Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (review)

The story that Hillel Cohen tells is a sad one, about a defeated people who had to face their former enemies coming to their villages as the victors and as their sovereigns. The "Good Arabs" were those Arabs who seemed to change their heart almost overnight, anxious to help in any way they could those with whom they were in war with just yesterday. However, this is not completely accurate; while usually the reference is to the Jewish-Palestinian intercommunal war that took place from late November 1947 to May 1948, in which the Arabs were unequivocally beaten, the actual warfare was not between the two communities. Out of the 1,200,000 Arab Palestinians, only about 6,000 went to war against the Jews. For various reasons, of which the almost complete lack of national institutions was prime, the vast majority of the Arab Palestinians did not take up arms. In fact, during the first months of the intercommunal clashes, many Arabs asked for truce from their Jewish neighbors. The Arab tragedy was that despite the fact that the vast majority of them did not want to go to war, they had to suffer the consequences of the very few who dictated their agenda over the rest of their brethren and went to war under the leadership of Haj Amin al Husseini.

Finding themselves citizens of a Jewish state after the war ended, both the Arabs who tried to avoid war and those who embraced it had to try to accommodate to their new situation. One way to do so was by cooperating with the Israeli authorities and collaborating with Israel's security services. In describing that process, the book wishes to refute some accepted truths about the Arab Israelis and their relations with the Jewish state: first, the relationship between the Arab Israelis and the Jewish state was not a one-way street in which the government was the powerful side, imposing its will on yielding population; Cohen argues that the Israeli Arabs were also active and influential in the making of the Israeli policy toward them. They expressed their will and opinion, advancing their own agenda, even through clashes and conflict with the authorities. Second, the Israeli attempt to control the Israeli Arab national consciousness and identity failed. Israel tried, through the education system, to dictate to the Arabs a narrative that would shape their identity: "The effort was almost a complete failure," says Cohen (p. 6). Connecting with the first point, that failure of the authorities was yet another demonstration of the ability of the Israeli Arabs to shape their own destiny, even shortly after the Nakba: the catastrophe. Those points lead to Cohen's main argument concerning the place of the main heroes of his story, or those Israeli Arabs who collaborated with the Israeli security authorities. Once again, they were not passive tools in the hands of their operators; "some of them knew how to demand their rights and to maneuver around the security forces" (p. 7). They managed to gain benefits not only for themselves, but also for their community. As a result, the attitude towards them among the Arabs was not only one of contempt and scorn, as one could expect, but also with esteem, "because of what they did for their people" (p. 7).

Those features, as important and significant as they are to our understanding of an important chapter in the history of the nascent state, are only part of the story. The real lesson of the book, told a bit unintentionally, is the desire of the Israeli Arabs to be just that: Israelis, citizens of the state of Israel. The Israeli officials identified that trend, but their lesson was not acting to integrate the new members of the Jewish state into the fabric of the new state. Their lesson was "that this would allow them to recruit significant numbers of collaborators" (p. 18).

The book...