Good Arabs : The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967

"Based on his reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, Hillel Cohen exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestinian collaboration with Israelis - and of the Arab resistance to it. Cohen's previous book, the highly acclaimed Army of Shadows, told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948, and now, in Good Arabs he focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller and has evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents Cohen viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day."--Jacket

A fascinating story. . . . With the publication of this book, we can abandon several accepted clichés.—Ha'aretz

While many Israelis—Jews and Palestinians alike—already had a sense that these shadowplays were part of the state's history, Aravim Tovim (Good Arabs) supplies the evidence. Case after case is summoned to illustrate how collaboration permeated all aspects of Palestinian society.—The Nation

The impressive achievement of this timely book is its equal and honest treatment of the explosive issues involved in spite of an often agonizing conflict of interests—and its articulation of the author's findings with empathy, boldness and fairness.—Jerusalem Post

Publishers Weekly

Israeli writer Cohen (Army of Shadows) makes extensive use of the thousands of recently declassified Israeli government and police files to argue that Israel has attempted, from its earliest days, to control and co-opt the lives of its Palestinian citizens (roughly 20% of the population) and has utilized classic tools of social control—informants, censorship, offers of reward and threats of punishment—to neutralize a potentially “seditious” faction and to turn the community “from members of the imagined Palestinian community/nation... into members of Israeli civil society.” He explores how deeply Israel infiltrated Palestinian communities, political groups and refugee camps to secure informants and create a veritable “collaborator class” to “ensure a maximal control over the political and social behavior of Israel’s Arab population.” Stressing that the behavior of both sides is typical of national majority-minority relationships everywhere, he shows the extent to which Israel has treated its Arab citizens as one-dimensional characters open to manipulation, and shrewdly observes that the irony for Israel is that because the state couldn’t offer non-Jewish citizens “a real path to participation... the state actually reinforced Arab identity among its Arab citizens.” (Jan.)

Table of Contents......Page 8 Illustrations......Page 10 Preface......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 14 Introduction......Page 16 1. Beginning a Beautiful Friendship......Page 26 2. Communists vs. the Military Government, Collaborators vs. Communists......Page 54 3. Boundary Breakers......Page 80 4. The Land......Page 110 5. The Battle of the Narrative......Page 138 6. Minorities within a Minority......Page 174 7. Circles of Control, Circles of Resistance......Page 210 Notes......Page 254 Bibliography......Page 280 Index......Page 284 1. Beginning a beautiful friendship: the rise of the collaborator class 2. Communists vs. the military government: collaborators vs. the communists 3. Boundary breakers: infiltrators, smugglers, spies The land 5. The battle of the narrative: symbols, pronouncements, teachers 6. Minorities within a minority: dilemmas of identity 7. Circles of control, circles of resistance Conclusion.