Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature

The Intimate History of Collaboration: Arab Citizens and the State of Israel

Yoav Di-Capua

May 2007

(Yoav Di-Capua is assistant professor of Middle East history at the University of Texas-Austin.)

Sometime in the late 1990s, employees in the Israeli State Archive unintentionally declassified an array of police documents. Many of the files consisted of the unremarkable personal data of prostitutes, petty thieves and black marketeers, but others dealt with a far more sensitive matter: the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s. Though these “Arab files” also contained records of mundane criminal cases, most of the documents concerned the politically explosive subject of Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Jewish state. By means of the mistaken declassification, the actions, methods and goals of multiple Israeli security agencies among the Palestinian Arabs of Israel -- in short, the entire history of two decades of espionage directed at a group of Israeli citizens -- lay exposed. At the heart of these documents was detailed information about individuals and families and the well-guarded secrets of what they “gave” and what they “got” in return. Many retired collaborators are still alive.

Hillel Cohen, then a graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, immediately recognized the potential of this material. It was not long after he and other scholars first saw these files that the archivists’ error was discovered and the material was reclassified and sealed, this time probably for good. Yet, in many respects, the state’s reaction came too late, for the files had opened a window for an unprecedented reevaluation of Arab life in 1948-1967, the early years of the state of Israel, lamented by many Israeli Jews as a long-lost golden age of normalcy. It is a little-known fact in the West, and a vague memory among Israeli Jews, that for almost all of those years the Arab minority was under military rule.

Cohen is not a newcomer to the complex politics of collaboration. In his previous book on mandatory Palestine, The Army of Shadows (originally published in Hebrew, but now forthcoming in English from the University of California Press), he examined how the transformation of Zionist attitudes toward Palestine’s Arabs from utopian partnership to political militarism prioritized espionage cum collaboration as a standard mode of inter-communal interaction. Now, in the wake of his encounter with the volatile and accidentally unsealed source material in the state archive, Cohen has published a well-written and at times ironic follow-up account: Good Arabs: Israeli Intelligence and the Arabs.

News of the publication traveled quickly in the Arab towns and villages of Israel. Indeed, with extensive and dramatic coverage by Arab media and bloggers, the book was something of a international sensation. Even in distant Sweden, an Arabic-language outlet that serves the Palestinian diaspora clamored: “Cohen publishes names of dozens of collaborators.”[1] As Israeli Arab writer Sayyid Qashu‘ joked, Arab readers read the book from left to right, that is, they rushed to the index first.[2] There they searched for their family name, the name of their village and the names of relatives and acquaintances. Many found references to relatives and began digging into hitherto silenced family history.[3]

And so, almost overnight, the book became a bestseller. It is probably the first time in the history of the Hebrew book that copies of one have been loaded in pickup trucks headed for remote Arab villages to bring the inhabitants news of their own history. Everybody knew about collaboration, but after decades of silence, the written proof of it was simply too tantalizing to resist. With reading came the need to talk. In Nazareth, where collaboration was also associated with volatile inter-religious sensitivities, community elders came together to reflect on a painful, some would say inglorious, yet without question revealing, chapter of the past. Incarcerated in an Israeli prison cell, Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti flipped through the pages. He was quick to communicate the lesson he drew to his fellow Palestinians: Divided Arabs always pay dearly. “It is about time,” he argued, “for a united Palestinian front.”[4] Barghouti was of course referring to the negotiations between Hamas and Fatah, since concluded, to form a consensual coalition government. Good Arabs, then, held considerably more than antiquarian interest for Palestinian Arabs inside and outside Israel, and for Israeli Jews.

Rethinking the First Republic

The first Israeli republic, that is the formative period of statehood from 1948-1967, is up for reconsideration among Jewish Israelis. In the collective memory, these were years of moral harmony in which a small, just and cohesive society, as yet innocent of the burdens of four decades of occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, lived congenially with its liberal conscience. But today, with the history of land, refugees, immigration, diplomacy and war more or less settled, and with new archival sources opening up to scholars, the focus of history writing has shifted to civic life. Specifically, historians increasingly take interest in Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian Arab minority in those early years. Until recently, this topic was marginal, and studies of it were devoid of the “action” that usually characterizes narratives of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict. No one really wanted to study the history of Israel’s internal conflict, as no conflict was really visible. And so, it is fair to say, the field was a historiographical no man’s land, inhabited by sleepy mid-career historians. That is, until now.

In 2006, in a truly remarkable dissertation, Shira Robinson brought action to the field. Her history of the system of military rule under which Israel placed its Arab citizens from 1948-1966 illustrated the natural limitations of liberalism without democracy. Robinson posed a serious question: Was the golden age, the ultimate psychic refuge of “normal” liberal Israelis distressed by the post-1967 occupation, a fiction?[5] Good Arabs takes a significant step forward in answering this question for a Hebrew-reading audience. Cohen covers much of the same territory covered by Robinson, albeit from a different and more intimate perspective, and, like Robinson, he too brings action to this seemingly slumberous arena.

Once the 1948 war officially ended, the Israeli bureaucracy was faced with the overwhelming task of ruling effectively over dozens of severely disrupted Arab villages and towns, where thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Since the state did not trust its Arab citizens, it placed this entire population under a tight military regime supervised by the Central Committee for Arab Affairs. Established in 1954, the committee was comprised of representatives of the police and the domestic intelligence agency Shabak, as well as the prime minister’s consultant for Arab affairs and the commander-in-chief of military rule. In concert, these men presided over three regional sub-committees (south, center and north), which dealt with the daily business of governance.

As the vast literature on mandatory Palestine shows, the indigenous Arab population, a conglomerate of peasants, townsfolk and nomads, Druze, Christians and Muslims, Bedouins and Circassians, was maladapted for unified political action. This was true before 1948, and even more so afterwards. Taking note of the cleavages, the Israeli authorities ventured to use them as instruments of rule. In order to do so effectively, however, they needed a constant finger on the pulse of Arab society, an up-close familiarity with the Arab population. In each village, Israel needed to know who the dominant families and individuals were, what alliances and rivalries they had and what their material, social and political bases of support were. The only way to achieve the gargantuan task of mapping communal vulnerability was to establish vast networks of collaborators who duly reported on every new development. At this time, the tactic of selecting individuals to collaborate, as practiced during the British Mandate, was perfected as a strategy of civil control. Cohen tells the story of this system from its inception until December 1966, when, after almost two decades of independence, Israel was confident enough to bring military rule to an end.

The first republic was also a formative period for the Arabs, however, for it was then that the conflicted self of the “Israeli Arab,” the “pessoptimist,” as per the title of Emile Habibi’s well-known novel, came into being. A member of the Arab minority faced continuous dilemmas, each of which was central to his or her very self-definition: Do I owe allegiance to an enemy state of which I am a citizen? Should I sell my land to Jews or wait to get compensation if the state expropriates it? Should I turn in infiltrators to the authorities? Who should I vote for? Will I teach my children the recent history of the Palestinian people? Good Arabs makes the point that the politics of collaboration significantly shaped the kind of choices a normative Arab citizen would make. Put differently, collaboration, and with it the fear, shame and guilt that were its fellows, became part of who they were.

Who Is a Collaborator?

Israel’s network of collaborators was built over a relatively short time span. In almost every village, neighborhood, clan, tribe and family, someone, on some level, helped the Israeli state consolidate its rule over the Palestinian Arab population. But why did so many people collaborate and what kind of collaboration was it?

Reasons for collaboration varied widely, but they boiled down to one basic motive: the need to survive. Post-1948 Palestinian society was in ruins, as people had lost their agricultural land and urban property, and thus their social and economic networks of support. They had also -- and this is an important aspect of the willingness to collaborate -- lost their psychological grounding. Scores of desperate and disoriented individuals, some of whom were physically weak and malnourished, were ready for a deal. With this in mind, various Israeli security agencies held out almost irresistible temptations: assistance in finding day jobs, career placement as teachers and bureaucrats, and a raft of licenses and permits for everything from commerce, construction and taxi driving to the coveted right of movement and travel between the Arab villages inside Israel. Other benefits were the granting of Israeli identification cards to “recommended” individuals, the prestigious right to bear arms, positions of community leadership and the erasure from state records of criminal charges -- both just and trumped-up. Last but not least were the time-honored cash payment and the human element of fear. These incentives attracted low-level informants who were commonly known to Arabs as adhnab.

For high-profile collaborators (‘umala’), people willing to put their lives or reputations on the line, the list of benefits was even more enticing. First there was the unofficial permission to smuggle goods into Israel from neighboring countries. The Israel of the 1950s was poor and often hungry, and the smuggling of meat, a rationed commodity, was a rewarding business. Collaborators could easily move entire herds of livestock across the border from Jordan or Lebanon. Other frequently smuggled items were fabrics, drugs and weapons. Thus, for instance, did an old acquaintance of Gen. Moshe Dayan from the northern village of Rihaniyya acquire the franchise upon authorized smuggling from Lebanon.

Another possible reward for powerful collaborators was the right to cultivate, or lease to others, the deserted land of refugees in exile. They could even choose a particular plot of land from the official database of abandoned properties. Such rewards usually brought large sums of money to the collaborator and thus translated into an important source of local power, which, in turn, inflated the collaborator’s ability to influence public affairs. The more receptive the authorities were to the needs of high-profile collaborators, the firmer the collaborators’ grip on and prestige within their communities became -- and the more valuable the information they could offer to Israel. With time, such collaborators also attained a measure of leverage over the authorities, which they could use for the common good. Truly, high-profile collaboration was a liaison dangereuse.

So elaborate were the emoluments of aiding military rule that, in the hundreds of documents scrutinized by Cohen, Israeli authorities never once complained of difficulty in drafting petty informants or bigger collaborators. Even without state incentives, in light of the atmosphere of collective insecurity in which nothing was kept private, many dissenting Arabs simply volunteered for the job.

Fluid Borders

Since Israel’s borders were practically wide open, infiltration of Palestinian refugees, Arab spies and would-be terrorists became an acute problem for the state. As Benny Morris has convincingly shown, regardless of their real motivations, all infiltrators were treated as potential terrorists deserving death.[6] Israeli intelligence used collaborators extensively to detect and entrap border trespassers. The collaborators’ tasks ranged from leading infiltrators into Israeli military ambushes to spying on smuggling networks and intercepting Arab spies who used the same infiltration routes. Some collaborators participated in Israeli espionage operations and even carried out assassinations of elusive individuals. Still others led Israeli commando units to their destinations during the retaliation campaign of the 1950s. Besides the Israelis, the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian security services also used Palestinians as secret agents. In one surreal episode, Cohen wittily shows how one of these agents, Mahmoud ‘Isa al-Battat, worked for all four security services at the same time. On another occasion, a certain Faris Hamdan became the leader of a smuggling franchise from neighboring Jordan. He was a wealthy landowner and a political personality of sorts who, during the mandatory period, supported the fervent nationalist Hajj Amin al-Husayni, but after 1948 worked with Israel. Hamdan brought other public figures on board the collaboration train and in 1951, joined the Israeli Knesset as a member of the ruling Mapai Party. Notwithstanding this distinguished official position, he continued to traffic in contraband. Indeed, both borders and loyalties were fluid.

Hidden within the ordinary business of smuggling, however, lay the great drama of border infiltration by Palestinians made refugees in the 1948 war. Masterfully captured by Elias Khoury’s novel Bab al-Shams (translated into English as Gate of the Sun),[7] such clandestine reverse flight posed a poignant moral dilemma for the Arab citizens of Israel. Required by law, and squeezed by compatriots who were informants, to report infiltrating family members and friends to the authorities, they had to choose between communal loyalty and state retaliation. Cohen shows how, despite such pressures, the local Arab population practiced a “private right of return” by which it helped refugee infiltrators to stay. In addition, on many occasions, a reward for collaboration was the right to naturalize a returning refugee or a family member. So, during the early 1950s, about 5 percent of 1948 Palestinian refugees managed to get back to their places of origin and acquire legal status in Israel. As a result, the state registered an increase of about 15 percent in the overall size of the Arab population.

Some collaborators also helped Israel to encourage overseas emigration of Arabs, leading to the departure of 3,000 Arab citizens by 1965. But the popular practice of assisting infiltrators challenges two established historiographical truths. First, with regard to Arab historiography, it shows that the so-called lost generation of Palestinians inside Israel was far from passive and submissive. Second, it demonstrates the inaccuracy of a prevalent argument among Israeli historians, summarized by Cohen as positing that “the Israeli government never put its Arab citizens to severe test of loyalty.” The demand to surrender a family member is the highest possible test of loyalty.

While infiltrators were protected, however, some Arabs forcefully collaborated with Israel in fighting infiltration. The prime motivation was fear that returning refugees would request their property, which on many occasions was already in the hands of fellow Arabs. Thus, the fear of losing one’s (new) field or home to its previous lawful owners provided enough of an incentive for informing. For some large-scale collaborators, the motivation was purely financial, for alongside returning refugees came bands of smugglers and thieves who operated inside the collaborators’ “jurisdiction.” This is why a figure like Sheikh Salih Khunayfis, a collaborating Druze from Shafa ‘Amr, demanded that Israel take decisive action against infiltrators. Reprimanding his Israeli operators, Khunayfis bluntly contended: “By any Middle Eastern or even international standard…your military occupation does not resemble a proper military occupation!”

Selling Land

While in the battle against infiltration the Israelis were not so successful, their project of acquiring more Arab land with the help of collaborators was thriving. As Cohen’s Army of Shadows showed, since the twilight of Ottoman rule, and especially amidst the hyper-nationalism of the 1930s, selling land to Jews was considered high treason. Despite this overt sanction, Kenneth Stein and others have shown that all sorts of people were selling land: Christians, Muslims, public leaders, commoners and even figures in the Palestinian nationalist movement.[8] Though the result of selling land to Jews became painfully clear during the 1947 debate over partition, land continued to change hands even after 1948, through the 1950s and 1960s. The only new factor was that after 1948, with the power of state law at hand, Israeli authorities could also expropriate land in return for a fee. Thus, it was often more appealing to sell in advance, possibly at a profit, than simply to lose land for modest state compensation.

The samasira, a pejorative term for corrupt and unpatriotic middlemen, were a particular brand of collaborators who specialized in real estate. Besides persuading individuals to sell, they also purchased land directly from Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries and sold the plots to Jews at a profit. But as the 1950s drew to a close and the Arab public appeared to be more organized in its resistance to the transfer of land, Israel used collaborators to sabotage the popular struggle against land expropriation. One famous episode was the failed Arab struggle over the taking of land in the Shaghur (Beit Netofa) valley, where a new Jewish city, Karmiel, was about to be built.

Using the Network Politically

Unlike other straightforward colonial situations, the Arab minority in Israel functioned within a nascent liberal democracy and, in theory, could wield its electoral clout to alter the Israeli political landscape. Addressing the paradoxical logic of liberalism without democracy, Good Arabs shows how the various security services manipulated the Arab political process in order to ensure the electoral dominance of the Mapai party of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In another instance, by writing newspaper articles on behalf of collaborators, Israeli agents sought to prejudice the fateful debate among the Druze over conscription into the Israeli army.

With such state concerns in mind, the fate of the joint Jewish-Arab Israeli Communist Party (Maki) is of particular interest. In one of the most fascinating chapters in his book, Cohen exposes the full story of the war against Maki and the role of collaborators in the trenches of down-and-dirty provincial politics. During the 1950s, Maki emerged as the only opposition force with a clear picture of Arab realities on the ground and a plan for what could be done to ameliorate the situation. At the time, Maki was the only political force that spoke on behalf of (a tamed) local Arab patriotism. Its scope of activity was impressive -- writing, lecturing, legal action, parliamentary interpellation and actual field operations. It promoted practical projects such as a united front against the selling of land and fought for the right of internal refugees to return to their villages. Maki was, in fact, one of the most impressive movements merging theory and praxis anywhere in the annals of left-wing Israeli activism.

The story of this ultimate outcast of Israeli politics is captured in Ben-Gurion’s stern dictum “beli Herut ve Maki”(without Herut and Maki). Herut, considered by Ben-Gurion to be incorrigibly right-wing, eventually became a core component of the Likud Party, under whose banner Herut’s leader Menachem Begin ascended to the office of prime minister. Maki, by contrast, was debilitated, thanks partly to the state’s campaign against it during the 1950s. This story, along with the adventures of the Maki leadership, is relatively well-known. Yet Cohen’s book (as well as Robinson’s dissertation) provides fresh evidence for the war against Maki as it was seen from the perspective of ordinary Arab citizens in the streets and alleys of ordinary towns and villages. With the help of collaborators, the various security agencies obtained a detailed picture of Maki’s network. In fact, records show the unbelievable degree to which the party became operationally transparent. With resort to emergency laws put in place by the British mandate, the authorities intercepted many of Maki’s operations in advance. Threats, sabotage and violent attacks on property and personnel were common as well.

In the higher echelons of collaborative politics, the state sponsored public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as anti-communist leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades. Because al-Najjada participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias, but also because Hawari negotiated with Haganah to avoid fighting in Jaffa, by the end of the war he became a refugee in Lebanon. Admiring his charisma, Israeli intelligence decided to allow his return to Israel in 1950 as an alternative anti-communist leader. The idea was that Hawari would establish a new Arab popular party. Based on reports of collaborators from within Maki, Cohen covers the fascinating struggle between Hawari and the communist organization, which ended with the former’s defeat. When politics failed, Hawari became a judge in the municipal circuit court in Nazareth.

Notwithstanding the collaborators’ actions, Maki famously persevered: Its credibility remained solid, and it continued to serve as a loyal champion of Arab concerns. Today, when this largely forgotten party is a shadow of its former self and Islamist politics reign supreme, even Marwan Barghouti was amazed by Maki’s persistence, dedication and achievements, however incomplete.[9]

The Life of the Mind

What would be taught in Arab classrooms in Israel? Who would teach it and how? Then, as now, these questions weighed heavily on the minds of officials in the Ministry of Education. According to the documents that Cohen reviewed, the officials singled out the domains of history, memory and politics for close inspection. When dealing with these tightly connected and “dangerous” topics, Arab educators were advised by the military bureaucracy to stick to an exclusively Zionist interpretation. In order to ensure that Arab education would be in the hands of “responsible teachers,” the ministry employed a special Shabak representative whose job was to monitor, appoint and dismiss Arab teachers and school principals. Indeed, many Arab teachers were -- and still are -- informers, and others were appointed to their positions because of their benign political profiles or their support of state Zionism. One should add that, despite years of protests by liberal education ministers like Yossi Sarid of Meretz, the Shabak presence in the Ministry of Education was terminated only in January 2005.

The heavy-handed involvement of security services in schools had severe pedagogical implications, for the teacher was not a figure of authority and leadership but a frightened, self-censoring character. Direct pressure was constantly applied against teachers and principals, demanding the suppression of any discussion or activity on behalf of Arab civil and cultural rights. Yet, notwithstanding this atmosphere and the unhealthy culture of doublespeak to which it gave birth, even after a decade of such close control, pupils continued to resist military rule. As for the creation of an intellectual leadership, Arab access to higher education at the university level was blocked in 1954. Even though this policy was later reversed, prospective Arab students were sometimes asked to collaborate in exchange for their schooling.

Beyond the classroom, informants regularly reported on “nationalist” or anti-Zionist inclinations among their compatriots. Whether it was a Palestinian nationalist song sung at weddings (Cohen pays great attention to expressions of such sentiment at weddings), a public hearing of a speech by Gamal Abdel Nasser, or a random comment at a coffeeshop, intimate family gathering or funeral procession, the authorities were immediately informed. With time, as the state meted out concrete punishments to informed-upon Arabs, a culture of mutual suspicion and self-censorship became more prevalent.

Close monitoring was also employed during official state celebrations such as Independence Day. In each school and in many villages and towns, the local leadership was expected to actively participate in state ceremonies. Failure to show up was costly, as in the case of Sheikh Sam‘an of Kafr Yasif, who lost his desk job at the Ministry of Health. Regardless of such policies, a minority, usually supported by Maki, refused to succumb. In 1964, for instance, the annual commemoration of the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre and the inauguration of the new Jewish town of Karmiel took place on the same day. While Arab MKs from Mapai attended the celebration of a Jewish town just built on expropriated Arab land, Arab members of the opposition attended the Kafr Qasim service.

Historiography, Reception and Beyond

The reception of Good Arabs in Israel is somewhat paradoxical. Obviously, Cohen’s findings are not so flattering to Israeli Jews, yet his book is a bestseller and has garnered plenty of press attention. With such a sizable audience, one would expect to see the shock waves that Morris’ work on Palestinian refugees generated in the late 1980s or that Yehoshua Porath caused with his history of Palestinian Arab nationalism in 1974. Of course, most reviewers were amazed by the contents of the swiftly reclassified documents. To former high-ranking intelligence official Reuven Merhav, Good Arabs was reminiscent of the professional practices of the East German Stasi. He had no idea that this was the quality of pre-1967 civic life.[10] To far-left public intellectual Yitzhak Laor, the book was a refutation of the pre-1967 left-Zionist myth of Israeli normalcy.[11] Still, Good Arabs did not trigger a soul-searching trend. One explanation for this strictly rational reception is the state of mental tiredness and public apathy in the wake of the second intifada, the failed summer war in Lebanon, the ongoing investigations of the political elite’s orgy of corruption and, more generally, the ongoing crisis of public leadership. Nothing, it seems, can shock Israeli civic consciousness these days.

Reception aside, both Army of Shadows and, even more, Good Arabs contribute to two historiographical fields that are usually kept mutually exclusive. Cohen takes the historiographic tradition of the Israeli “new historians” one step forward. At home in Palestinian society and equipped with the intimate view that collaborators provided to their masters, Cohen reconstructs the lives and actions of ordinary people in ordinary towns. Here his book faces a methodological hurdle, as he is making deep assumptions about Palestinian Arab villagers’ consciousness and similarly complicated topics based only upon official source material in Hebrew. Cohen also heard the oral accounts of dozens of collaborators, and read the Hebrew documents with these accounts in mind, yet chose not to use the oral histories as primary sources in the book. As Cohen explains, “I decided to use mainly intelligence documents because Jews and Arabs alike attach more value to such sources. Jews are not interested in the way Palestinians tell their narratives. They do, however, religiously believe in the security establishment.”[12] The methodological choice is perilous as a matter of history writing, but it is perhaps vindicated by the fact that neither Jewish nor Arab readers have contested the credibility of his findings. For one rare historiographical moment, the discussion is about the meaning of the findings. And so, in contrast to historians like Benny Morris whose Arab subject is a speechless “image,” Cohen’s Arab is a humanized historical actor.

It goes without saying, therefore, that Palestinian historiography is the second sphere to which Cohen contributes generously and profoundly. The Palestinian library is rich in literature about the losses of 1948 (al-nakba), the defeat of 1967 (al-naksa) and the continuing plight of the refugees, but has quite systematically avoided the painful topic of collaboration. One reason for this avoidance is that collaboration is far from over. A second reason is that, quite simply, too many individuals and institutions are implicated. As the reception of his book in the Arab media shows, Cohen’s uncontested credibility among Arabs is also due to the fact that, unlike many Arabic accounts, he takes Israelis seriously and respectfully without resorting to populist vilification and cheap political commentary. And so, like Robinson, Cohen makes the point that Arab and Israeli Jewish experiences must be seen as mutually constitutive rather than separable nationalist narratives.

If there is criticism to be made of Good Arabs, it is that its exclusive focus on intelligence files caused it to neglect the embryonic civil institutions within Israel that pass judgment on state policies. One can cite Uri Avnery’s outspoken political magazine Ha-‘Olam Ha-Zeh as one solid voice of opposition. After all, civic mechanisms have done their share to bring about an end to military rule (though not yet to collaboration).

Lastly, with the Army of Shadows and Good Arabs in mind, a third book about the unending saga of collaboration from 1967 to the present, is waiting to be written. The link is rather obvious. Methods that were experimented with during the mandate period, and were perfected inside Israel before 1967, culminated in the unprecedented system of collaboration in the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. It is more than likely, therefore, that in the trajectory of recent Jewish history, never was so much owed by so few (Jews) to so many (collaborators).

[1] As‘ad Talhami, “Good Arabs by the Historian Cohen Contains Names of Dozens of Collaborators,” Arab News Agency, December 11, 2006. http://www.ana-news.com/threads_show.php?table_n=articles&id=10206&mode=full.

[2] Hebrew, like Arabic, is written right to left, meaning that indexes are printed at what for readers of Western languages would be the front of the book, held in the left hand.

[3] Suhayl Kiwan, “‘Athartu ‘ala jaddi fi watha’iq al-mukhabarat” (I Found My Grandfather in the Intelligence Records), Kull al-‘Arab, February 9, 2007.

[4] Al-Quds, January 16, 2007.

[5] Shira Robinson, “Occupied Citizens in a Liberal State: Palestinians Under Military Rule and the Colonial Formation of Israeli Society, 1948-1966” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, Stanford University, 2006).

[6] Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[7] Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006).

[8] Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

[9] Al-Quds, January 16, 2007.

[10] Reuven Merhav, “Ha-ah ha-gadol she-‘einav ‘atsumot” (The Big Brother Whose Eyes are Closed), Yediot Aharonot, February 2, 2007.

[11] Yitzhak Laor, “‘Ad she-ha-kol yihye shelanu” (Until Everything Is Ours), Haaretz, February 9, 2007.

[12] Interview with Hillel Cohen, Jerusalem, January 3, 2007.