What is Reddit's opinion of Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948?

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Individual settlements had good relations with nearby villages. However, the majority of Arabs opposed Jewish immigration and were hostile. It was an incredibly complex and nuanced situation. I recommend Hillel Cohen’s book “Army of Shadows” which is specifically about Arab Jewish relations during the British mandate.

Have to recommend here Hillel Cohen’s book centered on Arab society and politics during the Mandate era, “Army of Shadows”, which provides quite a penetrating look at Arab Jewish relations from the Arab perspective, but based on archival documents kept by Jewish Agency bureaucrats and Haganah intelligence (not interviews or recollections of participants or only speeches and media reporting of leaders and official statements). Cohen is an Israeli scholar who is also fluent in Arabic and has been interested in Arab issues since his youth.

On the greatly misunderstood and incorrect “coexistence” meme during the Yishuv/Mandate period others have debunked here, I’d add the quip by some Israeli historian that the only thing shared by Arabs and Jews was the air they breathed and the hatred of some different British officials.

I haven’t read the book you’ve cited but another which directly speaks to the Arab - Jew issue and a detailed x ray view into the Palestinean side during the Mandate (from detailed records of the Jewish Agency and Haganah intelligence) is a book I’ve recommended on this sub many times for those who want to understand what was really going on from 1920 - 1949 is Hillel Cohen’s book Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism 1917 - 1948.

This book will quickly dispell any notion that the binational Mandate was some peaceful utopia.

Oh, snap, it’s an 1952 out of print book and copies are $150 - $300 + shipping on Amazon and AbeBooks. Guess I’m going to have to pass on that (I do buy rare books about Israel but they have to do with my interest in graphic arts and Israeli designers).

Can you suggest anything similar that covers similar territory about land sales (pun not intended)?

BTW, have you read Hillel Cohen’s “Army of Shadows”? It’s a terrific book about land sales during the Mandate and the dissension within Arab society about whether to deal with Jews or not. I’d highly recommend it if for no other reason it deals with the issues surrounding Palestinian nationalism and how Arab society was seriously divided about Zionism. You have to wonder if it would have worked out so poorly if a different cohort of Arab society which was not opposed (or so opposed) to Jewish immigration had power as opposed to the Grand Mufti and the Arab Higher Council of the day.

Much better to have humint moles and sigint. Israeli intelligence has always been scary good, going back to the Shas branch of Haganah. Hillel Cohen thought the organized pervasive cultivation of a huge network of Arab informants used sparingly gave the Jews a huge edge against British law enforcement and Arabs in the post-war revolutionary period (Hillel Cohen, “Army of Shadows”).

A current NY Times Israel beat reporter, Ronan Bergman, also wrote a terrific and scary book “Rise and Kill First” about the Mossad (Israeli foreign intelligence agency) which lays out a long and grisly history of mostly successful assassination efforts (and Eichmans controversial capture)and the basic Israeli doctrine that its better to pick off a few key players in a rocket or nuke R&D program years ahead of deployment or take down a mid-upper level military leader as a peremptory deterrent than risk a war or terror attack that kills hundreds or thousands of civilian citizens.

The book you probably want to read for this is Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism. I guess if you try and keep it strictly to 1948 this would be correct but that'd really be too narrow and misleading. For example there was a famous mayor of Tulkarm and his sons that did land deals and such with the Zionists throughout the years, and they were hardly the only guys. Even well in the midst of hostilities between the two communities. Just not entirely sure if that continued into '48 and the War of Independence.

Edit: As for more modern times, there's this article from the late 90s but it doesn't provide hard numbers.

You should read this book, Hillel Cohen’s Army of Shadows. Cohen, who speaks Hebrew and Arabic looked at the pre-history of the Israel, focusing on Arab society and its relationship with Jews and Zionism.

Cohen’s book is based on Haganah and Jewish Agency archives which were declassified in the past several decades, as archives were opened to researchers. His main point is that the Jews had extensive political and military intelligence on Arabs and tried unsuccessfully to identify and work with “friendly” Arab allies through astroturf political groups and personal contacts, and that a large cohort of the Arab population was NOT militant and would have shared Palestine with Jews. To the al-Husseini faction, these folks were traitors and their clan leaders were frequently assassinated. Casualty stats from the Arab Revolt seem to suggest it was more Arab on Arab violence than involved Brits or Jews.

Needless to say, when we talk about today’s Palestinians and their demands/claims, that peaceful political cohort of Palestinians was basically wiped out in the Arab revolt and that strain of moderate politics and will for for-existence was lost, perhaps forever (where are the Nashasibis today?).

I’m also not seeing the influence of classical colonialism as much as others as applied to this situation. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and outcome of World War I led to a power vacuum in which Arabs weren’t sovereign, they were defeated enemy nationals. The Mandate was proposed for British strategic and rather sentimental humanitarian reasons in an era where polyglot empires like the Ottoman were falling to ethnostates. Allowing some Jews to immigrate wasn’t intended as an existential threat to Dar al Islam, but that’s of course not how it was perceived and do here we are a century later.

Also, I don’t think the “British promised both sides narrative” is accurate. The McMahon - Husseini correspondence carves out the western provinces of Syria from the proposed Transjordan, and the Arabs were only entitled to Transjordan, despite Husseini claiming he was double crossed.

 

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