Israel’s Secret Founding Fathers
Everyone knows the name David Ben-Gurion. Why don’t we know about the spy Jamil Cohen?
JERUSALEM — Late on the night of Nov. 11, Hamas soldiers in southern Gaza stopped a van near the town of Khan Yunis. Inside were a group of Arabic-speaking men and women who said they were aid workers. The soldiers were suspicious. When the passengers understood that they couldn’t talk their way out, they dropped the pretense and drew guns. In the ensuing firefight, seven Hamas men and one of the passengers died before the intruders were extracted by an Israeli rescue force. The van’s passengers were undercover agents, but in Hebrew their profession has a unique name: They were mista’arvim, which translates as “ones who become like Arabs.” The work of the mista’arvim, who serve in Israel’s Army and police and are meant to move around Palestinian areas undetected, has gained some international renown recently thanks to the success of the TV series “Fauda,” a fictionalized version of their exploits. But the odd term has roots older than Israel — and deeper than the world of spies. Its origins have much to tell us, not just about the history of covert operations here, but also about the complicated identity of this country.
Israel tends to tell a European story about itself — Theodor Herzl, socialism, the Holocaust — and many Israelis and many of our enemies like to imagine that this country doesn’t quite belong where it exists. But even if we set aside the one-fifth of Israel’s citizens who are Arab Muslims, half of the Jewish population here has roots in the Islamic world. They’re the children and grandchildren of people like Jamil Cohen. Who is Jamil Cohen? He isn’t famous, and his name was new to me when I began researching a book about Israel’s first spies. But his story is a window onto some crucial and forgotten Israeli history. Cohen was born in 1922 in Damascus, Syria, and grew up in the alleys of that city’s ancient Jewish Quarter. The existence of such a quarter seems unimaginable today, with the Arab world’s old ethnic mosaic largely destroyed by state persecution, religious violence and civil war. But when Cohen was growing up, there were about one million Jews native to Islamic countries, most of them Arabic speakers. Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, was one-third Jewish in those days. At 21, facing an uncertain future amid the Muslim majority, Cohen decided to run away to join the Zionist pioneers forging a new Jewish future in the country next door: British Mandate for Palestine. He crossed the border on foot and joined a group of idealistic young people working the land at a kibbutz. It was the beginning of 1944, with World War II still raging and the creation of the state of Israel still four years away.
In oral testimony recorded in the 1990s, Cohen remembered what the experience was like. He was exhilarated by the comradeship and ideology of pioneer life. On the other hand, he was different from the others and found the difference hard to escape. Although Palestine had an old community of Jews who spoke Arabic, the native tongue of most Jews in the country at the time was Yiddish: They had come to the Middle East fleeing abject poverty and oppression in Poland and Russia. To the kibbutz pioneers, Jamil Cohen was mystifying. He seemed Arab — in his appearance, in his Hebrew accent, in the music he loved, like that of the Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum. He stopped using the Arabic name of his childhood, Jamil, and instead used his Hebrew name, Gamliel, but that didn’t resolve the problem. Cohen made friends but didn’t talk about his old life in Damascus; they weren’t interested. “Because I was the one who wanted to join them, and not the other way around,” he remembered much later on, “I was the one who was worn down, who had to round his edges to fit the machine that spins around, sparing no one.” The ability to “round your edges” is useful for a spy, as he’d soon find out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/sunday/israel-spies-founding-fathers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss