Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948
By Hillel Cohen
Translated by Haim Watzman
(University of California Press, 344 pp., $29.95)

The hills of the West Bank–Judea and Samaria–are dotted with well-ordered, red-roofed Jewish settlements. Clearly, they make the partition of the land of Israel/Palestine into two states more difficult, and as such they constitute an obstacle to peace. This is certainly the view in Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv, the bastion of center-left Israel. But for most Palestinians (who, incidentally, do not really want a two-state settlement–vide their support of Hamas in the elections in 2006), the settlements represent something far more sinister. They are highly visible agents and symbols of Israel’s design to steal their land.

The plain fact is that the West Bank settlements were largely built by Palestinian Arab laborers, who continue to construct buildings, security walls, tunnels, and bypass roads that daily reinforce Israel’s settlement enterprise and thus its grip on the territory. These workers–two generations of them since the summer of 1967, when the settlement venture was launched–reluctantly or eagerly took up their jobs in order to feed their families, putting personal need before collective interest. And the Palestinian political parties and armed factions, overcoming some initial unease, failed to interfere with and never tried to halt their work, even as these laborers were building the very “facts on the ground” that their national leadership–and, more generally, the Arab world and its supporters around the globe–were denouncing as evil. Over the same decades, dozens of Palestinians have been shot dead or maimed by fellow Arabs for selling or facilitating the sale of buildings and land to Jews–the very same land on which some of the settlements were later constructed. (Other settlements were constructed on state land.)

Encapsulated in this apparent illogic is an ambivalence that, throughout the history of the conflict, has marked Palestinian Arab attitudes toward cooperation, indeed collaboration, with the Zionists. On the one hand, there always were Arabs, in very large numbers, ready to sell their labor and land to the Jews, and to inform on Arab militants, and even to fight their fellow Arabs who were fighting the Jews (and the British, who were regarded as the Zionists’ patrons). On the other hand, Arabs were willing to battle against land sales and cooperation with the Jews, and to kill Jews (and Britons) and collaborators. And sometimes it was the very same people, at one and the same time or within a short span of years, who hotly denounced Zionism and secretly helped the Jews. (The Nazi German consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, in 1933 contemptuously cabled Berlin that these nationalists “in daylight were crying out against Jewish immigration and in the darkness of the night were selling land to the Jews.”)

To continue click here