Some of the most dramatic moments in Matti Friedman's excellent new book about the men of the Arab Section, an espionage unit that served Israel in the months immediately before and after statehood, take place at the border. These immigrants, newly arrived from the collapsing Jewish communities of the Arab world, found themselves asked to turn around and head back into what was now enemy territory. Equipped with false identities, they were trained to gather intelligence and carry out occasional missions of sabotage. Making the crossing, often in the guise of a fleeing Palestinian refugee, could be dangerous. “[O]ne slip, one second, and you were in a nightmare. There was no way back through the gate. The only way out was forward, into enemy territory.”
But they could hardly let their guard down once they were living in countries that were at war with Israel from the day it was founded. Anything could set off the suspicion of their neighbors. Damascus-born Gamliel Cohen had assumed the identity of a Palestinian named Yussef and ran a small candy shop in Beirut. One day, he found himself questioned by a nearby merchant: “You know what? . . . So far we haven't heard you say a word about your family. Not a word.”
“This was an innocent question, and also a gun at Gamliel's temple,” Friedman writes. But Cohen had an answer at the ready: “I'm miserable inside . . . All I can tell you is that my whole family was killed, that no one is left, that I myself barely escaped and am barely getting by. I have nothing else to say.” That shut the nosy neighbor up. But the danger was omnipresent. The Arab Section, suggests Friedman, in one of the book's nicer lines, “needed men idealistic enough to risk their lives for free, but deceitful enough to make good spies.”
In another case, one of the spies elicited suspicion in a Beirut boarding house because he cleaned himself in the toilet not with water but with paper, “a habit that was Western and middle class,” leading another resident to speculate aloud that he was a Jewish spy (and leading him to immediately seek out other living arrangements). Shimon Somech, the Baghdad-born trainer of the Arab Section, described the ideal recruit to his unit as “a talented actor playing the part twenty-four hours a day, a role that comes at a cost of constant mental tension, and which is nerve-racking to the point of insanity.”
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