My Amazon Review of Matti Friedman's "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel"

On the Job Tradecraft

 

Journalist Matti Friedman has written an important book on the adventures of four Israeli spies in the service of pre-state and post-state Israel from early 1948 to mid-1949. At the start Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk and Yakuba were operating under the orders of the Arab Section of the Palmach, Israel’s special ops force. They were all Mizrahi Jews from the Levant and were fluent in Arabic which enabled them to pass in the Arab section of Haifa and in Beirut. What we witness is a very real example of on-the-job training in spy craft.

 

They were recruited by the Palmach to engage in sabotage, and to gather information on arms movements, Arab militias, and public opinion. They never knew they would be able to return safely and were under the constant threat of exposure. Remember at the outset there was no country to go home to and when the Israeli state was proclaimed it was not clear it would survive the onslaught of the Arab armies.

 

One highlight for me was an attack on Hitler’s yacht which was owned by a Lebanese businessman. It was being refitted as a warship in Beirut harbor. The Beirut team assisted an Israeli frogman whose mission was to blow up the ship in the harbor. Although the yacht did not sink, it was sufficiently damaged to prevent it from becoming a warship.

 

Friedman highlights the Ashkenazi prejudice against Misrahi Jews, a prejudice though less than before, exists to this day. He also highlights the fact the spies realized early on the Palestinian problem was not going to go away.

 

Along the way we get a sense of the boredom and loneliness the spies felt every day which was punctuated by short bursts of intense fear. He also notes that they developed relationships with Arab women. After all they were all in their early 20’s. Friedman has brought his keen journalistic eye into the very early days of Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad. It is well worth the read.

 For the full Amazon URL see: On the Job Tradecraft (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Tom Segev's "A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion"

Implementing the Zionist Dream

Israeli journalist/historian Tom Segev has written a very detailed and somewhat biased biography of Israel’s first prime minister. He tells the story of how David Gruen, born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886 becomes David Ben-Gurion the labor leader and for a time Israel’s leading politician after his arrival in Palestine in 1906.

Segev’s Ben-Gurion has a single minded focus on bringing the Israeli state into being. He analogizes him to Lenin, but there is also the all consummate Stalinist bureaucrat in him as he first gains control the Histadrut labor union and ultimately the Mapai (Socialist Labor) Party, Israel’s largest political party until 1977.

Ben-Gurion is a complete bibliophile as he reads voraciously and with his autodidact style become learned on science and military affairs. After the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 he immediately recognizes that it would bring a revolution in military affairs and in 1956 he starts the Israeli nuclear program.

We see him as a very lonely man subject to severe depression and although he was married to his wife Paula for over 50 years he undertook a series of affairs and he was far from a doting father to his children. His life was totally enmeshed in the politics necessary to bring into being the Zionist state.

Where Segev and his fellow “revisionist” historians go astray is when they argue that there was defined plan to uproot the Palestinians from 1948 Israel thereby creating the refugee problem. There was no central order given and while many Palestinians were forced to leave more of them left on their own accord. Segev pays little heed to Israel’s geopolitical reality of 1948 where there was no strategic depth. Hence it is unfair to characterize Defense Minister Dyan a warmonger in the 1956 War against Egypt. The strategic reality facing Israel is that it had to win quickly or lose a war of attrition. That lesson was learned in 1973 War, where Egypt attacked first and almost won.

Although Segev gives us a great deal of discussion on Ben-Gurion hot and cold relationship with Chaim Weitzman, there is far too little discussion on why Ben-Gurion’s relationship with Vladimir Jabotinsky, his political rival in the 1920’s and 30’s was so vitriolic. It had to be more than politics. That vitriol extended to Jabotinsky’s successor Menachem Begin.

To me Segev’s book is way too filled with minutia. Nevertheless, given the caveats mentioned above, he offers great insight into the life of Ben-Gurion and the creation of the Israeli state.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1LLSNFVJT73TD/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv