Abstract
It was a hot summer day in Palestine in August 1942. Shim ʿon Somekh, a Baghdad-born Jew who had immigrated to the country a decade earlier, was teaching Arabic in Kibbutz Mishmar ha-ʿEmek. During one of the classes, the director of the educational institution stepped in and told him that someone was waiting for him outside. Somekh probably assumed that this had something to do with security. As a fluent Arabic speaker, the Haganah intelligence services contacted him frequently and used his knowledge of Arabic for security-oriented missions. But this time, the person waiting outside and the offer he made to Somekh were exceptional. This was Yigal Allon, one of the founders of the Palmach and its commander between 1945 and 1948.1 Allon explained to Somekh that he represented ‘a special Haganah unit which works in cooperation with the British army.’ He asked Somekh to leave his teaching position and join the unit. ‘The Jewish Yish uv needs you more than your students,’ he explained to Somekh, and recruited him to the mista ʿaravim unit of the Palmach.2
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Notes
The word ‘Yishuv’ (meaning in Hebrew: ‘The Settlement’) relates to the Jewish population of Palestine in the pre-state period. The quote is taken from: ‘The Irgun Archive: Testimony of Shim ʿon Somekh,’ 154.26. See also: Gamliel Cohen [in Hebrew], The First Mista ʿaravim (Tel Aviv: Israeli Ministry of Defence, 2002), 37.
For example, in 1937 in the aftermath of the Arab Revolt, British Army officer Captain Orde Wingate established the Special Night Squads (SNS) in cooperation with the Haganah. See: Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 96.
Robert Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007), 79.
See, for example: Reuven Erlich [in Hebrew], The Lebanon Triangle: The Policy of the Zionist Movement and the State of Israel towards Lebanon, 1918–1958 (Tel Aviv: Ma ʿarakhot, Israeli Ministry of Defence, 2000), 152; Yeroham Cohen [in Hebrew], Palmach behind Enemy Lines in Syria (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meʾ uhad, 1973), 11.
Anita Shapira, Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography, trans. Evelyn Abel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 111.
Yeroham Cohen [in Hebrew], By Light and in Darkness (Tel Aviv: ‘Amikam, 1969), 26.
Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 154–5; Cohen, By Light and in Darkness, 26–8.
The term ‘Arab-Jews’ has been almost totally excluded from Israeli-Jewish discourse. Instead, other expressions, all ‘Arab-free,’ such as Mizrah. im (‘Oriental’) or Sephardim (descendants of Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula until the Spanish Inquisition) were adopted. For further reading see: Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,’ Social Text, no. 19/20 (Autumn 1988), 1–35.
Yousef Qustika (code name Abu-Nuri) collected the intelligence on this target. The operation was never implemented as the boat of the warriors was lost and the faith of its people was never known (the boat carried 22 members of the Haganah and one British commander). See: Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 31;’Preparations for the Departure of the 23 Yordei Hasira Boat’ (Palmach Information Center): http://www.palmach.org.il/show_item.asp?levelId=42858& itemId=8607& itemType=0
Allon’s desired new orientation included the broadening of the unit’s responsibilities to include assistance to the ‘Mossad le-ʿAliyah Bet’ (the Zionist institution in charge of the Jewish illegal immigration to Palestine) and establishing connections with Jews in Arab countries to provide them with information about the Zionist movement. See: Zvika Dror [in Hebrew], The ‘Arabists’ of the Palmach (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meʾ uhad, 1986), 23 and 43.
‘The Villages’ Files’ [in Hebrew] (Palmach Information Center): http://www.palmach.org.il/show_item.asp?levelId=38612& itemId=5528& itemType=0; Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 85.
Dror, The ‘Arabists’ of the Palmach, 102–4; Yoav Gelber [in Hebrew], The Intelligence in the Yishuv: 1918–1947 (Tel-Aviv: Defense Ministry, 1992), 604; for further reading about the British military camps and their policy of hiring Arab and Jewish workers, see: Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1996), 292.
See: Johnny Mansour [in Arabic], ‘The Mista ʿaravim Unit: Beginning, Crimes, Training and Tasks,’ Qadāyā Isrāʾ īliyyā 15 (2004), 14.
See, for example: David Mittelberg, The Israel Connection and American Jews (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 6.
According to ʿAbbas, Ha-Halutz movement (established in Syria in 1928) was the first Zionist movement to operate in Arab lands. See: Avraham ʿAbbas [in Hebrew], ‘The History of Ha-Halutz Movement in Syria and Lebanon,’ Shevet ve-ʿAm 3 (December 1958), 113–24.
Reuven Snir, ‘“We Are Arabs before We Are Jews”: The Emergence and Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in Modern Times,’ EJOS - Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 8, no. 9 (2005), 1–47; Lital Levy, ‘Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,’ Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (Fall 2008), 459–60.
Dror Mishani, ‘Gamliel Cohen Died: One of Israel’s Most Senior Intelligence Agents,’ [in Hebrew] Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, 17 July 2002: http://www.inn.co.il/News/News.aspx/30272
For further reading about these characteristics in the Zionist discourse, see: Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000), 78, 92, 114, 141.
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin [in Hebrew], ‘Exile within Sovereignty: A Critique of the “Negation of Exile” in Israeli Culture,’ Teʾ oria u-Vikoret (Theory and Criticism) 4 (Fall 1993), 23–55.
See: Ami Pedahzur, The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle against Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 19–20.
See, for example: Reuven Snir, ‘“Ana min al-Yahud”: The Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in the Twentieth Century,’ Archiv Orientálni 74 (2006), 389.
Another derogatory term used by Ashkenazi-Zionists to describe Mizrahi Jews was ‘schwartze chaies,’ which means ‘black animals’ in Yiddish. See: Ella Shohat, ‘Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews,’ Social Text 75, no. 21 (Summer 2003), 50 and ‘The Invention of the Mizrahim,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1999), 5–20.
Rafi Sitton and Yitzhak Shushan [in Hebrew], The People of Secrets (Tel Aviv: Yedi ʿot Ahronot, 1990), 178.
See, for example: Dror Mishani [in Hebrew], The Ethnic Unconscious (Tel Aviv: ʿAm ʿOved, 2006), 29.
For further reading on the successes and failures of training spies to be able to speak and behave according to social functions and situations, see: Florian Coulmas, ‘Spies and Native Speakers,’ in A Festschrift for Native Speaker (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 355–67.
See: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 188–92.
See, for example: Herbert J. Liebesny, ‘Judicial Systems in the Near and Middle East: Evolutionary Development and Islamic Revival,’ Middle East Journal 37, no. 2 (Spring 1983), 202–17; Fazlur Rahman, ‘Islamic Modernism: Its Scope, Method and Alternatives,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no. 4 (1970), 330.
Approximately 700,000 Palestinian-Arabs were dispossessed during the years 1947–48. See: Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 31.
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Mendel, Y. (2013). Re-Arabizing the De-Arabized: The Mista ʿaravim Unit of the Palmach. In: Elmarsafy, Z., Bernard, A., Attwell, D. (eds) Debating Orientalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_6
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