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The Tangled Truth about Palestinian Nationalism

[New Republic] Benny Morris - 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. On the other hand, Arabs were willing to battle against land sales and cooperation with the Jews, and to kill Jews 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. In Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen succeeds in presenting an objective view of "collaboration." The value of Cohen's erudite book lies in its meticulous recounting of the history of Arab-Zionist cooperation and collaboration, period by period, region by region, family by family. Already by the late 1920s, Cohen writes, "the definition of treason" among Palestinians had been so broadened as "to include all those who opposed the hegemonic nationalist al-Husseini faction." So in 1927 one anti-Husseini newspaper quipped: "Were we to enumerate the number of traitors in the country in accordance with some of the newspapers, more than half of the country's inhabitants would be traitors."
2008-04-22 01:00:00
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