Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel is a book by Matti Friedman published in March 2019. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Spies of No Country is about a pre-independence Zionist intelligence unit, the "Arab Section," that operated inside the territory of the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon towards the end of the British Mandate for Palestine. [1]
Spies is the story of four Mizrachi men. [1] They were not related to one another despite the fact that three of them shared a surname. They were Gamliel Cohen and Isaac Shoshan, who grew up in Syria, Havakuk Cohen from Yemen, Yakuba Cohen, from Palestine. [1] [2] All four were native Arabic speakers. [1] They operated as mista'arvim , "Ones Who Become Like Arabs," but Friedman raises an interesting question, "They were native to the Arab world," Friedman writes, "as native as Arabs. If the key to belonging to the Arabic nation was the Arabic language, as the Arab nationalists claimed, they were inside. So were they really...pretending to be Arabs, or were they pretending to be people who weren't Arabs pretending to be Arabs?" [1]
Lily Meyer, reviewing the book for National Public Radio, called Spies "an important book (because) Americans are not accustomed to hearing about Israel's complexity, or its diversity. We are rarely asked to consider Israel as a country that is, as Friedman says, 'more than one thing.'" [1]
Bill Gladstone wrote that "In lesser hands, this story might not be capable of sustaining the interest of readers through more than 200 pages, but Friedman is a natural-born storyteller whose simple but compelling language, and level of insight and sensitivity, seem to anticipate and settle questions in the readers’ minds even before they arise." For example, early in the book Friedman writes that, "“The unwritten rules of espionage writing seem to require a claim that the subjects altered the very course of history, or at least of their war... This is tempting but rarely true, I suspect, and it isn’t true in the case of our spies, though their contribution to the war was significant. Their mission didn’t culminate in a dramatic explosion that averted disaster, or in the solution of a devious puzzle. Their importance to history lies instead in what they turned out to be – the embryo of one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services [the Mossad]...” [8]
In a review published in The Forward , Raphael Magarik noted that Friedman repeated Israeli propaganda throughout the book, overlooked evidence that did not support his argument, and misrepresented events. He nevertheless praised Friedman's storytelling. [9]
Spies of No Country won the 2018, pre-publication, $25,000 Nathan Book Award, a prize given by the Nathan Fund in conjunction with the Jewish Book Council to support the work of a writer whose book has not yet been published. [10]
In 2020, the book won the vine awards for canadian jewish literature for history. [11]
Eliyahu Ben-Shaul Cohen was an Egyptian-born Israeli spy. He is best known for his espionage work in Syria between 1961 and 1965, where he developed close relationships with the Syrian political and military hierarchy.
Natan Sharansky is a Soviet dissident and later Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization.
Yosef Mendelevitch is a refusenik from the former Soviet Union, also known as a "Prisoner of Zion" and now a politically unaffiliated rabbi living in Jerusalem who gained fame for his adherence to Judaism and public attempts to emigrate to Israel at a time when it was against the law in the USSR.
Victor John Ostrovsky is an author and a former katsa for the Israeli Mossad. He authored two nonfiction books about his service with the Mossad: By Way of Deception, a #1 New York Times bestseller in 1990, and The Other Side of Deception several years later.
Aluf Meir Dagan was an Israel Defense Forces Major General (reserve) and Director of the Mossad.
Ahron "Ronnie" Bregman is a UK-based political scientist of Israeli origin, as well as a writer and journalist, specialising on the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Rafael Eitan was an Israeli politician and intelligence officer. He also led Gil and served as Minister of Senior Citizens. He was in charge of the Mossad operation that led to the arrest of Adolf Eichmann. He served as an advisor on terrorism to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and in 1981 he was appointed to head the Bureau of Scientific Relations, then an intelligence entity on par with Mossad, Aman and Shabak. Eitan assumed responsibility for and resigned over the Jonathan Pollard affair, and the Bureau was disbanded. He was subject to an arrest warrant issued by the United States FBI. From 1985 until 1993, he was head of the government's Chemicals company, which was expanded under his leadership. After 1993, he became a businessman, noted for several large scale agricultural and construction ventures in Cuba. He was the chairman of the Vetek (Seniority) Association – the Senior Citizens Movement.
Meir Amit was an Israeli politician and cabinet minister. He served as the Chief Director and the head of global operations for Mossad from 1963 to 1968, before entering into politics and holding two ministerial positions. He was also widely regarded as the most successful intelligence officer and a leading political figure for Israel.
Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian billionaire who worked as a spy for both the General Intelligence Directorate (Egypt) and the Israeli Mossad.
Mista'arvim, also spelled mista'aravim, is the name given to counter-terrorism units of the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Border Police, and Israel Police who operate undercover. Such units are specifically trained to assimilate among the local Arab population. They are commonly tasked with performing intelligence gathering, law enforcement, hostage rescue and counter-terrorism, and to use disguise and surprise as their main weapons.
The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, popularly known as Mossad, is the national intelligence agency of the State of Israel. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman and Shin Bet.
Operation Yakhin was an operation to secretly emigrate Moroccan Jews to Israel, conducted by Israel's Mossad between November 1961 and spring 1964. About 97,000 left for Israel by plane and ship from Casablanca and Tangier via France and Italy.
Conspiracy theories are a prevalent feature of Arab culture and politics, according to a 1994 paper in the journal Political Psychology. Prof. Matthew Gray writes they "are a common and popular phenomenon." "Conspiracism is an important phenomenon in understanding Arab Middle Eastern politics ..." Variants include conspiracies involving Western colonialism, Islamic anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, superpowers, oil, and the war on terrorism, which is often referred to in Arab media as a "War against Islam". Roger Cohen theorizes that the popularity of conspiracy theories in the Arab world is "the ultimate refuge of the powerless", and Al-Mumin Said noted the danger of such theories in that they "keep us not only from the truth but also from confronting our faults and problems..." The spread of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist conspiracism in the Arab world and the Middle East has seen an extraordinary proliferation since the beginning of the Internet Era.
Yosef "Yossi" Meir Cohen is a former Director of Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel.
Matti Friedman is a Canadian-Israeli journalist and author. He is an op-ed contributor for the New York Times, and columnist for Tablet magazine.
Gamliel Cohen was "one of the fathers of Israeli espionage". Much of his life was spent living under various false identities in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. A deep-cover Mossad agent, he infiltrated neo-Nazi groups as well as governments that were hostile to Israel. Cohen wrote a book about the undercover unit he helped to create inside the Palmach, which was posthumously published by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and Galili Center for Defense Studies. Nearly all of Cohen's work at Mossad remains classified today, and his very existence was only publicly acknowledged after his death.
The Spy is an English-language French espionage streaming television miniseries, created and directed by Gideon Raff, based on the life of Israel's top Mossad spy Eli Cohen, who is portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen. The series is a production by French company Légende Entreprises for Canal+ and Netflix. OCS is airing the show in France and Netflix is streaming the show internationally outside France. The six-episode miniseries, released on September 6, 2019, on Netflix, was inspired by real-life events. It is based on the book L'espion qui venait d'Israël, written by Uri Dan and Yeshayahu Ben Porat.
Shulamit "Shula" Kishik-Cohen was an Israeli spy who worked to smuggle Jews from Arab countries into Israel. She was noted for her missions in Lebanon and work for the Mossad.
Isaac Shoshan was an Israeli intelligence officer, spy and "Mista'arev". Starting as an undercover operative in the "Arab Section" of the Palmach in Mandatory Palestine, he later became one of the founding members of Israel's Intelligence Community serving as an espionage agent, case officer and instructor in Aman and eventually in the Mossad.
Baruch Cohen was an Israeli intelligence officer in the Shin Bet and katsa in the Mossad. Cohen was assassinated by the Palestinian militant group Black September Organization in Madrid in 1973 after meeting with one of his Palestinian informants, who was a double agent.