Matti Friedman has built a reputation as one of the most compelling interpreters of Israel’s early history. A Canadian‑Israeli journalist and former AP correspondent, he writes with a reporter’s precision and a storyteller’s instinct for the human detail that reveals a larger truth. In Spies of No Country, he turns his attention to the Palmach’s Arab Section—the tiny, improvised precursor to Israel’s modern intelligence services—and uncovers a story that is both humbler and more astonishing than the sleek mythology that later grew around the Mossad.
The first surprise is how primitive it all was. Today’s popular imagination, shaped by the James Bond franchise and decades of Mossad legend, assumes espionage is synonymous with gadgets, global reach, and surgical precision. Friedman dismantles that assumption from the opening pages. The men he profiles—Gamliel Cohen, Isaac Shoshan, Havakuk Cohen, and others—were not trained in high‑tech tradecraft. They were barely trained at all. They operated with forged papers that could fall apart in the rain, radios that barely worked, and cover stories held together by nerve and improvisation. Their missions were improvised, their support minimal, and their survival far from guaranteed.
What made them uniquely suited to this work was not sophistication but identity. These were young Mizrahi Jews—men from Aleppo, Damascus, and other Arab cities—who had grown up speaking Arabic and absorbing the rhythms of Middle Eastern life. Yet in the Yishuv of the 1940s, dominated culturally and institutionally by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, they often felt like outsiders. Friedman shows how the Arab Section gave them something they had not previously been offered: purpose, belonging, and a chance to turn the very thing that marginalized them—their Mizrahi background—into a strategic superpower.
Their success, as Friedman presents it, was a blend of audacity, instinct, and perhaps good fortune. Some readers will see providence in their survival; others will see the improbable luck that often accompanies the bold. Whatever the interpretation, the results were remarkable. These young men infiltrated Arab cities, gathered intelligence that shaped the 1948 war, and helped lay the foundations of a state that did not yet formally exist.
But Friedman refuses to romanticize them. The book is as much about failure as triumph. The Arab Section’s work was riddled with danger, and the margin for error was razor thin. Being a Mizrahi Jew raised in a Muslim environment did not guarantee mastery of every dialect, custom, or social nuance. A misplaced word, a gesture slightly out of place, or a moment of hesitation could—and sometimes did—lead to exposure and death. Friedman treats these losses with gravity, showing how the same qualities that made these men invaluable also placed them in situations where the risks were almost unbearable.
What emerges is a portrait of espionage stripped of glamour and restored to its human scale. These were not super‑agents but teenagers and twenty‑somethings improvising their way through history. Their achievements were extraordinary precisely because they were so fragile, so dependent on courage rather than machinery, and so deeply intertwined with questions of identity, belonging, and sacrifice.
One of the most poignant threads Friedman draws out is the dislocation these young agents experienced when they finally returned from their long stretches undercover in Beirut, Damascus, and other Arab cities. Some had slipped across borders when Israel wasn’t yet a state at all—when the Yishuv was fighting simply to survive—and they came home to a country that had been transformed in their absence. Israel was now sovereign, a member of the United Nations, already building institutions and a national identity. Yet for all their service, they still didn’t quite fit in. The very skills that had made them indispensable in the shadows—Arabic fluency, Middle Eastern mannerisms, the ability to disappear into Muslim-majority societies—were not traits the new, largely Ashkenazi state celebrated or understood. They returned as heroes who were not fully recognized, men who had risked everything for a homeland that had changed without them and still struggled to find a place for them.
Spies of No Country is ultimately a story about the birth of Israeli intelligence, but it is also a story about the birth of Israeli society—messy, diverse, improvised, and shaped by people whose contributions were long overlooked. Friedman gives these men the recognition they deserve, and in doing so, he reminds readers that the foundations of modern Israel were laid not only by generals and politicians but by young Mizrahi Jews who risked everything in the shadows.
Speak Your Mind