Cohen Hillel. Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. — 281 p.Based on his reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, Hillel Cohen exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestinian collaboration with Israelis―and of the Arab resistance to it. Cohen's previous book, the highly acclaimed Army of Shadows,told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948, and now, in Good Arabs he focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller and has evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents Cohen viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day.Contents:Beginning a beautiful friendship: the rise of the collaborator class
Communists vs. the military government, collaborators vs. communists
Boundary breakers: infiltrators, smugglers, spies
The land
The battle of the narrative: symbols, pronouncements, teachers
Minorities within a minority: dilemmas of identity
Circles of control, circles of resistance