Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 36: How marginalized Mizrahim became Israel's first spies

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Long before the operational successes of the Mossad would become the stuff of legend in the espionage world, before the Twelve Day War, before Eli Cohen, before the Mossad itself had even come into being, a small ragtag band of courageous young Jews, without training or equipment, built the country’s first espionage arm to help the nascent Jewish state defend itself against its enemies.Journalist and author Matti Friedman returns to the podcast to talk about his book, Spies of No Country, about the Mizrahi Jewish young men who became the Jewish state’s first spies in the Arab world. Their heroic, tragic, sometimes funny stories help us fill in the longstanding lacunae in the larger story of Israel’s founding and of present-day Israeli society by paying closer attention to the enormous role and influence played by Arab-world Jews in forging today’s Israel.This episode was sponsored by the Lichterman Family of Jupiter, Florida, and dedicated to the memory and bravery of Aner Shapira, 22 from Jerusalem, who was slain in the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival on October 7. Aner attended the rave next to the Gaza border with a group of friends from Jerusalem, including his close childhood friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. When the rocket fire began, they left by car and stopped on the side of the road to seek safety in a roadside bomb shelter next to Kibbutz Re’im. Aner and his friends were among the last people to squeeze inside the shelter, where they soon realized that terrorists were gathering outside to attack. Aner positioned himself at the entrance to the shelter, where he caught and threw back seven grenades before the eighth exploded and killed him. Of the 27 people inside the shelter, only seven emerged alive. Those who survived did so because of Aner’s bravery.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Habib Anything. This is going to be a special episode. I say that far too often. I get mocked about it in the Patreon community. I'm going to stick with it. But this one really is special. It's a coming-of-age episode for this podcast because it's the first time that we've ever asked a guest to come back. And the reason for that is that Mati Friedman has written not one book, the book we talked about last time, Pumpkin Flowers about the Lebanon War,

which you need to understand if you want to understand Israeli psychology, Palestinian psychology, what Hamas thinks it's doing, how the relationship between Israel and various jihadi groups, Islamist groups around it developed over the years. That was a fascinating conversation. We enjoyed it very much. And the book is not just analytically fascinating. It's lyrical. It's actually beautifully written. Mati is a long-time acquaintance. I consider him a friend. We're going to hear soon if he considers me his friend. I just want to put in some, you know, real reality television vibes here

to create emotional suspense. Today we've asked him back to talk about another absolutely fascinating book that he wrote about five years back called Spies of No Country, about Mizrahi Jewish spies who were at the founding of the Mossad pre-Mosad, actually pre-state spies

for the Yeshua, for the Pahlimakh, for the Haganah and the Jewish community in the land. And their fascinating story, not just the espionage aspect of it, Israeli espionage would go on to be an empire, just one of the greatest espionage agencies, the Mossad and several other agencies as well, and espionage ecosystem in the history of the craft.

But also what it tells us, us about Israeli society because if you follow the stories of the origins of Israel, right at that moment, you see things that suddenly become a kind of thread through Israeli history that help you understand what Israelis see around them. That can be hard to see in the daily news cycle and maybe aren't easily understood by people who watch us from afar. So we're going to talk about spies of no country. Before we get into that book, by the way, highly recommended and as I like to tell people, available in audiobooks. So don't work hard.

You have no excuse for not taking long walks and diving very deeply into a beautifully written rendition of this very important history. Folks, this episode was sponsored by the Lichtenman family of Jupiter, Florida, who would like to honor this podcast for its insight, wisdom, and teachings. They wrote that. It's a little embarrassing to read it, but it also is tremendously gratified. to read that. Thank you so much to the Lichtenen family, and as has become a tradition here, they've asked to dedicate this episode to the memory and the bravery of Staff Sergeant Aner Shapira, 22, an unarmed off-duty soldier in the Nakhl Brigade's elite reconnaissance unit from Jerusalem,

who was slain while attending the Supernova Music Festival on October 7. Anner attended the rave with a group of friends from Jerusalem, including his close childhood friend, Hirsch Goldberg, Poland. When the rocket fire began, they left via car and stopped on the side of the road to seek safety in a roadside bomb shelter next to Kibbutz Reim. This is the story of, this is Anil's story as reported in the Times of Israel that I'm relating to you now. Aner and his friends were among the last people to squeeze inside the shelter, where they soon realized the terrorists were gathering outside to attack. Annel himself positioned himself at the entrance to the shelter, and in video that later emerged from a dash cam, he can be seen catching and throwing back seven grenades thrown in by the Hamas terrorists until the eighth one exploded and killed him. Ultimately, of the 27 people hold up in that shelter with Anil, only seven emerged alive and all survived because of his bravery. Anette was buried on Jerusalem's Mount Herzl Cemetery on October 13.

He is survived by his parents, Shira and Moshe, and his six younger siblings, Talia Ayala, Ariel, Tamara, Alma, and Hila. As a young child, he was always creating, writing stories, illustrating them, playing the piano. He eventually discovered a love for rap and hip-hop. He had composed and produced five songs before he was killed, and a sixth song, Hatred of Brothers. was posthumously produced with the help of rapper and producer Avery G

and with rapper Shaanan Shitrit of Hadag Nakhash, who wrote and recorded a final verse. We remember Anir today. Mati, I think Anir also went to your synagogue, right? Aner's family live not far from us in Arnona. And I know his parents, they didn't go to our synagogue, but Hirsch did with his family. So it's a neighborhood story.

Everybody, everybody knows somebody. I would also, and to get into our subject today, I would like to thank our Patreon subscribers who suggested we do an episode on this book and this topic. And so, Mati, you have a fan base over in my fan base. So there's an overlap there. If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes, participate in an exclusive live stream,

more kinds of things that we all do together as a community, debate, discuss on our Patreon. Join us on patreon.com slash ask Chaviv Anything. And now, Mati. First of all, thank you for joining us. I want to start us off because this is really one of the truly fascinating stories. It's both a human story, but it's so grand and it's so startling that there's glamour to it. In other words, it's bigger than life. It's a movie set, basically.

But all of this is actually human beings struggling with tremendous resilience and capability through a very, very difficult time. The story starts in the run-up to Israel's Declaration of Independence. That's where you begin the book in May 1948. And the fledgling Jewish pre-state, we'll call it the Yeshua, the Jewish community in the land, knows that armies are going to invade. They're already deep within what historians call the Civil War period of the 1948 war, which is Arabs and Jews in the land itself.

Palestinians and Israelis actually have battles between them, and then after the Declaration in May 1948, Arab armies invade from outside the land and come in. And that Yeshua, well, I'll let you tell us. That Yeshua then feels it needs to mobilize, among other capabilities, espionage capabilities, something it doesn't have. So how does it end up turning to these people? First of all, thanks so much for having me on again.

And it's hard to send our brains back to a time before the founding of the state of Israel. I mean, when we talk about Palestinians and Israelis at odds in the months that we're talking about before the founding of the state, neither Palestinians nor Israelis call themselves Palestinians or Israelis. So we have to kind of enter a different world where it's not clear that the Jews are ever going to be able to. who found a state, no one knows what's going to happen. It looks pretty grim for the Jews in the first part of the war. The British assumed that the Jews are going to lose the war, and as do many others.

So it's a moment of historical inflection when things could have gone numerous different ways. So we're in the period between the end of the Second World War and the founding of the state of Israel, as we now know. But again, the characters in the story don't know that that's where they are and they have no idea what's about to happen. The partition vote in the United Nations at the end of the end of the, November in 1947 where the UN decides that the British mandate territory of Palestine is going to be split into two. There's going to be an Arab state and a Jewish state. That decision

triggers a war that starts the next morning in Palestine with an attack by Arab guerrillas against a Jewish bus. And that's the beginning of what we now call the War of Independence, although at the time, again, no one knew that it was the War of Independence. It just is very clear that the Jews are in deep trouble because they're vastly outnumbered by people in the Arab world, because they're very poorly armed, they're poorly organized, and they don't know much about their Arab opponents. Most of the Jews in Palestine at that time come from Europe, mostly from Eastern Europe. Nearly all of them, the waves of Middle Eastern immigration come later. So at the time we're talking about a pretty solid European Jewish population, they do not speak Arabic.

They have only the flimsiest understanding of Islam and Muslims. And everything going on on the other side of the barbed wire fence is very mysterious to them. and they need intelligence. They need some way to understand what the intentions of the enemy are, what kind of capabilities they have. And in the year or two that lead up to the outbreak of hostilities, the Jews build what eventually will become an intelligence service. But at the time, it's so pathetic that it's almost ridiculous to call it that.

It's just, it's basically a dozen guys. And it's called the Arab section. And it functions as part of the Palma, which is the pre-state socialist militia. that was kind of the elite of the underground that was called the Haganah. And the Palma has this tiny operation that calls itself Hamakraqa, it's the Arab section. And the job of the Arab section is to walk across the street from Arab Jerusalem, from Jewish Jerusalem into Arab Jerusalem, or from Jewish Haifa into Arab Haifa,

and sit in a barbershop and pick up rumors and go to a store and buy merchandise and try to chat up the shopkeeper. And they plant people who work in different places. They plant people at the Haifa port as Arab workers. And the idea is to have people who are part of Arab society who can pick up information that will be useful for the Jews who are trying to figure out what on earth is about to happen and how they can defend themselves.

And this is called the Arab section, which at the outbreak of hostilities, is about a dozen guys, very young. Who orders this? And this thing is just, you know, Israelis are pretty famous for taking initiative sometimes unasked. It's good for high tech. It's maybe not so good for, you know,

intelligence agencies. This is something that comes top down from Ben Gurian. This is something that these guys just decide to do on their own. How does this get built? It actually starts with the British. The British have a problem in the Second World War, which is that the Arab world is allied to a very significant extent with the Nazis. And the British want people who can move around the Arab world

and pick up intelligence. and it's very hard for them to find loyal agents. So someone in Palestine realizes that the Jews can help because the Jews have people who can pass as almost anything. If you need people to pass as Germans, the Jews have them. You need people who can pass as, you know, Serbians, French, British, you name it. The Jews have it, and the Jews are also clearly in the Allied camp, although they also hate the British, which makes it a bit complicated,

but they're definitely on the allied side in the war. So they start using Jews for these double-locked. identity units. They create one unit that's called the German section, the job of the German section, which is founded in 1941, is to stay behind the Nazis capture Palestine, which seemed likely to happen at that time. And they were going to pass as Germans behind German lines. And they're trained. And this is because Rommel's forces are crossing North Africa. They're going to be stopped by Montgomery at El Alamein. Right, but we don't know it. Yeah, that's right. The Germans are in Egypt.

I mean, they're at the next door. And it seems quite likely that the British are going to have to evacuate Palestine and they want people who they can leave behind. So they, with the Palmaq, at this time when the British and the Jews are cooperating because they toggle between cooperation and overt hostility, they form the German section. At around the same time, they form the Arab section. The Arab section is meant to use Jews. from Palestine who can speak Arabic and to send them into places like Syria and Lebanon in order

to collect intelligence for the British. So that's how it starts. And then the British Jewish cooperation falls apart and it's a longer story that we probably don't want to get into, but not much remains of Jewish-British cooperation by the end of the war, certainly not with the Palma. And yet the Jewish military leadership realizes that a section of fighters who can pass as Arabs is going to be very useful because they understand that after the war, there is going to be another war in which Israel is going to have to fight for its independence, probably against the British and against the Arab world. So they need people who can move around the Arab world. So they make sure that this section survives and it goes through a few different incarnations.

The key character among the famous Pamach commanders is Alon, Yala Lone, who had one of the first people who had this idea, but the brain behind the Arab section. is a name that no one has ever heard, or very few people have heard. The name is Shimon Somach. And Shimon Somach was a Jew from Iraq, who went by an Arabic name, Saman. That's the name by which he's known. And he has this idea that Jews can become so Arabized that they will be able to move without detection behind Arab lines.

And to that point, I mean, now we kind of accept that this must be true. But until that point, the Jews had been using paid informants, that's how they got information. They wanted to know what the size of the militia is in an Arab town or an Arab neighborhood. They would pay people to inform on their neighbors. But this flew against the tenets of Zionism, right? Because Zionism says you don't pay someone to pave the road, you pave the road, you don't pay someone to pick the oranges, you pick the oranges. So how can you be paying other people to do your intelligence work? You need to do it.

And Saman, who's a Jew from the Arab world, who speaks fluent Arabic, he says, we can do it. we can do it and he basically creates the Arab section which had existed before under the British but he creates what becomes the Arab section of the independence where Hamakha Arabit and he starts picking up these kind of marginal characters who are kind of on the margins of Jewish society in Palestine who are these kids from the Arab world, Jews from the Arab world

who somehow ended up in Palestine and people didn't really know what to make of them and they didn't really know necessarily what to make of the world of European Zionism, and they were marginal characters who were often treated as second-class citizens and were often misunderstood and were often treated with suspicion because they seemed a lot like the enemy. Arabic-speaking Jews and some unrealized that that wasn't just a disability. He saw that that was a superpower, and he started picking them up,

and that's who forms the Arab section. That's active at the time of the war of the war of it. independence as it starts at the end of 47. One of the really interesting things for me about that period is, and it's often a victim of the propaganda wars, is the extent to which Jews at the

time really did feel tremendously vulnerable. And that blindness was part of it. There's a whole debate, you know, in the 48 war, for example, there's a whole debate where in the 1948 war

is Israelis remember in their sort of collective memory that we were few and the other side were many and they all invaded. And it is a simple historical fact that we actually deployed more soldiers. And a lot of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel historians have made that point. Abishlam, I think, has written about this where he has argued that actually the Jews won because they had many more soldiers and the Arabs, in fact. And it's true that the Arabs were uncoordinated and had trouble mobilizing and the Jews mobilized everybody down to 16 years old. I mean, just every asset, everything. one percent of the entire population issue was killed in that war. It felt to them like a desperate stand, even though because they could mobilize that much. So we're talking about people at a point in time where the Jews have a very clear sense of the danger, and they need to make use of every asset they possess, and these Arabic-speaking Jews are part of that. But I have to ask, an Iraqi Jew is, an Iraqi Arabic speaker is identifiable to every Palestinian. That's a different Arabic.

Even Syrian, which is closer to West Bank Arabic, let's say, is different. How do they blend in when they are clearly Iraqis? Is that something? What is their training involved? Right. So to call it training maybe gives it a bit more credit than it deserves. and we still, you know, because we have the Mossad and we know what it is now, we might imagine that there was a spy school and that there were instructors and there was a curriculum. And this was completely ad hoc.

It was being made up by Saman basically as he went along. And the training to the extent that we can call a training happened in some tents outside Kibu. The camp used to move. And they had to be taught certain things. So, for example, they had to be taught Islam because these people came from the Arab world, but they were not a Muslim. So they didn't necessarily know Muslim prayer, they didn't know how to pass in a mosque, and that was very important. They also had to have their accents calibrated because, as you mentioned, Iraqi Arabic is

very different than Palestinian Arabic and Palestinian Arabic is very different than Moroccan Arabic. And outsiders might just hear it all as the same, but an insider in this country, to this day, if you come from the north, an Arabic speaker can tell. If you're Druze from the North, an Arabic speaker can tell. And if you're a Christian from the North, an Arabic speaker can tell, it's a very, there are very fine gradations in the accent. So they had to also be trained to speak like locals. And that was part of it.

Did it work? Not really. And one of the first things that happens in the war to the Arab sections that they send to two of their guys, this is really in the first days of the war at the very end of 1947. So we're still in the civil war stage or the independent. were before the declaration of the state, before the invasion of Arab armies. And they sent two guys to Jaffa to figure out what the Arab militia in Jaffa is planning to do. And they're kicking around Jaffa trying to pick up rumors when militiamen, Arab militiamen and Jaffa, see them.

And they realize there's something wrong with these guys. There's something strange about them. And part of what they realize is that they sound like Iraqis, which they were. They were Jews from Iraq. And they take them into custody. the defense is that there are lots of foreign Arabs working in Palestine at the time. So you have Jews from Iraq, you have Jews from Huron in Syria, you have Lebanese, you have all kinds of people around Palestine. So the fact that you speak with an Iraqi accent doesn't necessarily mean you're a Jew, it could mean you're a Muslim from Iraq.

So they take them, they put them in custody, and we have this incredible conversation between two Arab militiamen that is picked up by a Jewish spy at the telephone exchange in Jaffa. So we know what the discussion between the Arab militiamen is. One is saying, I have these two guys, I think they're Jews. They're really suspicious. The other guy says, yes, but you can't just kill them because what if they're Muslims are saying they're Muslims? And they agree that what they're going to do is wake them up at night all of a sudden. And if they speak Hebrew when they wake up, their Jews. And if they speak Arabic, you know, they might be Arabs.

what seems to do them in, ultimately, is the fact that they didn't know how to wash, to perform the ritual washing before prayer. So one of the Muslim militiamen had the idea of making them wash, as any Muslim male would know to wash before prayer, where you wash behind your ears is a certain order of ritual washing. And it seems, according to the correspondence, that one of them could do it and one of them could not. And that blows their cover and these guys disappear.

And they're found decades later. their bodies are found decades later when in the state of Israel when they're building a school in Cholon, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of the suburbs of Tel Aviv. They're building, they're kind of uncovering the foundations

of the school, and they find these two skeletons. And it's these two Arab section guys whose Arabic was insufficient or whose knowledge of, you know, the minutia of Muslim practice was insufficient. So they were trained, but they're trained.

training was pretty shoddy and of the 12 guys or so who were active at the beginning of the war, about half of them die as a result? Half of them die. This is a, you get into what kind of a rag tag group this really was. There was a, well, tell us about the story of the bomb in Haifa, where they ran into another kind of problem, that this is a failure of what they call today the craft, right? But this is a simpler failure. what happened in Haifa with the bomb?

Right, the bomb in Haifa is one of the stories they're most proud of in the Arab section. They consider it quite a great success, and I think it's an indication of the scale that we're talking about, which seems almost ridiculous. When we think of stories about the Mossad, but I guess we should say, I mean, these guys,

not only were they not trained, they weren't paid. No one made a salary. You know, the whole thing was completely, you know, improvised in that Israeli way where you just go and you hope that it works out and often it doesn't and that was very much then the main source for the story of the woman heif and in general for the story that I wrote in Spies of No Country is a man named Isaac Shoshan, who I managed to interview had multiple interviews with him about 2012 if I'm not mistaken he was in his 90s and he was the last surviving member or a core member of the Arab section. And I spent hours and hours and hours

talking to him and heard from him this story that led to many other stories. And he passed away a few years ago. But he was alive long enough for me to give him a copy of the book. And he saw that on the cover of the book. There's a picture of him. And I think he was very gratified. It was, you know, it felt like it was less recognition than he deserved. But at least it was something. So So at the very beginning of 1948, the war is really descending into something that's becoming very, very scary. It's clear that it's not just a few skirmishes, that this is really the war and that one of the sides is going to lose, and it's still completely unclear which side it's going to be

the Haganah intelligence arm to the extent that such a thing exists. The intelligence guys hear that the Arabs are preparing a truck bomb that will go off at a cinema in Jewish Haifa, and that the truck bomb is being concealed as a British army. ambulance. And they also hear that this truck bomb is being prepared in a garage in lower Haifa, meaning the Arab part of Haifa. And they know which garage it is. So they decide to send two men from the Arab section to scout it out. And one of them is Tzhak Shoshang. And who is a guy who I met, I mean, I remember going up to meet him in Batyam. I went up in this tiny little elevator. The Israeli elevators used to be about the size of a phone booth. And this was in this very

Soviet-style apartment block and I went up to the seventh floor and he was waiting for me. The door open. He came up to my shoulders or so and I'm not particularly tall and he had a mustache and glasses and really big ears and that was a Dr. Shan and this was a much younger version of him, of course. And so he and another agent named Jakuba Cohen is another kind of legendary figure who serves in Israeli intelligence until his 70s. They scouted out. They see the ambulance and they try to figure out what they're going to do about it because

the Jews do not have artillery. They do not have an air force. They do not have an army. This is February 1948. So they have nothing, really. It's just a gang war at that point. So they decide that what they're going to do is blow up the Arab truck bomb with a Jewish car bomb. They're going to build a car bomb.

And that's the way they're going to deal with this. And it's an almost comic story that I tell about how the greatest minds and the Haganah get together. They build this car bomb at the Technion in Haifa, which is the scientific. institute in Haifa and they learn how to build a bomb and they need a condom to serve as, you know, a part of the detonator. So you fill a condom with acid and the acid eats through a condom, but they don't have a condom. They have a few and they keep breaking the, it keeps kind of snapping and they can't, they don't know what they're doing and they have to go out to find another condom, but it's Friday night. So all the pharmacies in Haifa are closed and,

they're frantically looking for condoms and someone tells, you know, the poor Palmachnik who has to go knocking on people's doors looking for condoms. He just says, like just restrain yourself, like wait until after Shabbat, what's the problem? And there are many kind of comic episodes related to this story about the car bomb. But eventually they create a car bomb using a stolen Oldsmobile. And they drive it down to Lower Haifa, and they drive into the garage, claiming that the Oldsmobile needs to be fixed. They break one of its headlights to make it seem like it needs repair.

And they park it next to the truck bomb, which is being painted to look like a British Army ambulance. And I don't know if I should tell the end of the story, but let's just say like most of the stories of the Arab section, it kind of works and kind of doesn't. So, you know, if people are expecting these stories to end in a kind of James Bond way or even in a Le Coray fashion where there's some great puzzle that becomes clear, it's very much not that kind of story. It's a real spy story where no one knows what's going on. And it's impossible to predict the results of your operations.

And even if your operation works, it always has unintended consequences. And that was true of the truck bomb. It was true of an assassination that they did, an assassination attempt that they did. A few months later, it was true of their attempt to sink Hitler's yacht in Beirut, which is another story in the book. It's very much a story of incredibly brave amateurs trying to do something that is usually beyond their grasp.

I just want to fill in that tiny bit, not to leave people hanging quite so much. They had to drive this car into that garage and discovered that neither of them knows how to drive a car. And that was the struggle. So, you know, it's a rag-tag group of kids. They're 18, 20, you know, 25. They're a rag-tag group of kids

trying to do something very big at a very dangerous moment with everything at stake. Right. Most of them had never finished high school. One of them had finished high school, Gamli El-Coyne, and he was considered an intellectual. But they were, I mean, some of them were street kids. Isaac Shoshan was basically a street kid. You can see pictures of him when he was 13 and he has shoes but no socks.

He grew up in the alleys of Aleppo and it was a very rough, very rough bunch. So he did not know how to drive a car. He was supposed to drive a getaway car. Jakuba was going to drive the Oldsmobile with the bomb and Yitzhak was going to drive the getaway car and he did not know how to drive. So they had to teach him at the Technion a few minutes before the mission and they teach him roughly how to operate the gears and the brakes and he manages to make it. But just barely.

I mean, the Mossad, I guess the proto-Mossad of this time didn't call it the Mossad. But they did not own a camera. I mean, there's one episode where these guys have to go photograph Syrian military fortifications on the border in the north. And they send them up and they have to borrow a camera from a civilian, from some guy who has a camera. And they're told, according to the story, that if they don't come back from this mission, that's okay. but the camera has to come back. The camera has to come back because it was very expensive

but eventually they end up around the time that the state is founded. They, and maybe one of the great moments in the history of Israeli intelligence, they exit British mandate Palestine and move into Lebanon. And this is the beginning of Israel's Foreign Intelligence Service.

There is a battle in Haifa. The Jews win the battle of Haifa. There's an exodus of Arab refugees from Haifa and the Arab section realizes that this is the perfect opportunity to get their agents into the Arab world. So they send a few of their guys, including Shoshan, down to lower Haifa where people are fleeing, and they pretend to be locals who are fleeing, and that's how they get to Lebanon. And this is right around the time that the state has founded immediately previous. It's a few weeks before, so they go to Lebanon.

But how are they supposed to communicate with headquarters? I mean, Israeli intelligence does not own a radio. So the borders are cut. there's no way to get letters across. And they have absolutely no idea if the state has been founded or not. All they know is what's being written in the Arab newspapers in Lebanon, which is that the Arab armies are victorious, and the Egyptians are at the gates of Tel Aviv,

and the Arab Liberation Army has taken Haifa. And all they have is these propaganda stories, and they have no idea if it's true or not. And they have no radio. So there's no way to contact home. And it's only a few months later that they manage to get a radio and smuggle it to the agents in Lebanon. And then they establish contact and realize that there is a state,

because there's about a month there where they have to deal with the possibility that they've been sent by a state that no longer exists. There's no, you know, it's not like the CIA, there's no Langley, there's no office with a list of names on it. No one's coming to help you. They were sent into the chaos

of the war and there was a very good chance that they would not have a place to come back to. There's one especially poignant moment where they go to a movie theater in Lebanon. And in the newsreel, before, the movie, if I remember right,

they see a news clip of the execution of members of their unit in Egypt. Tell us that. There's a group of them in Beirut, and this is really the first intelligence station run by

Israel, which is now called Israel. That's new, by the way. These guys had actually never been in a country called Israel, because they left before the state was founded. So you can see in the radio transmissions, which I've seen, they keep calling it Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, and they're theoretically officers in something called the Israeli defense forces, Zahal, but they've never met anyone from the Israeli army. And they think they're

part of the Palmaq, but the Palmaq has been disbanded. So they're kind of living outside of time in this very strange, in these strange circumstances in Lebanon, and that goes on for two years. And one night, that summer, they're in the summer in 48, they're in a movie theater, and they see a news reel, which shows two Jewish spies that were captured by the Egyptians, and these people had crossed the lines, the Egyptian lines in Gaza, and had been apprehended, and they recognized them. It's two of their friends, and there's a photograph of them in the book. And the newsreel shows them, obviously, terrified and tied,

and they were executed. And their bodies were never found. There are some indications of where they might be in Gaza, and at different times when Israel occupied Gaza, there were attempts to find their bodies, but they've never been found in this is something that they see in the newsreel. The stakes were very high. So the story has some comic elements, but it's quite a tragic story.

I mean, as I mentioned, about half of the people in this very small section don't survive the war, in large part because they were untrained, and they had very shoddy cover stories, and their accents didn't match the cover story. And they're often just making it up as they went along. Shashan told me that the way he would do it was when he met a Palestinian refugee, in Lebanon, this is when he's based in Lebanon, he would ask first where the person is from. He would always be the first to ask. And then if the person said, I'm from Haifa, Shoshan would say, I'm from Ja'Fa. And if the person said I'm from Jaffa, he would say I'm from Haifa. But that was the

level. There was no, you know, a committee making up watertight cover stories. And as a result, for these guys, it was a very, very perilous business. the microcosm of that experience of living on the edge in that way, it reflects their position also in Israeli society. In other words, they are Mizrahi Jews, Jews from the Arab world, living in a society that three years after May 1948 is already half and half. It's already half Jews in the Arab world because there's this influx of hundreds of thousands of people right after the founding. I don't know if it's half and half, some 150,000 of those are DPs from Europe,

But nevertheless, they are now, for the first time, hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Arab world in Israel. But they're very much, you know, the Shkenazi elites have been building the place for 40 years, 60 years. And these are newcomers without European knowledge and knowledge of these institutions and comfort, navigating these kinds of cultures that the European Jews built. And the European Jews have a tremendous amount of disdain for them. and they ship them off to these dusty little desert towns, and many of them have to live in Ma'a Barot, which are basically large tent encampments,

while this desperately poor state facing existential war at its very founding, and it's essentially a third-world economy, struggles to build homes for them, all under the threat of war. They come from this very marginalized place, and that raises this question for me. What happens to them afterwards?

In other words, some of them die. Some of them you mentioned, you know, would spend the next 50 years in Israeli intelligence. But what is it like coming home? What are they, are they appreciated? Are they respected? I don't, I didn't know any of these stories. Now, I knew the story of Eli Koein. I knew the story of Igallelon.

I knew the life story. There are these little pamphlets handed out to kids. You know, you can get little, I don't know what, bobblehead dolls of them to put on your bookshelf, if you're a particular kind of nerd. not these guys. These guys are almost missing from our story. So how do they function in this Ashkenazi-dominated place where Mizrahim, which is the thing that they brought to the state to help rescue and save the state?

That very aspect of them is what marginalizes them in young Israel. Right. It's the great irony of the story. Their social disability is also their superpower. And that's really the kind of the heart of it. These are people who were not celebrated by the society that they were part of it. They were seen as too weird. And these guys have very similar stories. So Shoshan, It'shak Shoshan.

He comes from Aleppo. His name is Zaki Shasho and he's basically an Arabic-speaking, Arabic-speaking street kid from Aleppo. And he shows up on a kibbutz and he wants to be a Sabra. Like he wants to be what we would call Israeli. They didn't use that word at the time. So he starts calling himself, Itzhak Shoshan, instead of of Zaki Sheshosso, so he makes himself sound more like a Sabra, and he learns Hebrew, and he tries to fit in, and he can't because he's too different. He seems too Arab. And for the Sabra kids

and the East Europeans, this was very, very strange. I mean, they came from a world where this was almost unimaginable, that they're Jews who speak Arabic and have a completely different tradition and eat different food. And it's only when Saman, the spy master shows up on the Kibbutzim looking for the misfits, that the disability becomes a superpower. And then these guys end up in what is essentially the only part of the early Israeli state where their identities appreciated, which is the intelligence world, because it's useful. Because understanding the Arab world, if you're a spy, is a great thing. Being too Arab, if you're just a regular Israeli in the 1950s or 60s or 70s, or 80s maybe, you know, it's not the, it's not the right identity.

At the time of this story, there's a tiny number of Jews from Islamic countries, so more than 90s, of the Jews in Palestine are from Europe and Eastern Europe. So these characters are exotic but not threatening. They're strange but not threatening. But as you mentioned, that changes immediately with the founding of the state when there is a mass immigration of Jews from Arab countries, from North Africa, from, you know, across the Islamic world. And then the character of the state changes and the founders of the state feel threatened because they had planned to have some kind of, you know, secular socialist Jewish republic on the Mediterranean. And what they started having was something that looked a lot like the Middle East because the Jews were Middle Eastern.

And if you're founding a Jewish state in the Middle East and you have a big Jewish population from the Middle East, I think you should realize that that is an incredible gift that you need to work with. And they, unfortunately, did not have the foresight. To see it that way, they have so many, there's so much about which they were right. And I hate to point out the instances in which they were wrong. And I mean the founding generation of Israel, bin Gulion and his colleagues, you know, in 20, the genius of those Zionists becomes more and more clear every day.

Every single day, it becomes more clear how much Herzl knew and how much we owe Ben-Gurion. So I'm not trying to deconstruct them. I'm just pointing out that this was their blind spot they didn't know to appreciate to Jews that from cultures that were very different from them. The only place where they were appreciated was in the spy world. And the reason that I wanted to write the book was essentially that. I mean, I love spy stories and I was happy to write a story about double-ed-old. and it has some great episodes in it,

but I was really trying to make a case for understanding Israel through the eyes of Jews who came from the Islamic world to take a step back from this very European story that I grew up with, that you grew up with, Herzl in Vienna, the Kibbutz, the Shoah, Benguyan, goa, bin Gouyuan, Godameir, Moshe, Deyan. Okay, that exists. That's how, you know, we need to tell those stories

if we want to understand how the state was created, but if we want to understand the state that we have in 2025, we need to understand that more than half of the Jews here did not come from Europe. And as a result, I thought it would be really interesting to find a story about the moment of inception, the creation moment, and try to tell it with no Ashkenazim. What would that look like if we took 1948 and we removed all of the characters who came from Europe? And the result is this book, which is it's not the only story about 1948. I'm not suggesting this has a replacement for every other story.

I'm just saying that if you read this story, let's put it this way, if you read stories about the Palmaq today, this kind of of socialist militia very much motivated by, you know, communism, and they were inspired by Tito and by the Red Army. And if you use those stories to understand Israel in 2025, you'll get absolutely nowhere. If, however, you know the story of the Arab section, which is a story about Middle Eastern Jews moving through a very ambiguous landscape in which they are at home and foreign, almost everywhere they go. Then you will understand something very deep about the state of Israel, and that's what I was hoping to get, and that's what I was hoping to get at with the story. of these incredible, incredible characters from 48.

When I talk about Herzl, and there was an episode in this podcast very early on about Herzl's actual theory and how he developed that theory and how he came to Zionism from other attempts to deal with anti-Semitism, how he understood what anti-Semitism actually was. So he has this, what I consider or think about as strategic Zionism, which is it's not religious Zionism, it's not socialized Zionism, it's not any of the idealistic Zionism. not any of the idealistic Zionisms, the messianic forms of Zion, any of those. He just says, look, Jews can't survive. All minorities, by the way, Europe itself is struggling through, you know, the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalisms and small peoples who are not going to get their own spot in the sun are going to suffer terribly, and he predicts a catastrophe and all of that. But there is that second half of Herzl that to me is uninteresting because it doesn't speak to me

and it doesn't matter to me, but it mattered profoundly to Herzl and to those founding generations, which is Alt-Noyland, Old New Land, his vision of that Jewish utopian state in the distant, distant future of, I think it was 1926, he said it in, where there's an opera, and everybody's kind of Viennese middle class. And that very, very, the Jew who is marginalized, and stepped on and is the the oppressing of the Jew becomes the

way that the Christian in Europe in the 1890s forward and for centuries and centuries beforehand, but it escalates from the 1880s and 90s moving into the 40s. The Jew is the thing against which the Christian defines himself. And so the Jew is said to be

all these bad things because that's how the Christian knows that these good things, etc. And the Jews leave that marginalization and land in this Zionist project in the land of Israel, and it's very important to them to be the European middle class that they were not allowed to join back in Europe. And that's a deep cultural strain of these people once Israel is founded.

And the Mizlachin go through a similar process, if only because the Arab world is going through a similar process, though delayed. There are massacres of Jews of Iraq. There are laws and, you know, they are very much second-class citizens and they're told to remain second-class citizens and in many ways are forced to leave most of the places that they leave. And then they get to the Jewish state and they discover that unlike the European Jews who got

to stop being the Jew and became in European sense and became the majority, they still have to be the Jew. They're still stuck off in the edges. There's an op-ed I once read, maybe I'll do a whole episode about it, a 1951 op-ed in the newspaper DeVa, which was the official newspaper, of Mapai, the big centrist, socialist political party of Ben-Gurion that, you know, founded the Haganah before the state was founded. And this newspaper that is very much the voice of the elite. There's a warning in this op-ed in 1951, as the hundreds of thousands are coming. We're not

letting them into the party. This editor of the newspaper Halperin says, we're not letting them into Mapai, the Mizrahi Jews. And that's going to rebound on us, because the only way that these people who come from the Arab world can experience European democracy, he's complimenting himself for being an Ashkenazi Jew, is through the mechanisms of the party that rules the state democratically, through the consultative mechanisms, the voting mechanism. But if they're not getting that experience, then we're just going to have a bunch of people from the Arab world with no democratic experience who are going to be half the voters. How do you think that's going to do?

What do you think that's going to be? So there are these active, loud discourses that you can tune into in the early state about how to deal with these Mizrahi Jews and their marginalization. But the fact that they knew they were doing it, the fact that there was a lot of criticism, even within the state and the elites of the fact that they were doing it, didn't mean they didn't do it. And the gap in income between Ashkenazim and Mizlachim is still visible today in the gap in income between the Yashit voter and the Likud voter, which I think is two deciles apart. And so this is such a fascinating experience of these people coming in at this very liminal moment.

I'm just trying to show off something I once read. But mostly, I'm just trying to say this really was an extraordinarily eye-opening book about the human experience of still being marginalized in that sense. Right. It was important to me to tell a story that was seen through the eyes of Jews who came from the Arab world, but that was not a story of victimhood because there are real stories of victimhood. You can talk about, you mentioned the Mah Baro, which are these really rough camps where people were sent. You can talk about different kinds of discrimination, many of them real and many of them with us to this day, as you mentioned.

And those stories are true. However, I don't, I would hate to see the story of the Jews of the Islamic world in Israel, what we would call Mizrahim. It's a terrible generalization, but we all use it. It means literally Easterners. I would hate to see the story become a story about victimization when it is. also a story about heroism. I mean, the state that we have today was built in equal measure by Jews who came from Europe and Jews who came from the Islamic world. It's not like, you know, this is a marginal population. This is more than half of the Jewish population of the state.

And it's the dominant, in my opinion, part of the culture. If you look at music, if you look at food, if you look at religion, and certainly if you look at politics and the way politics looks right now, this is not something on the margins of our country. The country that we have is very very much, I think, incomprehensible with that. I'm understanding the contributions of people who came from places that were not in Europe. So I wanted to tell a story that was a story of heroism. These are Zionist heroes. I mean, these people founded the state of Israel for us, for them and for us.

And whoever them and us are, however we understand those terms. And I wanted to celebrate them. So I recognize that there are many stories of victimhood, and many of them are true. And I also think that we need to remind ourselves that they're also incredible stories of heroism. And you mentioned Eddie Cohen. I mean, that's another story, which is kind of a child of things. the Arab section, the brain behind, or one of the brains behind the Elikon operation is Saman.

Shimon Samach, who continues from the Arab section to be one of the brains behind the Mossad and Elikoyen is a much more sophisticated version of the Arab section operation where you take a Jew from the Arab world and you change his identity to some extent and you plant him back inside the Arab world where he is native and one of the great ironies of his story and this story is that it's not exactly clear what the pretense is. And that's one of the great things about looking at the way these guys were trained. What are they pretending to be exactly? Are they, we call them in Hebrew. We have an amazing name for these guys. They don't call themselves spies, by the way. I call them spies of no country in the book, but they avoided the word spies,

which in Hebrew is Miraglim. In Arabic, the word spy has a negative connotation. It sounds traitorous. It's not cool like James Bond. It has a negative connotation, so they didn't want to be known as spies. Instead, they called themselves Mista Arravim, which is a Hebrew word, exists in Arabic too, but it's a Hebrew word that means those who become like Arabs. So Hebrew actually has-Arabisers. Hebrew has a word for that. It also exists in verb form. So to become like an Arab in Hebrew is Lih Starrhe.

We have a verb for the action of becoming similar to Arabs. And that's quite shocking. Where does it come from? Well, it comes from the world of Jews in the Arab world centuries before the state of Israel because in a place like Aleppo, you had two main populations of Jews. you had Svalidim, Jews who came after the Spanish exile. And you had the local Jews who'd been there before the Spanish exile who had become Arabized over many centuries under Arab rule,

but who had been there before Arab rule. And they called themselves Mostarabin, Mistarvim, Jews who became like Arabs. So that word is kind of taken out and applied to these spies. And you look at them training in their tents to become Mistavim, to become people who become like Arabs. The thing they were also born into. But they speak fluent Arabic. They do.

but at the same time, and you read about this, they don't know Islam at all. Okay, so they're not Muslims, right? But you have Christian Arabs. But they're also separate from Muslims, right? They're separate. In Iraq, they lived a separate life. And they could be friends,

and they could have joint business ventures, but they lived a separate life. This person, I would know more, because I happen to know Islam just academically or have learned about it in school, in social studies, you know, a class, than they would have learned living in Baghdad. Certainly the religious communities, the religious communities were very separate and they knew very little about Islam.

But being an Arab and being a Muslim at that time certainly was not seen as the same thing. So you could be a Christian Arab. And in fact, many of the leaders, as you know, Arab nationalism, many of the thinkers were Christians who believed that they were Arab. So these guys were Arabic speakers, native Arabic speakers born in the Arab world. They were Jews. Were they Arab Jews? They would say no. I don't think that any of them believe that that was a thing.

Some people now do. And I'm not getting into that argument because it's not my identity to adjudicate. But they would not have described themselves as Arab Jews, but they were as native to the Arab world as any Muslim or Christian in the Arab world. So were they pretending to be Arabs? Or were they pretending to be people who were not Arabs pretending to be Arabs? So it's a very complicated identity game, which helps us kind of understand this incredible birth story of Israel.

intelligence where the people who found Israeli intelligence are Jewish refugees from Arab countries pretending to be Arab refugees from a Jewish country. And if you get that, then there are so many layers of incredible displacement and identity confusion

that it's almost a shame to call them Israeli spies, because if you do, you lose so much of what is interesting and amazing about this story. They come early, that immigration wave, of the major immigration waves that would come, and they tended to have a lot of kids. And there are pretty good estimates that something nearing half of Israelis today are their descendants of Jews from the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Half of them descendants, you know, I have so many friends who are half Romanian, a quarter Turkish, and a quarter Yemeni. And that's most of, I think, my generation of Israelis, and certainly the kids' generation, where there's now a lot of half Ethiopian kids. That's a group that came in the 80s. and 90s, and therefore, it's a couple generations later, but so this mixing has created, just to double down on a point you already made and maybe close with that, you talked about music, food, religion. The most popular and beloved music in Israel today, and especially by the younger generation, is Middle Eastern Jewish, Israeli Hebrew music. The Israeli religion. Israeli religion, by and large, is not. Deeply ideal.

and carefully delineated subgroups and ideological groups and religious visions that Ashkenazim tended to produce, and that kind of characterizes American Jewry, and certainly European Jewry. It's a kind of traditionalism, a kind of vague traditionalism, that is the classic vision of what a Jewish life is for a thousand years in the Arab and Muslim world among the Jews. Israeli food, obviously. There's a big fight. I was once in a debate with a Palestinian activist, who said we stole hummus, right? And I'm like, okay, all the Jews stole hummus, except for the Syrian Jews.

They're kosher, they're good, right? But there is no place. We have in Israel, Cuba from Iraq, we have the Sabihamang the Yemenis. We have all these foods that are really their foods. I don't, right? And the last thing was, and this was something that just, it's a tiny little story that I think says a lot.

our Hebrew is almost entirely their Hebrew. Now what do I mean by that? Israelis say Hamas. And a Palestinian activist and anti-Israel activists say it's not Hamas. They mock the Ha of Hamas. It's Hamas. And that ha sound is Ashkenazi. You take that Heat in Hebrew, which is Heet in Arabic, which is a ha sound in Arabic and also in Mizrahi.

Hebrew and and you make it the gutter al-hahah and you become Ashkenazi. But in every other way, almost other than that sound, modern Hebrew sounds Sephardi sounds Mizrahi. And what do I mean by that? We actually put the accent, Ani Holech Habita on the second syllable. And Ashkenazi Hebrew does it on the first syllable. Ani-Holach habaita, right? And so when you read the great Ashkenazi Hebrew poets of the last century, like Chaim Nachman Bialik. He has really good meter if you're an Ashkenazi Jew speaking Ashkenazi Hebrew. And if you're pronouncing it like a Mizrahi Jew, it's free verse that doesn't have any meter. And every Israeli child reads Bialik, it's free verse because we speak our Hebrew like Mizrahim, like Sephardi Hebrew. And my point was

just, I was once mocked for saying Hamas by somebody who doesn't like Israel. And I said, guys, guys, come on. I'm an Ashkenazi, Israeli Jew. Leave me the chate. Just the chate. Everything else, the Mizrachim won. Just give me this one little. Anyway, I thought it was funny. Apparently, nobody laughed and neither did you. So I'm going to stop telling that dad joke. But

when the language is shaped by their ear and the food and the religion and the music and all of these subtle, deep foundational things, these assumed things, there is still an Ashkenazi Mizrachita Vaid. Even if people are both, they somehow have to fall on one side or the other in the public debate.

But when so much of the foundations of society and the assumptions of society are theirs, I think it's fair to say they won the culture war. This country, you mentioned politics. This country has deeply tribal politics. Every political party serves a particular socio-cultural, ethnic, religious grouping, subgroup of society. They come to parliament and duke it out, but there's no question that Chasseh represents Sephardi Kharidim. It's not an accident that our political parties represent confessional groups, faith groups, ethnic groups, exactly the way Lebanese political parties do. And so if you start

looking at Israeli politics as Middle Eastern structurally, you'll suddenly understand what the heck is going on. Who Bibi represents why people vote the way they vote. Why Israelis are never convinced to switch sides for anything. We are deeply, in deep, subtle, profound ways. country. This is a Jewish country established mostly at the beginning by Ashkenazi European Jews that in every way that it thinks about itself, every way you can identify and really pin down culturally, looks Middle Eastern, smells Middle Eastern, feels Middle Eastern. It's the stories of individuals that allows us to really open a window into a much larger story, a story of a country, a story of an identity. That was my takeaway. Did I miss something? Is there another takeaway? Is there more to

with and that. And this is, you know, this is it. We'll close with this. I think that we've become accustomed to telling the story of Israel as a story about Jews from Europe who founded a state and were joined by Jews who came from different parts of the Middle East. And the longer I live here, I've been here for 30 years, the more clear it is to me that it's the opposite, that there were always Jews in the Islamic worlds. They were here before Islam and every major Arab city. pretty much had a Jewish quarter. There were always Jews here. There were a million Jews native to the Islamic world in the 1940s,

which is not that long ago. Baghdad was a third Jewish in the 1940s. So in my mind, another way of telling the story is that there were always Jews in the Islamic world and they were joined by the remnants of the Jews of Europe. And I think that's another way of telling the Israeli story. It kind of switches the identity of the main character. And I'm not saying that that should rule out any other way of telling the story, but I am saying that if you put the Jews of the Islamic world

at the center of the story, things in this country make a lot more sense. It makes more sense to see this country in its Middle Eastern context than it does to try to insist that it has something to do with the Warsaw Ghetto or with Herzl's Vienna. I think there are different ways of seeing the place that I was trying to bring one of them in this book about spies. Thank you, Mati. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Habel.