The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Israeli: A Work of Historical Fiction by Phillip Kurata

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

The Israeli: A Work of Historical Fiction by Phillip Kurata https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DYQ7CTRC The Israeli: A Work of Historical Fiction – This page-turning tale, based loosely on the life of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen, explores the terrible effects of ethnic hatred on individuals, peoples and nations. As a new, free Egypt emerges from British colonial rule after World War Two, Eli Cohen, an Egyptian Jew, ignores his mother’s warnings and tries to enlist in the Egyptian army. He is shouted out of the enlistment office as an insidious Jew. Later, his closest friend, Sami Azar, is executed by the Nasser regime for participating in a Zionist bombing campaign aimed at thwarting British plans to turn over ownership of the Suez Canal to Egypt. These events turn Cohen into a fervent Zionist and hater of Arabs. The Israeli tracks Cohen’s rise as a top Israeli spy, from his resettlement in Israel, his marriage to the beautiful intelligent Nadia and his recruitment and training by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. He infiltrates into an unstable Syria where he becomes part of the country’s political and military power structure that is bent on destroying Israel. Soon he finds himself under consideration for deputy defense minister.

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from Books to Lifemarketing.co.com. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Today, an amazing young man on the show, we're going to talk about his book called The Israeli, a work of historical fiction by Philip Carada. We're going to get into it with him, find out all the deets and what he's telling here in his wonderful novel. It was Philip. He is a gentleman who has done a lot in his life, and we're going to get into it with him. He's written several books as well.

He graduated from Kansas University, worked in Peace Corps and taught hospital sanitation for a medical nonprofit, in Tunisia for four years. Study Japanese and taught English in Tokyo for three years and her graduate school for a master's degree in East Asian Studies. Study Chinese in Taiwan for four years and wrote weekly dispatches about Taiwan for the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine. Edited and reported for United Press in Hong Kong and edited and translated agency France Press in Paris,

radio respondent for Voice of America in Tokyo, Beijing and Washington, D.C., a staff writer at U.S. Information Agency and U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., diplomatic assignment to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, published two novels, the reluctant agent in 2002, and this one in 2004. Welcome to show. How are you, Philip? I am great, and I'm very grateful to be talking with you, Chris. And we're glad to have you as well. Give us your dot-coms, websites, emails, maybe social media, wherever you want people to communicate with you, or, Amazon on where they can get the book. The best way is my email, which is K-U-R-A-T-A-P as in Peter, C as in Charlie, at hotmail.com. So give us the 30,000 overview of what's inside this new book? When I heard the story of Ellie Cohen, I was just captivated.

I said that what a story. story. If a novelist made up the story, it would be rejected because it was just too far-fetched. Now, who is that person you just named and give us a foundation for that? Yeah, Ellie Cohen is the main character. Okay. He is the Israeli. And he was an Egyptian Jew who, early in his life following the collapse of the British Empire, And Egypt was becoming an independent state.

He wanted to be a Jewish citizen of Egypt. He wanted to be an Egyptian. He tried to enlist in the Egyptian army to show his patriotism. He was shouted out because the recruiter said, we will never trust a Jew. And his best friend, was caught up in a scheme to make the British stay in Egypt and not relinquish control of the Suez Canal. And his best friend was caught in that and executed.

Oh. Yeah. So that's a turning point, an early turning point. And from that, it transformed Ellie from an Arab friend. into a hater of Arabs. And it's his hatred of Arabs that drives this plot. Wow. And what was the proponent that made you want to tell this story? What was the moment that you had an aha moment and said,

oh, we should put this to paper and write this out? Yeah. A Jewish friend who was a great admirer of Valet gave me some pulp novels about him. Oh, really? Yeah. Was he a real? person then? He was a real person. Okay. And then you've taken and you're using his name and your main

character, correct? So I didn't understand. Yeah. All right. Okay. And it's historical fiction this novel. So we're writing, we're influencing a little bit of fiction to an already kind of real story. So this, did the part where he wanted to join the Egyptian

military, did that actually happen or is this you? No. He actually tried to adjoin. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, he believed peace and good relations could exist between Israel and Egypt. Yeah, it would be good if people can learn to all get along. You write this story, and what was it inspired you to write the book? I'll go back to my question.

Just the amazing feats this man accomplished. He's a national hero in Israel. There are streets named after him. There's their museums in his honor. And I realized that he is not widely known outside of Israel. Yeah, I've never heard of him. Yeah, many of my American Jewish friends have never heard of him. So I said, this story has to be written.

It's like a low-hanging piece of fruit for me to pick. So I couldn't get it out of my mind. So I wrote it. Oh, wow. Yeah, I wasn't aware of him. We've had lots of people from Israel on the show, and no one's ever brought him up. So, yeah, you're bringing, shining a light on a story that sounds like it was a guy who rising tide lifts all boats, is an abundance thinker, and maybe we can all get along. Is that correct? Correct. Now, was he also a spy for Israel? Nasser, the Egyptian president, expelled all the ethnic minorities from Egypt after 19. He expelled the Jews, he expelled the Italians, he expelled the Greeks, the Armenians.

He got rid of all the ethnicities that had lived in Egypt for a very long time while it was under British rule. And so was he then a spy in the... Yeah, he was not a spy, but he ran like an underground railroad getting Egyptian. Jews out of the country with as much wealth as they could take with them. Yeah. And many of them went to Israel. Many of them came to the United States. But it was his undercover work for which he was not paid that caught the attention

of the Israeli spy agency, the Mossad. He got to Israel and rejoined his family. He was a known quantity for the excellence of his work in getting the Jews out of Egypt. And, yeah, I imagine they were being persecuted. What time frame did this take place in in years? Yeah, it takes place. The book starts around late 1940s. Israel gained its independence in 1948.

and this is the time where there's a lot of turmoil, and it takes it up to 1965 when Ellie Cohen was executed by the Syrians. All right. And so you decide you want to tell this story. How long did it take you to write it? It took me a long time. Like years? Oh, I guess.

I heard about him in the 1990s, but I was still working. working and I didn't have enough energy and time to concentrate on it. So I retired from my job in 2014, and then I turned my attention to this and, yeah, spent years researching and writing it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And tell us, for those who were not aware of some of the things that were going on back then,

what caused the Arab-Israeli conflict? It was basically a fight over land, the land of Palestine. Egyptian Jews, no, excuse me, European Jews began streaming into Palestine starting in the 1930s. And it was a fight between the Jews wanting to take land and the Palestinians already on the land. there was an incipient Palestinian national movement

in the 1930s which the British crushed they were the colonial powers after World War I and the British sided with the Jews

and what crushed or quelled the Palestinian national movement and after the Second World War the stream of European Jews into Israel just became a torrent. And the British could not negotiate a greedy treaty between the Palestinians and the Jews.

And they just threw up their hands and left when their empire collapsed. Wow. Yeah. And then the Israelis and the Arabs have fought many wars, 1948, 1956, 1973. And the Israelis established their military dominance. Yeah. Quite wild. Yeah.

Quite wild. Period of history, you know. Yeah. Lots of fun. The beginning of the never-ending Arab-Israeli conflict. What sort of man was this Eli Cohen that you write about? Tell us a little bit more about maybe his characters, motivations, or maybe drove him as a person? First of all, he was a brilliant man.

He spoke many languages. He was a polymath. He was gifted in science and technology. He was a gifted student of Judaism. When he was a young man, the rabbi of Alexandria, wanted him to become the rabbi of Alexandria after the elder had passed. And L.A. wanted to study.

And then it became impossible for him to study. He was a devoted man. He was totally devoted to his friend who was executed. Wow. He was devoted to his wife. They met in Israel and his family. And he was devoted to the cause of Israel. He put his life on the line.

to participate in this fight. And he paid the ultimate price. Wow. Wow. And so you fictionalized it into a novel, so he has adventures. Do you see this as a future more books coming, like maybe in a series, kind of like they do with Jack Ryan and all that stuff? No. I haven't thought that far ahead yet.

Okay. So you got the book out and promoting it and all that good stuff. If readers could remember just one thing after finishing the book, or what would it be? And maybe what do you hope people do take away from the book? I hope that they see the lesson of ethnic hatred. And it's everywhere, and it affects everyone. And it's a lesson not to let hate overcome you.

dominate you because hatred will harm you and it will harm the objects of the hatred. It is a very destructive force. Yeah. Yeah. Very destructive force. And that can be a challenge. Yeah. It's hard to make world peace happen, I guess, in these days.

How do you balance the excitement of spy operations with the moral dilemmas they create? And yeah, let's do that. Yeah. That's where the writing skill comes in, create scenes that are exciting, get into Ellie's mind with inner dialogue, inner monologue stream of consciousness, and create scenes where the moral conflicts or the moral choices are discussed, especially with his handlers in Israel when he is faced with the prospect of Mary. a Syrian woman. So writing effective scenes and bringing what's going on inside

Ellie's mind to the reader. Now you have a background working for the government or I think covering the government, right? Newswise? Yeah. Yeah. And how did that play into you writing the book and knowing some of the background of maybe Spycraft or government operations?

Yeah. I just read a lot. I knew I had friends who were CIA agents and I, yeah, I just absorbed it by osmosis. You write what you know. That's a good thing to remind everybody who is going to write or trying to write a book. You write what you know. So what you see every day, you know, a lot of this stuff you can really learn from and stuff. So as we go through the rest of this, what do you think personal, relationships can challenge political and national loyalties. I imagine you talk about that a little bit in the book. Yeah, personal relations have really influenced the flow of history. Anwar Sadat became the Egyptian president after Nassar's death in 1970.

And Sadat was a major supporter of Nassar in overthrowing the king. and driving out the foreigners. And if Nassar had not died, then Sadat may have not become president and may not have established diplomatic relations with Israel and recognized us. There are many, many examples. Take, for example, Lenin and Stalin.

Lenin was the leader of the, of the Communist Party in Russia and Stalin was his closest aide commander and Stalin died relatively early of a stroke Oh really? Yeah, and then

Stalin was able to take power and during his rule atrocities were committed Yeah, millions and millions of people died and if Lenin did not have a stroke and he lived, I don't know, another 10 years, he was quite young when he died, history would be different. Ah, yeah, that's true. That's true. You think it would have been better or worse?

I think Sadat was a great gift to Israel, to Egypt, and to the world. I think that Stalin has been a curse. to the Soviet Union and to humanity. So, you can go different ways in different directions. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's see here. What aspects of Eli's personality were most important for you to portray? I guess to portray, to explain the reasons for his hatred

at the At the core of his heart, he hated Arabs. And he tried to make an ordinary life for himself in Israel, becoming an accountant and never having a stable job. And the Mossad knew of him. So they found him. They tricked him into going to work for them. Yeah, his determination, his devotion.

his loyalty. He had all the characteristics that I would want in a friend. And if I had known L.A. Cohen in different circumstances, I would have liked to have been his friend. He was just a lovable guy. Was he kind of a hero to you or something? Would you describe it as that? In a way, what I wanted to portray was the tragedy of his life. I mean, he was so brilliant, he could have become a scientist, a rabbi, anything he wanted. He might have won a Nobel Prize. He was just an extraordinary human being. I wanted to show how an extraordinary human being can be destroyed the tragedy related to

ethnic hatred. Yeah, yeah. Very, very bad stuff there. Let's see. As we go out, give people a final pitch out on where to buy your book, why they should pick it up, and any dot com's emails, wherever you want people to get to know you better. Amazon is the biggest seller of books in the world. Amazon.com is probably the easiest.

There's the publisher itself, which is called Doran. Publishing House. They sell it. It's available on quite a number of outlets. Just Google the Israeli by Philip Carada. A lot of possibilities will pop up. All right. Sounds good then.

It's been wonderfully having the show, Philip, very insightful, and a book that hopefully maybe will inspire people to think more about peace in the Middle East and trying to figure out how we can all get along, right? Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for running us for tuning in. Order up his book, wherever fine books are sold. The Israeli, a work of historical fiction.

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