Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948

Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 is a book published in 2004 by Hillel Cohen about the sale of land and other cooperation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.

In this book, Hillel Cohen, a scholar at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem documents the thousands of Arabs, ranging from wealthy absentee landlords to fellahin smallholders, who sold land to Zionist organizations. He shows that everyone understood that control of land was a necessary precondition to fulfillment of national goals, both Jewish and Arab. Cohen explains the varied motives of sellers: Some wanted money, some sold land or acted as intelligence agents for the Zionists even while publicly denouncing land sales, but there were also non-monetary motivations. Some thought that cooperating with the Zionists would improve the life of their clans and villages. Others thought that it was impossible to defeat the Zionists and, therefore, wiser to cooperate with them. Others were committed nationalists who believed that staying on the land was paramount, and that working for and cooperating with the Zionists was the strategy that would enable them to stay on the land. Others were driven to collaborate with the Zionists or with the British out of their intense hatred for Hajj Amin al-Husayni.

Cohen sees the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine as split between two positions. There were those who agreed with al-Husayni that all of Palestine must remain Arab and the Zionists must be fought, and there were those who argued that the Zionists were too powerful to be defeated and that, therefore, the path of wisdom lay in some sort of co-existence.

According to Cohen, the Husayni clan tried to rid itself of opposition beginning in the 1920s. In 1929 Sheikh Musa Hadeib was murdered near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. In the 1929 Palestine riots Husayni spread the falsehood that the Jews intended to tear down the Al Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock shrine on the Temple Mount. Over the course of the next decade, Husayni had a thousand Arabs murdered, 500 in 1938 alone. In 1939, the Husaynis were paying 100 Palestine pounds to assassins who murdered important "traitors", 25 pounds for petty "traitors", and 10 pounds for murdering a Jew.

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