Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
Matti Friedman
Algonquin Books, 2019, $26.95, 272 pp.
“I’ve learned over years as a reporter,” writes Matti Friedman in the beginning of Spies of No Country, “that time spent with old spies is never time wasted.”
He’s right. As the novelist John le Carré observed, “Espionage is the secret theater of our society.” Or as Friedman puts it, with characteristic elegance: “Countries have cover stories and hidden selves, just like their spies, and our clandestine basements conceal insights into the world aboveground.”
And this is the story he tells, one ostensibly about spies, but in reality about the state of Israel: its founding myths, the legends it created and continues to create about itself—its cover stories.
The book centers on “The Arab section,” a group of Arab Jews from the Islamic world that performed perhaps the most vital espionage work in and around the birth of Israel—spying on its neighboring Arab states, from the inside. He focuses on four in particular: Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba. From their interlocking stories emerges the section that eventually became the nucleus of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, a staple of Israeli pride and global conspiracy theorists ever since.
Here one must understand the importance of the Mossad as myth—both for Israel and its enemies. It is central to Israelis because their homeland is “a small country in a precarious position,” and because the legends of the Mossad “conceal the frailty of the people behind the curtain.” Equally, it is useful to Israel’s enemies in playing the role of the “hidden hand” that explains their repeated failure to defeat a tiny state with a (comparatively) minute population.
On one level, then, the book is a compelling yarn about spies, replete with secret identities, acts of sabotage and months (if not years) spent under deep cover. And like the best le Carré, in being a book about spies it is also a book about bureaucracy—in this case the near-total lack of it. As the section begins its work, before the state has come into existence, anything resembling an organized structure is almost entirely absent. Spies sit around in fields because they don’t have a proper headquarters. Spies are sent into Lebanon without a radio transmitter—that is to say, with no means of reporting back about the people and events on whom they are spying. Spies get caught for the most basic of mistakes. No one really knows what anyone else is doing half the time. And no one ever, ever has any money.
Friedman’s superb storytelling skills are such that he employs the devices of fiction, most notably the use of dramatic irony, which gives the narrative a particular poignancy in places:
Among the other men at camp was David, nicknamed Dahud, who already had a wife, and who would soon have a daughter but would never meet her; and Ezra, who provided comic relief and was known for asking his comrades to train him to withstand torture by beating him. One story has Ezra squeezing his own testicles and screaming, “I won’t tell, I won’t tell!” They used to roll with laughter but wouldn’t have if they’d known his fate. There was a pair of younger trainees from Damascus, Rika the saboteur and his redheaded friend Bokai, both with roles to play later on, one heroic and one tragic.
And then there are the thrilling details of tradecraft (so vital to spies and to their stories) that lend the narrative an urgency and depth that further draws the reader in as she learns how precarious it all was:
The war was barely six weeks old, but the distance between alive and dead had already become negligible—the length of an incorrect verb, an inconsistent reply to a sharp question. Or it could be a detail of dress—a villager wearing shoes better suited to a clerk, for example, or a worker whose shirt was too clean.
It’s all there, then. The tragedy, the deception, the tension—and for stakes that could not be higher. But Spies of No Country is much more than a mere caper. It is a meditation on Israel itself—because, for Friedman, who these four spies are has “something important to tell us about the country they helped create.”
The founding myth of Israel in the global imagination is that of a refugee camp for the Jews of the Holocaust, who came flooding in from Europe after the war. And for many, that is an image of western colonialism. But regardless of where you sit on the issue, that is only half the story. It was also a minority insurrection inside the world of Islam, where Jews from Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and all across the Arab world, who had lived in the Middle East before the very existence of Islam, were expelled from the homes they had known for millennia and forced into the country not as pioneers but as refugees. As Friedman writes:
These were Israelis, but not the kibbutz pioneers of the old Zionist imagination, orphaned children of Europe. These were people from the Islamic world, in the Islamic world, their lives entwined with the fate of the Islamic world, like the lives of their grandparents’ grandparents. This was Israel, but an Israel not visible in the way the country is usually described.
As such, the book becomes yet something else: a meditation on identity. Who then, were Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba, these four spies?
They were certainly not Muslims, which is why they had to learn Islam. But were they Arabs? They would have said no, and most Arabs would have said no. But they were native to the Arab world—as native as Arabs. If the key to belonging to the Arab nation was the Arabic language, as the Arab nationalists claimed, they were inside. So were they really “becoming like Arabs”? Or were they already Arabs? Were they pretending to be Arabs, or were they pretending to be people who weren’t Arabs pretending to be Arabs?
The intermingling of identity is central to Israel, as it is, of course, to spying. And it helps explain the Israel that exists today: a state of multiple identities, a nation of immigrants (like the United States), but above all a Middle Eastern Country. This, Friedman concludes, is how best to understand Israel. As he rightly points out, “the last kibbutznik prime minister was voted out of office as this century began, as his peace plan collapsed in the Middle East of radical religion, black masks, and suicide bombers.”
Since then “Israel’s Middle Eastern soul has come out of the basement.” Israelis have come to realize that being Jewish in this region is not new; that it is native to half the people in the country, whose experiences must be acknowledged if Israel is to be properly contextualized today. Indeed, as Friedman nears the end of this important and beautifully written book, he makes an observation that we would do well to recognize:
For half the Jewish population of Israel, the Middle East isn’t new, and tension with a Muslim majority isn’t new, just the latest iteration of a force that has shaped their families for centuries.