![]() ![]() The Arab Section emerged at the tail end of British colonialism, at a moment when the Palestine was filling with Jews. Spies of No Country focuses on a fledgling Israeli intelligence unit called the Arab Section, and on four of its spies. In his third book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, Friedman rejects the narrative of Israel as a country filled with Europeans and their descendants, motivated by memories and guilt like my grandfather's. His perspective is unusual: Israeli by choice, he clarifies his own bias in every piece but he writes to complicate, not to defend. ![]() He rose to attention - and controversy - through a pair of essays about media bias in coverage of Israel, and has remained on the beat ever since. Then he would say, without ceremony, that my grandfather's version of Zionism is done.įor half a decade, Friedman has been working hard, and publicly, to dispel easy narratives about Israel. I imagine that the Israeli Canadian writer Matti Friedman would empathize. ![]() Stories like his are common, and easy to empathize with. He believed, unshakably, that Jews needed a place of refuge. The helplessness and guilt he felt underpinned his lifelong Zionism. as Hitler, then Stalin, murdered unspeakable numbers of Jews, including most of his family. My grandfather was too young to serve in World War II. ![]()
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