Sometimes we read books that fill in details about a particular moment in the history we care deeply about, and we learn so much.

Matti Friedman has written such a book about the Jewish spies who spoke Arabic as their native language because they had grown up in places like Syria, Yemen and Jerusalem during the British mandate before Israel became an embattled state in May 1948.

Friedman correctly characterizes these daring young men and a few women as forerunners of the men and women who became spies for Mossad, the legendary Israeli intelligence agency. Each was fluent in Arabic, not always in Hebrew. Each was not well accepted by the Ashkenazi Jews who were leading the political and paramilitary efforts to establish the state of Israel when the British left their mandate for Palestine.

They were known as One Who Becomes Like an Arab, a somewhat pejorative term because they understood Arab culture, food and customs and could disguise themselves as Arabs. Their skin was darker than the Ashkenazi founders of Israel, and they understood the ways of the people in the hostile Arab countries that opposed Palestine becoming a sanctuary and state for Jews fleeing the Holocaust. 

We meet four whose work as spies in Lebanon, for instance, help us understand the risks they ran as conflicts between armed Jewish agents in the underground Palmach and various Arab groups took dozens of lives in the armed conflict between Jews and Arabs.

Gamliel Cohen was born in Damascus, Syria; his Arab name was Yussef. Havakuk Cohen, aka Ibrahim, was born in Yemen. Yakuba Cohen became Jamil when he was under cover; he was from Jerusalem in British Palestine. And Isaac Shoshan, from Aleppo, Syria, became Abdul Karim.

The author interviewed Shoshan the last time for this book when Shoshan was 93 and living in an apartment in Tel Aviv.

Friedman helps us imagine the mixture of swagger, fear and loyalty to the Jewish cause at the time that motivated these spies. They had little money. Their communications with their superiors were spotty at best. They had to think for themselves and were inventing the tradecraft of Israeli spies as they went along.

Here’s one example. When undercover in the port city of Haifa in northern Palestine, where the conflict was quite intense, men from the Arab Section heard of a school bus packed with explosives that Arabs planned to use to kill Jewish children. They found a car, rigged a bomb of their own and drove the car into the bus, which was parked in a garage.

The resulting explosions could be felt and heard throughout much of Haifa.

A few months later, three of the Arab Section were at their usual listening post, a kiosk in Beirut where they could observe and report on Arab refugees fleeing the conflict in Palestine.

Isaac Shoshan told this story to Friedman many years later, long after Israel was established:

One day, a tired looking man “in a simple suit” starting talking with the Jews undercover at the kiosk. 

“The man told Isaac his story,” Friedman writes. “He fled Haifa when everyone fled, the man said. Now he lived in a refugee camp. … The old man had two sons. They were mechanics at a garage in Haifa. One son was eighteen, the other twenty. When the war began, the Jews smuggled a bomb into their garage, and when it exploded — 

“But of course, Isaac knew the story, and so do you [the reader]. I asked him if the man cried. 

“ ‘No, but he was sad.’

“What could Isaac do for this man? He followed custom with a few comforting words and request that God visit his vengeance upon the killers. After a while the father of the dead mechanics drifted off, and Isaac never saw him again.”

Some books might only recount one side of the conflict. Here Friedman tells of the price paid by Arabs on the other side, mostly innocent people caught up in a national struggle much larger than themselves. 

We also learn that men of the Arab Section were not sentimental. They could not afford to be. Friedman asks Isaac questions about how he felt in such circumstances. 

“How did it feel? Did he think about it afterward? He was polite, but I think he saw it as modern foolishness. Public introspection, the expression of regret in a few sentences of pathos — those were innovations of a later time. It wasn’t the style of the Arab Section.

“ ‘We were given a job,’[Isaac] said of those days, ‘and I am proud that I succeeded.’ That’s all he would say.”

The men of the Arab Section also warned their fellow Jewish Israelis that the Arab people would not forgive the creation of a Jewish State in the midst of the Arab world. 

“The Arab Section weren’t ideologues,” Friedman writes. “They looked at other people and listened to them, and reported what they saw and heard. In those first days after the war, they were among the first to grasp what the refugees meant. 

“These people, Gamliel warned from Amman [Jordan], weren’t going to come to terms with their loss. They weren’t going to move on, as the Jews had.”

And so it remains in much of the Arab world, among the Palestinians living in Gaza and refugee camps in the West Bank and in adjacent Arab states. 

Friedman’s reporting on this moment in the formative time in Israeli history is helpful today as we watch events unfold that give hope for better relations between Israeli Jews and their Arab neighbors. 

Still, that powerful undercurrent of rejection in the Arab world seems as intense as ever in certain areas, particularly among the Palestinians.