Podcast: Matti Friedman on Israel’s First Spies

This Week’s Guest: Matti Friedman

Long before the Mossad became known as one of the world’s most capable intelligence agencies, Israel’s first spies were dispatched to Beirut without so much as a radio to contact home. In the spring of 1948, a handful of young Mizraḥi Jews were recruited to serve in the Palmaḥ’s Arab Section and charged with going undercover among the Arab population of Palestine and neighboring countries. Sent back into the Arab lands they had left behind, they risked their lives to become spies for a country that was yet to be born.

In his new book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, journalist and author Matti Friedman focuses on the lives of four of these men, transporting us back to a world without a state of Israel or an IDF, where the fate of Palestine’s Jews remained uncertain and the project of Jewish statehood hung in the balance.