Zionist Conspiracy? What Zionist Conspiracy? I have been reading Hillel Cohen's Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, which just came out in the English edition. This item stood out. In the spring of 1920, Chaim Weizmann visited Palestine and asked the intelligence office of the Zionist movement "to draw up a comprehensive plan for countering Arab opposition to Zionism." The sixth item of the proposal stated: "Provocation of dissension between Christians and Muslims." (p. 17) Let me say a word about this book which has been receiving praise right and left, and progressive academics in the US have endorsed it. First, it follows the trend of Zionist revisionist history: this tendency to stick to detailed configurative approach in which data (all based on Israeli archives and such) is used, and in which large damning conclusions about Zionism are avoided. Those books (including this one and the one by Segev about Palestine under the mandate) promises use of Arab AND Zionist sources and yet they only use an Arab token source (the diary of Sakakini in the case of Segev and the diary of Akram Zu`aytir in the case of this book although this author talked about Arab archives and I did not know what archives he was talking about). The biggest methodological problem of this book is this: his attitude toward collaboration and collaborators. The attempt is to treat collaboration with the Zionist and Israeli occupation as being different qualitatively from all other collaborations with occupations. His introduction on the subject is to basically absolve collaborators from any immoral responsibility by basically saying: collaboration? What is collaboration, and who is to judge who is and who is not a collaborator? Worse than that, Cohen even attributes benevolent motives to collaborators by talking about "ethical" and "nationalist" and "communal" motives of collaboration (p. 67). Would a historian talk about collaborators with Nazi occupation of France, say or of French occupation of Algeria under such terms? Of course, not. Cohen also typically ignores the number of Arab killed in clashes including in Hebron in 1929. One has to read the Zionist revisionist history with much caution, and one has to be careful before giving out blenders to those historians.