Ambivalence, division, and critique: The collaborator in British Palestinian political thrillers

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of the collaborator as a literary figure and a critical tool in Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off and Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda. I argue that Hiller’s and Masoud’s political thrillers reclaim the collaborator as a figure of division and ambivalence, which facilitates engagement with local subtleties. These include the issue of collaboration and its implications for individuals as well as the Palestinian national struggle; the straightforward path from resistance to liberation and statehood; and the idea of a unified Palestinian ideology to which Palestinians, including Palestinian authors in the diaspora, need to be loyal. In this sense, Hiller’s and Masoud’s works offer important insights into wider trends in Palestinian writing, including an emphasis on non-heroic and ordinary characters, while using the political thriller, as a popular anglophone genre, to bring awareness of the Palestinian cause, in all its ambivalence and complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• Palestine
• Mischa Hiller
• Ahmed Masoud
• political thriller
• British Palestinian literature

Introduction: Palestinian collaborators in literature and history

The figure of the collaborator is not new in Palestinian literature. One of the earliest and most famous fictional depictions of a Palestinian collaborator is Saeed, the protagonist of Israeli Palestinian writer Emile Habiby’s (2010) satirical novel The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, published in Arabic in 1974 and in English translation in 1982. Following in his father’s footsteps, Saeed becomes an informer for the Israeli authorities. Saeed can be considered the fictional “prototype” of the collaborator in Palestinian literature, as he defines the ways in which later works – such as the ones discussed in this article, Mischa Hiller’s (2011) Shake Off and Ahmed Masoud’s (2015) Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda – depict this figure. Saeed, as an Israeli Palestinian, occupies an in-between space, not being entirely trusted by either Israeli Jews or Palestinians, thus foregrounding ambivalence as a key aspect of his identity as both an Israeli Palestinian and a collaborator. This aligns with wider perceptions of collaborators as traitors, often accused of being “a source of internal transgression”, as these figures “seem to threaten and destabilize the fragile moral and social relationships that [ … ] bind us to the perhaps otherwise abstract notions of nation, people, or community” (Kelly and Thiranagama 2010, 2). This idea of the collaborator as an ambivalent and transgressive figure, and one that challenges ideas of a unified nation and national agenda, lies at the heart of how the two works discussed in this article depict fictional collaborators.

Similar to the literary examples mentioned above, an emphasis on ambivalence can also be found in how collaboration has historically been used by Jewish groups since the British occupied Jerusalem in 1917. A key purpose of recruiting Palestinians as collaborators has been “creating mistrust, spreading confusion and undermining collective self-confidence within Palestinian society” (Jawwad 2001, 18). Many critics have identified four types of Palestinian collaborators that are used for this purpose. The first are land dealers, who help Jewish and Israeli Jewish groups to acquire land, which was particularly important in the lead-up to 1948, when the state of Israel was established, but continued until 1967 (Dudai and Cohen 2007, 41). The second type are mediators between the Palestinian population and the Israeli (administrative) authorities (Cohen 2012, 470) and the third are armed collaborators, who assist the Israeli Special Forces (Jawwad 2001, 19–20). The fourth type, and the one focused on in this article, is the informant or spy who “provides information upon the activities and movements of certain activists as well as general information about political activity in a given area” (20). In light of the necessity of obtaining information, especially at times when opposition to Zionism is strongest, and given that collaborators constitute active forces of division, it is not surprising that they continue to play an important role in Palestine and Israel. This role became even more prominent after Israel occupied the Palestinian Territories in the wake of the 1967 War, which required inside knowledge of the Palestinian national movement and ensuring that this movement was not becoming strong enough to overthrow the occupying forces.¹

However, the popular Palestinian uprising of the First Intifada (1987–93) represented a major challenge for Israel’s use of collaborators as this was a key period when collaborators were exposed and discouraged from working with Israel. Salim Tamari (1990) observed that during this time “Israel’s system of penetration and control over the clandestine [Palestinian] national movement” (39) received two considerable blows. Members of the local police and tax collectors resigned while at the same time “the popular upheaval compelled many collaborators to recant publicly and surrender their weapons” (39). Interestingly, both Hiller and Masoud return to this period in Palestinian history and access it through the lens of collaboration as this was also a time when Palestinian aspirations for statehood seemed realizable, at least for a brief moment, until the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “consolidate[d] asymmetries between the two parties, and further entrench[ed] Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism” (Kayali 2020, 1). Returning to the First Intifada but reclaiming the collaborator as a figure of division and ambivalence allows both authors to foreground political concerns that are still prevalent in Palestinian society today, such as the divergences between different factions in Palestine, and the different national agendas of both Palestinians in Palestine and those living in the diaspora. The political thriller genre is essential for offering this type of critique, not only because it is a genre that often features collaborator characters, but equally because it has been associated with providing social critique, an idea that I will return to later.

While the political thriller is not a common genre in Palestinian literature, as an anglophone genre it plays a key role in cementing stereotypes about Palestinians, especially as seen in recent popular TV series such as Homeland (2011–20) and Fauda (2015–present), where the Palestinian is cast in the role of the villain or terrorist. Toine Van Teeffelen (2004) has discussed how these ideas about Palestinians have been circulated in bestselling political thriller novels published between 1960 and 1986, where Israeli Jews are often seen as victims or moral authorities, while Palestinians are depicted as opponents or terrorists (440–444). These are key aspects of the political thriller genre that Shake Off and Vanished subvert as in both cases the main villain is an Israeli Jewish character rather than the Palestinian protagonist. Moreover, Hiller and Masoud challenge the common inclusion of Palestinians as characters who do “not experience a sense of daily life in the context of personal or family development” (440). They partly achieve this through a focus on the everyday and ordinary lives of their protagonists, or at least through the ways in which they interrogate extraordinary identities associated with Palestinians, such as the hero.

The Palestinian protagonists that feature in Shake Off and Vanished, like Habiby’s character Saeed, can certainly be described as non-heroic and “everymen”, and thus they exemplify an important shift in 21st-century Palestinian literature and film. Viola Shafik (2000) observes that similarly in Palestinian cinema there has been a “conscious move away from earlier revolutionary heroism”, which has led to the inclusion of fewer “images of resistant fighters” and “martyrs” (233, 236). Hania A. M. Nashef (2016) confirms this trend, arguing that films such as Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (Abu-Assad 2005) and Omar (Abu-Assad 2013) depict “ordinary people trying to survive testing situations” (83), which constitutes a move away from “earlier problematic portrayals, which rendered the individuals almost inviolable” (84). Abu-Assad’s titular character Omar, for example, resists the occupation without being part of a political group or explicitly situating his resistance within a particular political rhetoric. Instead, the film emphasizes that resistance is linked to the everyday experience of occupation and humiliation at the hands of the Israeli military. In this sense, Omar, and, as we will see below, Hiller’s and Masoud’s works, challenge cultural narratives that have defined Palestinian resistance and nationalism, such as the hero. As Laleh Khalili (2007) argues,

the heroic narrative insists on interpreting all past events teleologically as the epic progress of revolutionary courage and envisions nationalist history hurtling towards an inevitable victory, the establishment of the nation-state in the statist narrative or the liberation of society in the liberationist narrative. (93)

Hiller’s and Masoud’s collaborator characters – in not fighting and in not using armed resistance, at least not to advance the Palestinian cause – challenge heroic narratives about resistance and nationalism by interrupting the inevitable trajectory from resistance to either statehood or liberation.

This critical approach resonates with the use of the political thriller genre as one that offers social critique. Both Shake Off and Vanished, as indicated above, feature spies or informants, and they align with key conventions of the spy thriller genre. As Allan Hepburn (2005) observes, “in literary representations, spies recall dissonance at the heart of ideological certainty” (xiii). Indeed, in both works the spy-protagonist allows the reader to engage with internal divisions within Palestinian society and politics, which questions the idea of a unified Palestinian ideology. Relatedly, the spy or informant encourages “readers to [ … ] speculate on the nature of statehood and citizenship” as “spy narratives allegorize civic responsibility by figuring competing loyalties to one’s country, one’s family, or oneself” (xv). The idea of “competing loyalties” resonates strongly with collaborators as characters that are torn between opposing sides but it is also important to consider how this idea of loyalty can be related to different approaches to Palestinian statehood from the First Intifada to the present day, as we will see below.

Moreover, both Shake Off and Vanished – although using slightly different subgenres, since Shake Off is a spy thriller while Vanished draws on conventions of the detective genre – critically engage with encounters between occupiers and occupied, which Nels Pearson and Marc Singer (2016) have identified as a key aspect of postcolonial approaches to the genre (3). But Hiller and Masoud also pay close attention to internal Palestinian divisions and the ways in which collaboration impacts on family structures and traditional gender roles. In this way, their novels can be seen as exemplifying a trend that Anastasia Valassopoulos (2022) has identified in anglophone detective fiction set in Palestine, namely that the crimes that are portrayed allow us to “reorganise contemporary popular thinking about the dynamics of the occupation and force a consideration of local social subtleties” (129; emphasis in original).

However, in addition to drawing the reader’s attention to the “local subtleties” of Palestinian politics from the First Intifada to the present day, Shake Off and Vanished engage with issues of representation, including how Palestinian authors in the diaspora should engage with the idea of Palestine from afar. Thus, they reflect on the question that Maurice Ebileeni (2022) has raised in discussing Palestinian writing in the diaspora; namely the extent to which diaspora works “must demonstrate a kind of unconditional loyalty to the national script that seems to prioritize the story line of an unrescinded historic injustice over the distinct ongoing political and cultural consequences of this injustice in various contexts of displacement” (16). While the historic injustice of the nakba – the displacement and dispossession of around 750,000 Palestinians in the lead-up to the creation of Israel – is central to both texts, Hiller and Masoud also focus on life under occupation and the issue of internal displacement, as both of their protagonists grow up in refugee camps. Their novels are more generally concerned with considering the relationship between Palestinians living in Palestine and those in the diaspora. Hiller discusses this conundrum in his non-fiction, observing that some Palestinians who have never lived in Palestine might experience “feeling slightly fraudulent making judgments about the struggle for Palestinian nationalism from afar” (2012, 141). However, he continues by saying that as descendants of Palestinians born in Palestine, Palestinians in exile play an important role in depicting this struggle, since it “is taking place everywhere, although in different forms, on various fronts and with varying agendas” (141). Hiller emphasizes how the Palestinian struggle is taking place not only in Palestine, but equally, albeit in different ways, in the diaspora. This, in turn, foregrounds the ways in which the national script of Palestine at times marginalizes the concerns of diasporic Palestinians, especially since it is becoming increasingly clear that the right of return, if feasible at all, will not include all of the Palestinians currently living outside historic Palestine. The collaborator as a figure of internal transgression foregrounds this concern alongside cultural and political trends in Palestinian writing that critically engage with the idea of heroism in relation to nationalism. As such, both works develop our understanding of how the collaborator as a transgressive figure can be used in contexts marked by colonialism and occupation to critically engage with the relations between occupier and occupied, but also with internal power dynamics and oppressive structures and the divisions that these create.

The inadvertent collaborator in Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off: Spy games and competing loyalties during the First Intifada

Hiller was born in the UK in 1962 and grew up in London, Beirut, and Dar-es-Salaam. His second novel and first political thriller Shake Off was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award in 2012. Set in 1989 during the First Intifada, it follows Palestinian protagonist Michel, whose parents are killed during the 1982 massacre in the Sabra Refugee Camp in Lebanon where between 2000 and 3500 civilians – mostly Palestinians – were killed by the Lebanese phalangists with the support of the Israeli army. While growing up in a foster family, Michel is recruited as a spy and undercover agent to work for the PLO. Michel’s alienation and isolation make him the perfect candidate for this endeavour, following the conventions of the political thriller, where the protagonist is often a marginalized character. In addition to using his marginality, Abu Leila, the person who recruits Michel and later becomes his superior, asks Michel “do you want to see justice done?” (Hiller 2011, 22). Becoming a part of what Michel thinks is the PLO, a lie that Abu Leila tells him, is framed as bringing about justice for his family’s deaths and, thus, implicitly aligned with overcoming the trauma that Michel experiences due to having seen his family being killed. Michel summarizes Abu Leila’s offer as “giving [this] experience a reason and a purpose” (22). However, Abu Leila also leads Michel to believe that he is playing a significant role in advancing Palestinian aspirations to self-determination, emphasizing the individual heroism that is often associated with spies in political thrillers.

The importance of heroism, especially in contrast with victimhood, is reinforced throughout Michel’s education and training. Abu Leila talks to Michel about both the history of the Palestinians and that of the Jewish people, as well as their intersections. Michel becomes obsessed with reading about the Holocaust in order to find traumatic experiences that resonate with his own, especially experiences that emphasize overcoming trauma and victimhood. When reading an account of a Jewish boy’s experience during World War II in Poland, Michel tells the reader that “for a minute I thought I was reading my own story” (Hiller 2011, 46). Read in the light of wider narratives about Jewish and Palestinian victimhood, Michel’s comparative approach to thinking about Jewish and Palestinian suffering challenges both Israeli Jewish and Palestinian ideologies, since “each relies [ … ] on the simultaneous and forceful negation (explicit or implicit) of the catastrophe of the other” (Bashir and Goldberg 2018, 2).

Bringing Israeli Jews and Palestinians into dialogue with each other is one of the key tasks that Abu Leila gives Michel, not just through his education but also in his work as an undercover agent. When he is asked to find a location in the UK for holding a secret meeting between an Israeli and a Palestinian delegation, Michel sees himself exactly in the role that Abu Leila envisioned for him: “I was making sure a secret meeting was going to take place between arch enemies with a view to creating a single, secular state for them to live together” (Hiller 2011, 99). Michel’s description of his work not only foregrounds the perceived importance of his individual role and the heroism attached to being a spy but it also reveals, in a manner typical of the spy thriller, “the shadowy underpinnings – secret committees and covert plots – that keep the state functioning” (Hepburn 2005, 277). While there is no Palestinian state that needs to be kept functioning, Michel works – or believes that he is working – towards the establishment of a Palestinian state by helping facilitate discussions about a one-state solution. However, given the political situation at the time, Michel can also be seen as inadvertently betraying the Palestinian cause, because in the 1970s and 1980s there was a strong sense in Palestinian political circles that a Palestinian nation was not realizable in a shared state. Michel’s ideological “betrayal” not only illustrates the competing approaches to statehood that were prevalent during the First Intifada, which challenge a unified political ideology, but it also functions as a criticism of the use of the heroic narrative that emphasizes a straight path from revolution to self-determination. Instead, what we find through Michel is a misguided heroism that does not yield any tangible results for Palestinians living under occupation as it is driven by idealism rather than pragmatism.

In an exchange with Ramzi, another Palestinian character who also works for Abu Leila, Michel is confronted with this distinction when Ramzi says that “you people outside the Territories won’t make a Palestinian state by playing these games. You don’t play games with the Israelis” (Hiller 2011, 41). For Ramzi, resistance does not come from outside Palestine but is firmly located inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Although this criticism is directed at Michel and Abu Leila and their “spy games”, it is hard not to apply this comment to conflicting Palestinian opinions regarding the role of different Palestinian leaderships during the First Intifada. As Ghassan Khatib (2010) notes, at that time, the leadership inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories focused on ending the occupation, while the outside leadership strived to gain international recognition (169). In his non-fiction, Hiller (2012) has criticized the latter goal as “a token gesture”, which “might give a psychological boost to occupied Palestinians” but “will do little to change their reality” (144). But this moment also constitutes a comment on how Palestinian diaspora writers, including Hiller, might be perceived in terms of contributing to the Palestinian struggle, especially in comparison with those resisting on the ground.

Michel’s misguided heroism is exposed most poignantly when Abu Leila is assassinated in West Berlin. Michel flees with an envelope that Abu Leila was carrying, which contains crucial information that Michel only discovers towards the end of the novel. Initially, Michel is afraid to open the envelope, because “not opening it was the only act of loyalty that still remained to [him], a demonstration of allegiance to the dead man who was not [his] father” (Hiller 2011, 229). Michel emphasizes his loyalty to Abu Leila, both on a personal level – despite his emphatic negation of Abu Leila as a father figure, which of course indicates the opposite – and on a professional level. If Michel’s loyalty is read as an allegory for “civic responsibility”, including competing national, familial, and personal loyalties, then we can see that initially Michel remains loyal to Abu Leila as his substitute family, but also to what he thinks is the Palestinian cause.

When Michel eventually opens the envelope, he finds that Abu Leila was a Mizrahi Jew called Amir Serfati, who was a major in the Israeli army during the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. While Hiller challenges the prevalent depiction of the Israeli Jewish character as a hero in anglophone political thrillers, it is important to note that Abu Leila/Amir Serfati is a Mizrahi Jewish character, similar to the boss and main antagonist of Habiby’s Saeed. Mizrahi Jews are often seen as having an ambivalent position between Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and are considered inferior to Ashkenazi or European Jewish people.² This ambivalent identity partly explains why Michel feels such a close kinship with Abu Leila as he sees himself as an outsider throughout his life, an idea that Abu Leila reinforces during their time together, exemplified in statements such as “We are a family of uprooted gypsies, outsiders wherever we go” (Hiller 2011, 179).

After learning about Abu Leila’s betrayal, Hiller no longer frames Michel’s internal transgression in terms of advancing Palestinian politics through an unpopular one-state solution. Instead he realizes that he is a traitor because he has been working for the Mossad and against his own people, which makes his contributions to Palestine’s struggle for liberation meaningless. Moreover, Michel finds out that Abu Leila was implicated in the killing of his family in the Sabra refugee camp, if not directly than certainly indirectly, which not only nullifies his quest for justice but also ridicules it as he was working for, rather than against, one of the key people responsible for the death of his family. Michel loses his sense of belonging, which was anchored in his attachment to Abu Leila as a substitute father figure and Michel’s role as a PLO agent contributing to the Palestinian cause. He reflects that

I wanted to reject everything to do with [Abu Leila], to purge myself of his influence. But I couldn’t really do it [ … ] You couldn’t wipe things clean and start again, you had to deal with events, to incorporate them into your being without letting them cripple you. (Hiller 2011, 275)

This loss of identity is a key turning point in the narrative, as being able to define his identity beyond being a spy and an inadvertent collaborator allows Michel to leave the world of political intrigue and to break the cycle of collaboration, similar to Saeed’s son Walaa in Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, who becomes a resistance fighter instead of following in his father’s footsteps. Michel returns to Beirut to teach French to children in the refugee camp that he grew up in. He explains that he “was motivated by the hope that at least some of them might find it helpful in breaking from the confines of the refugee camp that [he] had left over ten years ago” (265). In many ways, Michel is offering, at least in a small way, the next generation a better chance, suggesting that education and creating a better future for Palestinians should be a key aspect of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Thus, Michel reclaims a sense of agency outside of being a collaborator, while highlighting the importance of people on the ground to effect change. Michel’s emphasis on everyday heroism can be linked to the Palestinian tradition of sumud, or staying put, as a means of resistance. However, it is important to note that while Michel returns to the camp to stay put, he teaches the children in the camp French to allow them to escape its confines. Hence, the novel ends on an interesting note of ambivalence as it suggests that both people in the region and those in the diaspora play a role in raising awareness of the Palestinian struggle and that there are different ways of engaging with the “national script” of how Palestinians have been impacted by dispossession and displacement.

Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda: Detective fiction, heroism, and webs of corruption

The impact of dispossession and displacement also preoccupies the work of Masoud, who was born in 1981 and grew up in the Gaza Strip. Masoud moved to the UK in 2002 and his first novel and political thriller Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda won the Muslim Writers Award for unpublished work in 2011. Vanished follows Omar Ouda, who travels to Gaza after finding out that his family’s house in Jabalia Camp, a neighbourhood in the north-eastern Gaza Strip, was hit by a missile during an Israeli military strike in July 2014 carried out as part of Operation Protective Edge. While travelling to Gaza, Omar writes down the story of his life for his four-year-old son Mustafa, whom he has left behind in London. Prompted by the possibility of not returning, telling his story stems from Omar’s desire to save his son from following in his footsteps and becoming a collaborator because he is looking for information about his father. Omar writes that he “spent [his] whole life wondering where [his] father was, and [he doesn’t] want the same to happen to [his son]” (Masoud 2015, 13). This worry shows that collaboration and being coerced into cooperating with the Israeli regime is still a key concern in 21st-century Gaza, as elsewhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and beyond.

Omar’s story starts during the First Intifada, when he embarks on a quest to find out what happened to his father, the titular Mustafa Ouda, who disappeared in 1982, a few months after Omar’s birth. Inspired by Egyptian crime books for children, eight-year-old Omar “proclaim[s] [him]self the youngest detective in Jabalia Camp” (Masoud 2015, 15). Taking on the identity of the detective provides a form of escapism as it turns the grief that Omar feels due to the absence of his father into a quest that can be completed. Both Omar and Michel – albeit in different ways – become collaborators due to absent father figures as well as traumatic childhood experiences, which also contributes to depicting both characters as fully rounded rather than one-dimensional. Typical of the detective genre, Omar, with the help of his best friend Ahmed, starts piecing together clues to solve the mystery of his father’s disappearance. Omar and Ahmed make a list of people who might know what happened to Mustafa, which includes Uri, the Israeli military general stationed in Jabalia Camp, who is represented as a terrifying figure and the main villain of the story.

Omar decides to visit Uri at the Israeli military headquarters in the camp, which follows the conventions of postcolonial detective fiction where crossing boundaries is seen as “key to [the crime’s] detection and resolution” (Pearson and Singer 2016, 7). Omar physically moves into the space of the Israeli military, a space that is usually reserved for those who have committed a crime or are suspected of having done so. But Uri refuses to give Omar any information about his father during this first visit. Thus, crossing this boundary does not lead to a resolution for Omar, showing how in a situation marked by occupation, these conventional acts of the detective genre can have opposite effects. A few weeks later, Omar is asked to come back and Uri apologizes to him, saying that “I had no idea who you were and who your father was” (Masoud 2015, 52), implying that Omar’s father was a collaborator. Omar also becomes a collaborator as Uri promises him information about his father in return for identifying someone in the camp who is believed to be a member of the Palestinian resistance. Omar’s recruitment is a typical example of how the Israeli military uses someone’s vulnerability to coerce them into collaborating.

But this vulnerability also draws attention to the complicated attribution of guilt in the case of collaborators. As Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama (2010) have argued, “the guilt or innocence of traitors is [ … ] never clear-cut, as competing moral values make often-conflicting demands” (1). These “often-conflicting demands” become obvious in Omar’s case when their neighbour Zuheir Hammadullah and his mother are killed as part of a raid by the Israeli military to find the resistance fighter that Omar identified. Omar feels responsible for these deaths and consequently that he is betraying his own people, reflecting: “What would they do if they knew the person responsible for all this was standing there behind them?” (Masoud 2015, 59). This rhetorical question, whose answer is as obvious to Omar as it is to the reader, draws attention to the guilt that Omar feels in betraying his people but it also shows that as a child he is unable to reconcile the demands of his Palestinian community with the ones made by the Israeli regime. This leads Omar to ask Uri not to use him as an informant any more, a request which Uri denies, responding that “sometimes you have to do what is necessary for the greater good” (63). Uri’s response not only suggests that as a collaborator Omar is advancing “the greater good” for the Israeli collective, but he also implies that collaboration is beneficial for the Palestinian “greater good”, appealing to Omar’s loyalty to the Palestinian cause.

As well as attempting to convince Omar to continue being an informant by explaining Israel’s reasons for occupying Palestine, Uri harrowingly reinforces Omar’s position of dependence by raping him. This act not only emphasizes Omar’s powerlessness as a child, but also exemplifies one of the basic tenets of the detective genre, where “individual crime comes to be seen as a symptom of, result of, or reaction to basic flaws in the political, social, and industrial systems” (Christian 2001, 2). The rape draws attention to how Israel’s military occupation and its use of collaborators facilitates environments where sexual assault and other acts of violence can happen and also suggests that these violent acts are justified by the rhetoric of being “for the greater good”. Moreover, this foregrounds the wider ways in which the occupation impacts on family structures and gender roles. As Penny Johnson and Eileen Kuttab (2001) have argued, “the crisis in gender identities is produced by a series of related crises, both in Palestinian nationalism after Oslo on a political level, and the multiple economic, social and humiliating effects” (33) that accompanied the Oslo Accords, which, as noted above, cemented the power differentials between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, occupied and occupier. For Omar, the rape, which happens just before the Oslo Accords in 1993, is a clear attack on his masculinity, and it adds bodily shame to the shame he already experiences about being a collaborator: “I thought of Father and what he would think of what happened today, of his worthless coward son who was now an informant to the army that had stolen our land and tortured our people for decades” (Masoud 2015, 65). Omar contrasts his perceived cowardice with the heroism of his absent father and it becomes clear that he sees his role as an informant as directly working with the enemy and against the Palestinian national movement, which also challenges Uri’s naive attempt at suggesting that collaboration is beneficial for both Israelis and Palestinians.

In order to escape Uri and his demands, Omar runs away and is taken in by the Palestinian resistance. He is trained in shooting and martial arts, which enables him to adopt a different identity, and this allows him to reclaim a masculinity equated with heroism: “From a self-hating collaborator to a freedom fighter, I was back with my people again” (Masoud 2015, 123). Omar’s transformation can be linked to a wider trend whereby experiencing violence at the hands of the Israeli military “galvanizes political consciousness” (Peteet 1994, 31). However, when writing down this experience for his son, Omar is aware – with the benefit of hindsight – how exaggerated this stance is, which is confirmed by the bathos employed in describing his return from hiding:

I walked home with the kuffiyyah lowered on my shoulders. I wanted everyone to see me come home. I was a soldier returning from war, a victorious revolutionary – my ego growing so big that I began to believe I was responsible for driving the Israelis out of Gaza. (Masoud 2015, 124–125)

At the time, Omar considered being part of the resistance as a heroic endeavour, visualized through wearing the keffiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, and it is implicitly contrasted with the weakness and passivity associated with collaboration. Omar presents himself as a soldier fighting in a war who actively contributes to ending Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip, a stance that is also adopted by Michel in Shake Off. This emphasis on agency aligns with typical heroic narratives that depict armed resistance and “revolutionary courage” as facilitating liberation, as Khalili (2007, 93) observed above. However, the ways in which heroism is depicted here draws attention to the wider rhetoric around resistance and the impact this has on someone like Omar, a young adult who perceives armed resistance as the only way to have purpose and agency under occupation.

Based on his work for the resistance, Omar is employed to recruit new members for the Fatah Party Youth Movement in 1997. However, this work leads to Omar becoming a different kind of collaborator, and one that again supports Israel and its occupation of Gaza. Issam, the same person who asked Omar to work for Fatah, recruits him in December 1998 to become part of the Preventive Security Forces, an internal intelligence service which was established by Yassir Arafat in the wake of the Oslo Accords. Omar’s role as a collaborator with Israel becomes most obvious when he is asked to participate in a raid on Jabalia Camp. During this raid, Abu Hammad, who was a substitute father figure when Omar was part of the resistance movement, accuses Omar of being a henchman for Israel, saying that “these negotiations [the Oslo Accords] were designed to give Israel more time to kill us and uproot us from this land, with people like you policing it. [ … ] We will not be collaborators” (Masoud 2015, 147). This accusation challenges the role Omar thinks he is playing in supporting Palestinian self-determination and instead exposes him as an inadvertent collaborator, which in some ways mirrors Michel’s misdirected heroism in Shake Off.

Nevertheless, at the end of the novel, Omar is able to escape being defined only as a collaborator, albeit by physically removing himself from Gaza. This trajectory is facilitated by solving the mystery of what happened to his father. During this process, in a manner typical of the detective fiction genre, Omar’s detective work contributes to “exposing a web of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed” (Willems 2017, 79). Omar finds out that it was his mother Souad who was the collaborator in their family, not his father as he initially believed, and that she was partly responsible for his father being sent to an Israeli prison. Souad was blackmailed into becoming a collaborator after having casual sex with an Israeli soldier who threatened to tell her family; this is described as a “death sentence” in the novel as “she would have never been able to fight her people’s judgment and the abuse she would receive from them, not only for having sex out of wedlock, but with an Israeli soldier” (Masoud 2015, 183). Sex and its associated shame in crossing marital and ethnic boundaries is a common way to put pressure on Palestinian people to become informants as a B’Tselem report notes (Be’er and ‘Abdel-Jawad 1994, 39).³ Souad, like Omar, becomes a collaborator because she is made vulnerable by the Israeli military; however, her vulnerability is also partly caused by a traditional patriarchal society that enforces strict moral codes for women. In this way, Vanished offers a more nuanced account of why people become collaborators and questions clear-cut distinctions between innocence and guilt when it comes to collaboration.

Omar recognizes the parallels between his mother’s situation and his own, saying that “we were two prisoners, trapped in our own mistakes and guilt” (Masoud 2015, 191), but he decides he does not want to stay trapped. While for Michel returning to the refugee camp is a way of escaping his identity as a collaborator and finding a different way of resisting, Omar needs to leave the refugee camp as the site where his identity was reduced to different forms of collaboration. Instead, his resistance takes him to the diaspora, where he – and Masoud through him – uses literature and the political thriller genre to expose the injustices that Palestinians experience at the hands of the Israeli military, while considering how the stigma of collaboration affects not only those who collaborated but also the generations that follow them, whether they are in Palestine or in the diaspora.

Conclusion: Ambiguity as a critical tool

Hepburn writes that “the spy’s appeal is his ambiguity, his articulation of doubts, violence, and mixed motives” (2005 13). Both Hiller’s and Masoud’s political thrillers emphasize the ambiguity of their spy characters, which is further confirmed by their protagonists’ roles as collaborators who are torn between the personal and the political. This ambiguity enhances the critical potential of the spy and political thriller genre more widely as it allows both authors to reflect on how the spy-collaborator can be used as a tool to interrogate representation of Palestinians in anglophone culture as one-dimensional characters who only function in a stereotypical manner while also making sure not to represent Palestinian characters as either too virtuous or too heroic. The ambivalence and transgressive potential of Hiller’s and Masoud’s collaborator characters also facilitates engagement with local subtleties, including the issue of collaboration and its implications for individuals as well as the Palestinian national struggle; the straightforward path from resistance to liberation and statehood; and the idea of a unified Palestinian ideology to which Palestinians, including Palestinian authors in the diaspora, need to be loyal. In this sense, their works offer important insights into wider trends in Palestinian writing but also use a popular anglophone genre to bring awareness of the Palestinian cause, in all its ambivalence and complexity.

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Isabelle Hesse

Isabelle Hesse is senior lecturer in the discipline of English and Writing at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Reimagining Israel and Palestine in Contemporary British and German Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current project examines the use of speculative fiction in settler-colonial contexts.

Notes

1. While the exact number of Palestinian collaborators is hard to determine, it is estimated that since 1967 there have been over tens of thousands of collaborators (Be’er and ‘Abdel-Jawad 1994, 261; Rigby 1996, 10).

2. A more recent example of a Mizrahi Jewish character passing for an Arab character is Eli Cohen, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, in the Netflix mini-series The Spy (Raff 2019).

3. This is also the subject of Hany Abu-Assad’s (2021) film Huda’s Salon.