Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

44 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
bears striking resemblance to the Soviet case but also highlights the
latter’s distinctiveness. Much like the societies studied in this article,
newly independent Israel gained control over a national-religious entity
hostile to its very existence and then moved to integrate it as citizens
while subjecting it to nearly two decades of military rule and pervasive
surveillance. Informants multiplied in every sphere of public life, drawn to
the security services by ruthless blackmail and intimidation, the realization
of Israel’s permanence and power, attraction to the state’s modern and
democratic features, and rewards—such as preferential treatment in
leasing land, family unification, payments, freedom of movement, the
right to carry arms, the blind eye turned on smuggling activities, and
career promotion. The results have been impressive, if ambiguous: the
Arab minority has been thoroughly infiltrated and neutralized but only
within certain limits. Inhibited by legal-democratic structures and beliefs
that countered its inherent aggressiveness, as well as the state’s opting for
ethno-religious over universalist national identity, the Israeli surveillance
system often failed to penetrate at the family level and reap the benefits of
a supranational community. In a word, it lacked the two key features that
made the Soviet system so powerful. 124
Indeed, the magnitude of Soviet violence often obscured its ambitious
revolutionary dimensions, which, in turn, bred distinct socialist patterns of
surveillance. Much like their counterparts within the pre-1939 borders, the
populations of the western frontier realized early on that the Soviets sought
to reach everyone and everywhere and pursued the total submission and
transformation of anyone they laid their hands on, informants included.
Surveillance was often the initial encounter with Soviet power and its
bureaucratic machinery, introducing new constituencies to the rules of the
Soviet game, teaching them who and what was legitimate and who and what
was not. 125 The homogenizing drives, shaped by a universalist ethos and
conspiratorial political culture, overwhelmed their various constituencies,
conveyed the aura of inevitability and permanence, and institutionalized everexpanding
social infiltration, equal-opportunity recruitment of informants,
and the gathering of vast information for use in restructuring society and
124 Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
125 See Nick Baron’s insightful observations, “Remaking Soviet Society: The Filtration of
Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49,” in Warlands: Population Resettlements and State
Reconstruction in the Soviet–East European Borderlands, 1945–50, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick
Baron (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 89–116.