Hillel Cohen

Who is Hillel Cohen?

Hillel Cohen-Bar is an Israeli scholar who studies and writes about Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine/Israel. He is a Research Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a senior lecturer at that university.

Cohen is especially familiar with east Jerusalem, the topic of his book, Kikar Hashuk Reka, because of the years he spent as a correspondent for east Jerusalem affairs for the Israeli weekly Kol Ha'ir. He published extensively on the Palestinian internal refugees and on the 1948 war. Two of his books deal with Palestinian collaborators and the Israeli security agencies, using methodology that can be described as history-from-below. The Jerusalem Post calls his books "an accessible mixture of academic research and vivid journalistic reporting. Cohen manages to show empathy when relating human issues, but maintains a professional distance regarding events."

He first became known in other countries in 2008 when his book Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 was published in English. His book Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Services and the Israeli Arabs was published with the University of California Press in 2010.