Robert de Niro in Mossad time – Israel Magazine

by Avrum Bar Shoshan

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He diverts rivers and wins wars

He has become the archetype of the spy, a UFO named Eli Cohen, an Egyptian turned Syrian, and makes him a “Zelig”, a chameleon man as depicted by Woody Allen (Be a Chameleon Man and be a Hero!), but in a heroic and tragic mode. Moreover, and in his Jewish authenticity, an Israeli from Bat Yam, “Daughter of the Sea”. An emblematic figure of the Mossad and of all the universal spy services, Eli Cohen never ceases to fascinate and inspire books and films. And we still have at the bottom of the retina, since its broadcast in September 2019, the Netflix series in six episodes of The Spy / The Spy, by Israeli director Gideon Raff, with the astonishing British actor Sacha Baron Cohen who renounced his roles as a comedian to embody with his tall stature the impassive and serious Eli Cohen, this Arab Jew expelled from Egypt by Nasser in 1957 after the Suez crisis and who, contacted and trained by the Mossad, would become, through his chameleonic and Zeligian virtue, the intimate of the highest Syrian authorities; thanks to his friendship with General Amin al-Hafez, the future President of Syria, the spy was to make it possible, by providing secret topological plans, to prevent the diversion of the Jordan River which would have deprived Lake Tiberias and all of Israel of water , then above all, later, by his precious information on the military fortifications on the Golan Heights, the dazzling victory of Israel over the Arab armies united in what was called the Six Day War (June 2-10, 1967 ).

Robert de Niro in Mossad time Israel Magazine

Eli Cohen

A flavor of Africa in Buenos Aires

If the TV series was made from the book The Spy Who Came From Israel hot written by Uri Dan and Yeshayahu Ben Porat (The spy who came from IsraelFayard, 1967), with filming which took place mainly in the city of Casablanca, it is from this same city that Paule Darmon, a French-speaking Moroccan writer, native of Casablanca, but residing in Buenos Aires, takes off for us give, more than a life story, a novel (Robert de Niro, the Mossad and me, Editions de l’Antilope, Paris, 2022, 256 p., €19.90) where she skilfully mixes what we know about Eli Cohen ─ but from the book dedicated to him by his lawyer Jacques Mercier (Eli Cohen the Damascus Fighter, Robert Laffont, 1982) and quite different from the previous one ─ to his own adventurous, or sulphurous memories, and his fabrication around this Hollywood star actor, Robert De Niro. With, as a trigger, in the narrator, a photo of this biography, unearthed by chance in the bin of a Parisian bookseller, which upsets her and catapults her on this disconcerting track:

The photo of General Hafez, in profile, took up an entire page. A portrait so stunning in resemblance that I had to read the caption several times to convince myself that it was not my father’s photograph, but that of the number one Syrian at the time. »

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Robert DeNiro

Moroccan paradise lost

We are in Casablanca and the narrator, a film scriptwriter named Dora Bessis, is having tea with her friends, without any ethnic or religious barrier, and we talk and chat endlessly as we like to do in the East where the verb is king, and it is the hostess Zoraida who sets the tone:

The good thing about you Jews is that you never get bored. »

Hence the current strengthened ties between Morocco and Israel, this rivalry of two promised lands ending in a Habibicheri-Cherifian embrace. And it’s true that here the stories intertwine in a real zigzag: on the one hand, this spy story which the screenwriter would like to make a film and which will lead her, by some happy coincidence, to New York , and on the other hand, in a sort of mise en abyme, the tribulations of Isidore, a cousin of the narrator, involved in the political opposition to the King of Morocco and serving a heavy prison sentence in Kenitra. Between Morocco and the United States, she remembers what, for all those banished from the Maghreb, represents paradise lost. Here they are, all those of her generation with whom she confronts:

The beach, the cafe, the girls, the surprise parties, represented happiness. They were young. Coming out of the war, they had the future ahead of them. They worked, cycled for miles to go camping, met at the beach every day between noon and two o’clock. Having fun, laughing, dancing, making love, apart from work, nothing else mattered. Why would I need anything else? »

How to get De Niro on his side

Albert Camus knew how to speak of this gloom of the Mediterraneans, of the melancholy of those who live so close to the gods who “speak in the sun” that they are blinded by them, like Meursault, feel out of place in the ‘Eden, and experience themselves as “strangers”. As Eli Cohen inevitably was, hiding his Egyptian accent in pure Syrian language, then becoming Argentinian, at the instigation of the Mossad, to bond with the community of turks (aka Levantines) from Buenos Aires, and therefore mixing his Arabic with the Spanish of Rio de la Plata. To add to the apprehension of such a fragmented personality, we see him married to this Israeli of Iraqi origin, in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv and “daughter of Jerusalem” according to its etymology, “black and beautiful/graceful” (שחורה־אני־ונאוה), and at the same time linked or married (we do not know exactly) to a young and beautiful Damascene; so yes, really, his ego was in pieces. But assuming the usual and tragic fate of spies, since Mata-Hari (alias Margaretha Geertruida), he would end up under the gallows in Damascus, traitor for the Syrians, hero for the Israelis.

Throbbing Quest

A little of this psychological and physical crumbling passes through this Dora who intends to lay siege to the great De Niro with a nerve that seems modeled on the incredible hutzpa, this Hebrew insolence, of the Israeli spy. The meeting with the star is one of the bravery pieces of the book. Dora has succeeded in forcing the door of the actor to whom she intends the role of Damascus wolf ─ title of her screenplay ─ but waits so long in the “pharaonic living room” that she wakes up a terrible lumbago in her body:

I inhale and exhale slowly, in the painful stretching of my whole spine, when the star of the cinema bursts into the room. As if caught in the act, I straighten up suddenly and collapse at his feet with a loud cry.

And so there, Paule Darmon gives us the most unexpected, incongruous, original portrait of her Bobby who seems to have just come out of the screen of raging bullthe “Bronx bull”:

Hirsute, bewildered look, dressing gown with leaves open on a hairless trunk, mules of fine red leather, and hair on the calves, as in René Gruau’s advertising drawing for Dior’s Eau Sauvage, Robert De Niro pats my play. »

pleasure in pain

Too beautiful to stop there, the novelist does not want to deprive herself of a pleasure which is that of all the admirers of the crazy hero of Taxi Driver:

Bobby then makes a quarter turn to stand behind me, and his naked body under the silk of the bathrobe is pressed against my back as he tightens his embrace. I then emit a rattle of real pain ─ not to be confused with a moan of pleasure ─, the contact of Robert De Niro’s belly against my back was simply spinning”.

But as in the films of the Marx Brothers, which have only ever shown the (Jewish) catastrophe in action, the meeting fails and ends up in the hospital, where the vertebrae of the protagonist will be put back in the place and this story a whirlwind of a spy who has come, not from the cold, but from the heat (unlike John Le Carré) in his rightful place; and the “Synopsis for a feature film” by Dora Bessis will end up in the ropes, to be plunged into oblivion. All that will remain is this story with multiple voices, confused in abundance, delirious at leisure, and which, embroidering a true, pathetic and crazy story, on a hand-woven carpet from the High Atlas, unrolls an astonishing oriental tale, which we will read with delight until the end of a thousand and one nights.

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Avrum Bar Shoshan

(a.k.a Albert Bensoussan)

The rest of the article can be found in the next issue of Israel Magazine

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Robert de Niro in Mossad time – Israel Magazine