A few days ago, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office announced that Mossad had recovered thousands of documents, photographs, and personal items belonging to the late Israeli spy Eli Cohen. Allegedly held in Syrian security archives, these materials, according to Israeli sources, were secretly transferred to Israel in a covert operation involving a foreign intelligence service. The announcement claimed they had been “kept in secret by Syrian security forces for decades,” including “the original document of the sentence and the decision to execute him.”
Yet newly surfaced reports complicate the official version. According to a Reuters investigation, the archive may not have been seized in a covert operation at all. Instead, it was reportedly handed over by Syria’s new leadership—following the ousting of Bashar al-Assad—as part of a broader diplomatic overture toward Israel and the United States. Framed as symbolic reconciliation, the act casts the archive not just as a retrieval, but as a transaction: a political gesture in a region where documents can be as powerful as weapons.
Meanwhile, Syria’s leadership—eager to rebuild diplomatic capital after regime change and more than a decade of revolution and war—may have used the archive as a symbolic offering, repurposing the past for leverage in a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. But whether extracted through covert means or received as a diplomatic gift, this retrieval was not just about remembrance. It was a performance—another episode in the long-standing use of intelligence not to uncover history, but to control its telling.
From Spy to Symbol: The Myth of Eli Cohen
Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew who migrated to Israel and was later recruited by the Mossad, was sent to Syria in the early 1960s under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet. Over the course of four years, he managed to infiltrate the highest levels of Syria’s political and military leadership. He developed personal relationships with senior generals and cabinet ministers, attending their gatherings, listening closely, and transmitting intelligence back to Israel. According to many Israeli accounts, his reports played a key role in mapping Syrian military positions on the Golan Heights—information that would prove critical during Israel’s swift territorial conquests and subsequent occupation following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Whether or not his intelligence was decisive, Cohen became intimately linked to a war that reshaped the region and entrenched Israel’s occupation of Arab land.
Since his execution in Damascus in 1965, Cohen has been transformed from covert operative into national legend—enshrined in Israeli memory and reified through textbooks, Mossad tributes, and televised dramatizations. But this transformation is also strategic: by turning Cohen into a timeless symbol of heroism, the Israeli state has obscured the geopolitical calculations that underpinned his mission, and the long-term consequences it enabled. The myth of Eli Cohen does not merely commemorate the past—it sustains a narrative of exceptionalism, righteousness, and entitlement to regional dominance.
History as Theater: What the Cohen Archive Is Designed to Perform
The Eli Cohen archive, we are told, contains execution orders, surveillance files, forged documents, and remnants of a life lived under deep cover. It feeds a national narrative in which Israel is both eternally vulnerable and endlessly clever—always a step ahead of Arab regimes deemed brutal, irrational, authoritarian, backward, or incompetent.
In the story now unfolding in the Israeli press and elsewhere, Cohen is once again the undisputed hero: tragic in loss, courageous in action, timeless in myth.
But this is not just mythmaking—it is narrative manipulation, a deliberate effort to reshape public memory through selective storytelling.
There is no moral clarity and genuine reckoning in this retrieval. Whether seized through covert means or handed over as part of strategic calculation, these materials remain deeply entangled with the politics of violence, legitimacy, and erasure.
To celebrate this act as a victory of history over silence is to misunderstand how archives work.
The Performance of Recovery: Archives as Distraction in a Time of Atrocity
The archive is never neutral. Across imperial, authoritarian, settler-colonial, and liberal regimes, archives are used not to preserve truth but to consolidate power. They are seized, staged, redacted, and erased. Select portions may be released to scholars and the public—but always under conditions that reinforce institutional control.
As someone who works with declassified archives—American, Arab, and European—I have learned that the most explosive truths are rarely found in the headline document. The real story often lies in the margins, in a redacted phrase, or in what has been deliberately destroyed. But archives do more than hide or reveal—they perform. In the hands of intelligence agencies and states under pressure, the archive becomes a stage. A tool of spectacle. A performance of control.
And often, the most dangerous archives are those that, to borrow a well-worn cliché, appear to speak only truth—and truth to power.
In many ways, what makes an archive dangerous is not what it reveals, but what it conceals—the hidden fragments of high-level meetings, intelligence notes from the field, the dynamics between handlers and assets, and far more.
There is immense power in the hidden and redacted sections. The gaps, the lost files, the deliberately misplaced boxes in basements of foreign ministries and intelligence services. In the case of Eli Cohen, his remains have yet to be returned. What has been offered so far is not an archive, but the illusion of one—a carefully staged performance built on the symbolism of retrieval. With no public access to the documents themselves, the act of “recovery” becomes its own message: a curated moment of remembrance, orchestrated to stir national sentiment and reassert Mossad’s legendary aura.
But this gesture is not taking place in a political vacuum. It comes at a time when Israel is waging a catastrophic war on Gaza—marked by mass atrocities, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, millions displaced, and international outrage is mounting. The International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In this context, the Eli Cohen operation functions less as historical restoration than as strategic diversion: a reaffirmation of national myth to offset collapsing legitimacy. The archive, once again, becomes a stage—not to uncover truth, but to redirect it.
Israel is not just recovering what it perceived as a piece of its ‘past.’ It is reasserting its control over how this selective reading of the ‘past’ is remembered—and how the Arab world, especially Syria, is perceived in the process.
Memory Under Occupation: Archives, Genocide, and the Politics of Distraction
Whether staged as a covert operation or coordinated through backchannels, the gesture did not emerge from a historical vacuum. It is a carefully timed act of symbolic power. At a moment when Israel faces mounting international scrutiny for its endless atrocities in Gaza—where over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, and millions displaced in what many human rights groups have called genocide—Netanyahu’s government desperately needs a symbolic victory. Not just to distract an anxious Israeli public, but to restore a fractured sense of control, and to project resolve in the face of growing domestic, regional, and international condemnation.
In the absence of battlefield clarity or diplomatic maneuvering, archives become the terrain on which states like Israel perform dominance. This spectacle is not just about honoring Eli Cohen. It is about reasserting the myth of Mossad supremacy, at a time when the very foundations of Israeli policy—occupation, expansion, impunity—are being globally contested.
But memory, like land, can be occupied.
What has been extracted from Syrian vaults is not just information. It is a claim over the Arab archive itself—its fragments, its history, its silences. And this is not the first time.
During its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces looted the entire contents of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut—an institution central to the Palestinian intellectual and historical record. Approximately 25,000 volumes, rare manuscripts, and microfilms were stolen and transported to Israel. Some materials—including archival film reels—were even exhibited in Tel Aviv in 2017.
The Mossad’s retrieval—or negotiated reception—of the Cohen files continues a broader logic: whether through unilateral seizure or strategic diplomacy, archives in the region are not preserved for public truth. They are used to signal dominance, assert narrative control, and rewrite memory on the terms of power. In many ways, this control is meant to occupy not just a people, but also their memory and narrative.
Weaponizing the Archive: From Intelligence to Intervention
Israel is not new to this strategy. When it paraded stolen Iranian nuclear documents in 2018, it was not just revealing intelligence—it was laying the groundwork for geopolitical confrontation. The Cohen archive may play a similar role: not as historical clarification, but as justification for future interventions, whether in Syria or elsewhere.
We must resist the urge to romanticize the archive. It is not sacred. It is political. It can be misused. In authoritarian regimes, it is often purged. In colonial regimes, it is smuggled and sealed. In democracies, it is delayed and redacted beyond meaning. And in settler colonial states, it is instrumentalized to fortify a foundational narrative of entitlement and origin—and to justify occupation and land theft.
In the hands of Israeli intelligence, the archive is not a collection of facts—it is a show of power. One curated for international consumption and domestic reassurance.
Archival Conquest: Erasing History, Denying Return
What Mossad has done in Syria echoes what other powers have done across the region. By way of example, French forces stealing Algerian records after independence. Also, American forces stole and exported Baath Party documents along with records from preceding Iraqi governments, from Baghdad. All are acts of archival conquest—power not simply exerted on people, but on their capacity to narrate themselves.
And while Israel celebrates this “return,” it is painfully obvious that many Palestinians still wait for their own archives to be acknowledged, let alone returned. Tens of thousands of documents held in Israeli military and intelligence collections—about expulsions, village demolitions, and massacre orders—remain inaccessible. The Nakba of 1948 is not only denied in discourse; it is locked in filing cabinets, redacted, and reburied. While fragments of that history have been exposed by Israel’s so-called “new historians,” a deeper archival assessment remains elusive. Access to these records is still tightly controlled, and non-Israeli scholars are largely barred from fully examining the state’s archival record of Palestinian dispossession.
Absence as Strategy, Memory as Resistance
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the documents we most need—the ones that can trace the structural violence of occupation, the secret regional deals, the buried ambitions of decolonization—are often missing from official archives. But that absence is not accidental. It is produced. It is political. And while state archives remain powerful tools of erasure and spectacle, they are not the only sources of truth. Oral histories, subaltern testimonies, and collective memory have long narrated what official records conceal. The violence is already known—it is the archive that refuses to acknowledge it.
We must learn to read the absences, the silences, the mysteries. The stories that never make it into archives, or are deemed unworthy of classification. Sometimes, the truth is not in the file—nor does it need to be. It lives in oral histories, in testimonies passed across generations, in subaltern archives that have long spoken what official records suppress. The danger is not that truth is lost, but that it is systematically denied recognition by the very institutions that claim to preserve it. It is in the refusal to preserve it—or, just as powerfully, in the refusal to share it with the public.
The Mossad’s retrieval of the Cohen archive is not a lesson in heroism or perceived ‘patriotism.’ It is a lesson in power—how it operates through secrecy, spectacle, and the selective resurrection of history. The real archive—the one we should be chasing—is not the one locked in steel cabinets and dusty boxes. It is the one that was never allowed to exist: buried, fragmented, or hidden from the public. Yet it lives elsewhere—in oral histories, in testimonies passed hand to hand, in the silenced accounts that persist outside state control. What makes these absences dangerous is not that people have forgotten, but that institutions have refused to recognize what has long been known. States like Israel exemplify this dynamic—where absence is not a void, but a strategy, and a central pillar in dominating and controlling the narrative under the guise of history, morality, and national memory.
This essay forms part of a broader scholarly project on intelligence operations, statecraft, and the politics of archives in the Middle East and North Africa.
