[1] In this book, Cohen, a scholar at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, documents the thousands of Arabs, ranging from wealthy absentee landlords to fellahin smallholders, who sold land to Zionist organizations.
In the 1929 Palestine riots, Husayni spread the falsehood that the Jews intended to tear down the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the Temple Mount.
According to Cohen, Husayni rejected the offer because Britain did not guarantee his position as ruler of the Palestinian Arab state that it proposed to create.
[2] Writing in The Nation, Neve Gordon calls Army of Shadows "groundbreaking" for exposing a "particularly nefarious side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," the manipulation of paid Arab collaborators by Zionist organizations.
[3] When the book came out, he says it caused a stir among Jewish and Arab intellectuals since both sides found the evidence presented by Cohen unpalatable.
[2] The most notable aspect of the book according to Stephen Schwartz, writing in the Weekly Standard, is the idea that some Palestinian Arabs refused to take up arms against Israel in 1948 out of hatred for Husayni.