Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War by Shay Hazkani

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War by Shay Hazkani Abigail Jacobson Shay Hazkani. Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 352 pp. In this fascinating and engaging book, Shay Hazkani takes the readers on a unique journey into the history of the 1948 War. Much has been written on the history of this war, which was probably the most significant and dramatic turning point in this history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet Hazkani’s book offers an unusual contribution to this scholarship. Based on hundreds of personal letters, diaries, army magazines, radio broadcasts, and pamphlets of Jewish and Arab soldiers who fought in the war, either in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces or the Arab League’s Volunteer Army (ALA), Dear Palestine examines the ways ordinary soldiers experienced the war and their role in it. The book follows the preparation and indoctrination in the early stages of the war, and carefully analyzes the soldiers’ contemplations regarding the meanings and implications of the war and the violence they experienced and were part of. Moreover, and maybe most importantly, this rich account, based on the untapped corpus of soldiers’ letters, challenges and questions the Arab/Jew binary that is so prevalent in the historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general, and of the 1948 War in particular. In fact, the soldiers’ accounts during the war show that these nationalist categories are much more complex, diverse, and full [End Page 215] of internal contradictions than usually thought. In this, Hazkani’s book is part of a growing scholarship that follows the relational history approach to the study of the relations between Jews and Arabs, and that complicates these identities. Part of the important contribution of the book to the historical accounts of the war in particular, and the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, lies in the corpus of sources used by Hazkani, and the reflective way he incorporates them. As such, in the introduction, conclusion, as well in several points throughout the book, Hazkani critically discusses the sources he uses, their methodological limitations and advantages, and uses this sensitive and unique corpus in a smart and reflective way. Each of the book’s five chapters examines a separate stage in the journeys that Jewish and Arab volunteers who fought in 1948 went through. The first chapter focuses on the mobilization process of Jewish and Arab soldiers as they were conscripted, or volunteered, to take arms and join the war efforts in Palestine. Carefully scrutinizing the different groups and the processes that brought them to the front line, Hazkani exposes the different meaning of “fighting for Palestine” for various groups. Those include, for example, Moroccan Jews, Holocaust survivors, American Jews, as well as Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian Arabs of different ethnoreligious backgrounds. The second chapter continues to the next stage of these soldiers’ journeys, namely the propaganda, indoctrination, and preparations that the IDF and ALA utilized. The chapter follows the training of the soldiers, the use of propaganda mechanisms, and the depictions of the enemy. The comparison between the ALA’s and IDF’s propaganda and indoctrination mechanisms is fascinating and reveals many internal frictions and tensions within these two forces. The third chapter discusses the motivations and reasons that brought the Arab and Jewish recruits to fight in Palestine. Through a careful analysis of soldiers’ letters and accounts, Hazkani points to the ways in which different ideologies, such as Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islam, nationalism, and anticolonial struggle, all mixed together in soldiers’ identities and motivations to fight. He reveals how Moroccan Jewish volunteers were gradually exposed to racism and discrimination from their fellow Ashkenazic soldiers and how their experience was radically different from that of the Ashkenazic volunteers who came from the United States, for example. The experience of Moroccan soldiers complicates the national Zionist narrative regarding the role of the Zionist movement in saving Moroccan Jews and incorporating them into the Zionist and later Israeli “melting pot.” These very intimate reflections and contemplations are discussed further in chapter 4, which focuses on the actual experience of war and violence on the...