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

Abstract

Shay Hazkani’s Dear Palestine is an innovative, compellingly written, and deeply researched contribution to the history of the 1948 Palestine war, the establishment of Israel, and the effacement of Palestine. Important histories of these events have previously focused on the question of Israel’s culpability in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem and specifically the issues of who in the Israeli leadership ordered expulsions and whether they were planned prior to the May invasion by Arab armies. Israeli historian Benny Morris paved the way of archival research into these controversies with his 1987 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and revised his initial conclusions in later works. Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappe, and Efraim Karsh have since produced responses—Karsh defending Israel, and Masalha and Pappe indicting it. Hazkani indeed adds to our knowledge of these historical debates. His focus, however, differs from that of these other scholars. He argues that the war and the events of its immediate aftermath were meaning-making and identity-making enterprises for both Arabs and Jews. Through mobilization for the war and its conduct, elites and soldiers constituted and contested collective identities, including Arab, Jew, Muslim, Palestinian, Israeli, Mizrachi, and Ashkenazi. His project is not so much to establish what identities prevailed during this time as to recover how individuals and institutions—especially war- and state-making institutions—produced and debated collective identities. He eschews the nationalist binaries of Arab and Jew as primary analytical categories and instead examines how collective identities were discursively generated. Hazkani consequently brings to the history of 1948 elements of relational history exemplified by Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (1996) and Abigail Jacobson’s From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (2011).