Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War

by Shay Hazkani

In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home, writing about everything from daily life to nationalism, colonialism, race, and the character of their enemies. Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 War through these letters, focusing on the people caught up in the conflict and its transnational reverberations. Dear Palestine also examines how the architects of the conflict worked to influence and indoctrinate key ideologies in these ordinary soldiers, by examining battle orders, pamphlets, army magazines, and radio broadcasts. Through two narratives—the official and unofficial, the propaganda and the personal letters— Dear Palestine reveals the fissures between sanctioned nationalism and individual identity. This book reminds us that everyday people's fear, bravery, arrogance, cruelty, lies, and exaggerations are as important in history as the preoccupations of the elites.

Genres: History, Israel, Nonfiction, War, Middle East

352 pages, Hardcover

Published April 13, 2021

Reviews

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-researched book that deals with the social and cultural aspects of the 1948 war in Palestine, some of the events leading up to it, and its immediate aftermath.
In a nutshell, this book is about the soldier's opinion. The author gives a nuanced account of the wide range of motives that inspired Jews and Arabs to fight for Palestine in 1947-48, and made many of them see it as their duty.

In this social history we meet ordinary people from all sides and with various backgrounds: Arabs from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen, Palestinian Arabs, Jews from the Yishuv, Morrocan Jews, the Holocaust survivors, and Jews from North America (the Mahal). They are the main actors in this narrative, not Ben Gurion, Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, or the leaders of the Arab countries. I find this perspective refreshing.
The book examines the propaganda machines on the opposite sides of the conflict, such as the ALA (the volunteer army formed by the Arab League to save Arab Palestine from erasure and prevent partition) and the Israeli military. It looks at how propaganda was disseminated through radio, newspapers, and mass rallies. We learn about how propaganda and indoctrination were reflected in letters written by soldiers and officers to their families, relatives, and friends.
Personal letters have a sense of immediacy. Although usually censored during wartime, they often contain unfiltered thoughts and translate unpolished, sometimes conflicting sentiments, making them valuable primary sources.

In analyzing the epistolary material, Shay Hazkani debunks some long-standing claims.
He seeks to understand the motives that drove ordinary Arabs to join the ALA and that drove Jews to come from abroad to fight for Israel's independence.
Some Jews who fought in that war were ideologically motivated, having come to believe that inflicting violence on others was the only way to establish themselves as a sovereign nation. Others were driven by the threat of being victimized a second time, as propaganda kept telling them.
Others, like many in the Mahal, were appalled by the violence and the justification for brutal actions but saw Israel as a place of refuge.
The Zionist agitators sought to recruit future soldiers in displaced persons camps in Germany. They used the threat of what they called "a second Holocaust" to induce survivors of the Nazi camps to enlist in the Haganah.
Many Arabs were inspired by the possibility of throwing off the colonial yoke and reversing what they perceived as a long “decline” in Arab civilization. Some embraced the ideas of pan-Arabism, while others saw the partition of Palestine as an injustice that needed to be redressed.
Some Arabs joined the ALA to make up for some of their past mistakes and to improve their reputations by helping the Palestinians.
The ALA forces were inferior in equipment and ammunition to the Jewish paramilitary groups that benefited from the state support. The volunteer army's leadership was divided, and its efforts were usually poorly coordinated. Moreover, most of the volunteers were inadequately trained.

Contrary to one of the propaganda tropes, Palestinian elites appear to have reflected on their share of responsibility for the mass exodus of Palestinians.
Jews felt disappointed and even betrayed at the end of the war. Their initial enthusiasm for the Jewish state waned as they witnessed the racism of Ashkenazi Jews. Going back to Morocco, however, was a complicated matter. Nevertheless, some managed to return to their country of origin.

The letters reveal parallels between the fate of many Moroccan Jews, who felt like outsiders in Israel, and the Palestinians, who were desperate to return to their homes and clung to the hope that one day they would be allowed to do so.
In the past, Arabs and Jews had a somewhat similar relationship with the Western world and the internalization of certain stereotypes about both communities. The European racist lens portrayed them as 'weak' and 'inferior.' Espousing a masculine militarist culture on both sides was in part a response to this racist gaze and an attempt to prove their worthiness through a willingness to exercise violence.
Orientalist stereotypes, a product of colonialism in the Middle East, prompted Arabs to join the military to "defend their honor."
One of the justifications for violence promoted by the Israeli propaganda is that 'Jews should become “a nation like all other nations” and adopt the gentile way of war.' They should break with the peaceful tradition in Judaism. Officers often turned to stories from the Hebrew Bible to emphasize the bravery of the Jews and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for a "higher" cause.

Hazkani mentions Volokolamsk Highway - a Soviet patriotic novel by Alexander Bek about the defense of Moscow during the Second World War - as a source of inspiration for the Israeli side. It reminded me why I have always been a little skeptical about this kind of literature, especially when read through a nationalist lens.

[Samuel A · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book in which you have to read each and every footnote. Numerous times the footnotes of this book either paint a slightly different or completely opposite picture of what the author was trying to show. I give it a pass since this is one of the few books of its kind, but man were there inconsistencies. Multiple "there was no evidence of [x]" and then the footnote said "for a competing view, here is evidence of [x]". It was also very quick to describe the actions of a party as being purely ideological, not based on the reality around it. This book very much shows the "what" and not the "why" of what individuals thought and felt, though it presents itself as showing the "why".

This is a very interesting book and a great read, but keep a note to yourself to be extra attentive and do some critical thinking while reading this.

[Shaked · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and sheds a lot of light on Zionist propaganda and the nakba

[Arthur Read · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adds some grassroots level color to the Israel/Palestine conflict via a cache of Israeli analysis of personal letters collected through an early Big Brother agency, but the uneven treatment is of limited overall value due to its narrow scope and thus this book can only be recommended to specialists and not neophytes.