Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War

Abstract

Historian Albert Hourani once wrote that “the sources we use help to determine the emphasis we place within the complex whole of the historical process.”1 No statement rings truer when describing Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War, the new book by Middle East historian, former journalist, and petitioner of the Israeli High Court of Justice Shay Hazkani. Admittedly, one must wonder why, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we require yet another historiographic endeavor tracing what is now one of the most evaluated historical events of the twentieth century: the 1948 Nakba/Israeli War of Independence. What could new work on the topic offer by way of added value? Upon concluding Dear Palestine, the answer to this question becomes clear. Hazkani’s work is empirically rich. His critical approach is made possible by the source material collated by proto-state and state surveillance apparatuses; the inheritance of colonial surveillance tactics from British imperial governance and the appropriation of Arab Liberation Army (ALA) files within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) archives enabled these resources to exist. The book is a feat given the precarious circumstances under which the author sourced his materials. Methodologically, the book may be classified as a dialectical approach to the study of nation making. It tells the story of war as constituted by “messier battle lines,” which hundreds of analyses have accepted as a given and ignored (2). Hazkani taps into a trove of letters written during the 1948 war by Jewish, Palestinian, and other Arab soldiers that reflect individual struggles over complicity, perpetration, self-understanding, and identification. These self-understandings, we find, are never stable; they are always shifting and constructing. We are offered a window into the formation of subjectivities, another feat given the historical distance to the period. We often lack microlevel accounts and explanations of participation in violence or assume that master frames or ideologies simply explain away the successes or failures of mobilization. Hazkani tries to enter the worlds of soldiers, to grasp the ways in which individuals became embedded in social and political contexts and in violence through conflict, not consensus. Hazkani reverses the approach of taking official discourse as the object of study and instead takes individuals’ social processes—of interpretation, resonance, alignment, and misalignment—as the animating mechanisms. Yet Hazkani also constructively supplements the bottom-up use of letters with a deconstruction of military and political leadership’s discourses and top-down practices. He looks