About the Author

Shay Hazkani is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Reviews

"Shay Hazkani opens an entirely new vista on the Nakba. With methodological bravery and archival rigor, he carefully unfolds the stories and words of everyday soldiers and civilians, to reveal the divisions and fractures, the uncomfortable truths, and the surreal alliances that began to consolidate the 'Arab' and the 'Jew' as mutually exclusive categories."-Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Reading a rich collection of letters, this seminal work examines ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. Shay Hazkani's microhistories explore how war dehumanizes some people and humanizes others; how individuals succumb to, but also resist, propaganda efforts; and how perpetrators and victims interpret, and mediate to others, the traumatic and violent events they lived through."-Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago
"Shay Hazkani makes a brilliant contribution to the literature on the 1948 Palestine War, documenting the views of the Arab and Jewish soldiers who fought in the war through letters seized by the Israeli censors. Impeccably balanced and engagingly written, Dear Palestine is a remarkable book that deserves the very widest readership."-Eugene Rogan, University of Oxford
"Hazkani's book does not completely overturn our view of the past, but it does add nuance, proving that it was possible, even in the early years of the state, for Israelis to view their Arab and Palestinian neighbors less hatefully than the Israeli leadership at the time had wanted. This enmity and nationalism were produced with much effort, as a result of systematic indoctrination. And if such animus was not always present in the past, it may not have to remain a part of our future."-Tom Pessah, +972 Magazine
"Dear Palestine is not just another book about the 1948 war. Even though it continues the growing tendency of historians to shift the gaze toward microhistory, it does more than that. It takes us on a fascinating journey to the space between efforts of official indoctrination and the unpredictable ways in which they are processed."-Tamir Sorek, Critical Inquiry
"Hazkani's claims for a new narrative do not rely on reconstructions of individual experiences deviating from the binary logic of nationalist sentiments alone. By juxtaposing the opposing narratives side by side, he argues for a more comprehensive assessment of how Zionist identity was constituted and challenged."-Yael Mizrahi-Arnaud, The Tel Aviv Review of Books
"Hazkani has followed an intuitive but all too infrequently traveled path in attempting a shared history of Jews and Arabs in Palestine in 1948. He attempts a fusion of historical horizons by joining a careful analysis of wartime propaganda by both sides with the honest accounts of soldiers on the ground. This interplay of top-down and bottom-up sources yields striking dissonance, which a skilled historian such as Hazkani uses to great advantage."-David N. Myers, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Dear Palestine marks a paradigm shift in the study of the relations between Jews and Arabs... It is a story that quietly defies monolithic and binary perceptions passed down by nationalist histories. In their stead, Hazkani offers a relational account that listens to a more nuanced human network which steers this commendable and unpretentiously radical book."-the Korenblat Book Award selection committee
"I strongly recommend Shay Hazkani's book. It is masterfully written and tells stories not told before, highlighting that while war is all-too-often portrayed in a way in which the warring parties come across as monolithic entities united in a common struggle, the truth is that societies undergoing conflict are just as complex and composed of individuals as societies in peace time."-Jorgen Jensehaugen, Journal of Military History
"Dear Palestine is entirely generative and contributes greatly to non-mythologized, rigorous, and empirical scholarship on Palestine in 1948. At the center of this work is not so much an empirical recitation of what happened and when-this is largely known-but rather a historicization of the sociopolitical process of meaning making... It tells the story of how imperialism, colonialism, and the struggle over nationalism foreclosed the futures of certain groups of people, those who faced exile, dispossession, and marginalization. Most of all, it reminds us that the possibility of liberation for Jews and Palestinians is constitutively intertwined."-Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Journal of Palestine Studies
"This book is a groundbreaking contribution to Palestine-Israel studies for several reasons; above all, it is the first comprehensive social history of the 1948 war. Hazkani's analysis of recruits' letters highlights their candid observations, opinions, and feelings about the tumultuous war, filling a significant gap in scholarship."-Elizabeth Brownson, Journal of History