Dear Palestine

 

with Shay Hazkani

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| The 1948 War resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba of 750,000 Palestinian refugees. In Dear Palestine, Shay Hazkani sheds new light on these events through a unique source base: hundreds of personal letters secretly copied by an Israeli censorship apparatus. We talk in this episode both about his struggle to access these materials and the subversive truths that they reveal, including everything from Moroccan Jewish volunteers who felt solidarity with Arabs to Palestinian refugees who attempted to care for and return to their homes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

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The 1948 War resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba of 750,000 Palestinian refugees. In Dear Palestine, Shay Hazkani sheds new light on these events through a unique source base: hundreds of personal letters secretly copied by an Israeli censorship apparatus. We talk in this episode both about his struggle to access these materials and the subversive truths that they reveal, including everything from Moroccan Jewish volunteers who felt solidarity with Arabs to Palestinian refugees who attempted to care for and return to their homes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

Contributor Bios

Shay Hazkani is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular interest in the social and cultural history of Palestine/Israel, and Middle Eastern Jews. He teaches at the University of Maryland in the Departments of History and Jewish Studies. Hazkani earned his PhD in History and Judaic studies in 2016 from New York University, his Master’s from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University ,and his BA in Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University. His work has been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Israel Studies Review, and he also publishes historical pieces in the Israel-daily Haaretz. His book Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War was published in 2021 by Stanford University Press.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Further Listening

	Shira Robinson	273 10/20/16	Both Citizens and Strangers in Post-1948 Israel
	Sherene Seikaly	206 10/30/15	Men of Capital in Mandate Palestine
	Gershon Shafir	344 2/5/18	A Half Century of Occupation
	Salim Tamari	367 7/17/18	The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine
	Beshara Doumani	170 8/15/14	Writing the History of Palestine and the Palestinians
	Rochelle Davis	203 10/14/15	Palestinian Village Histories
	Peter Wien	285 12/2/16	Nationalism, Communism, and Fascism in the Modern Middle East

Credits

Episode No. 515
Release Date: 29 November 2021
Recording Location: Somerville, MA
Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Chad Crouch, "Pacing"; Zé Trigueiros, "Sombra," "Chiaroscuro," "Big Road of Burravoe"

Bibliography courtesy of Shay Hazkani

Select Bibliography

Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha, ed. An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (London: Zed Books, 2018). 

Uri Ben-Eliezer, War Over Peace: One Hundred Years' of Israel's Militaristic Nationalism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 

Shay Hazkani, "Israel's Vanishing Files, Archival Deception, and Paper Trails," Middle East Research and Information Project 291 (Summer 2019).

_____, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2021). 

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Picador, 2021). 

Nur Masalha, "New History, Post-Zionism, and Neo-Colonialism: A Critique of the Israeli 'New Historians.'" Holy Land Studies 10.1 (2011): 1-53.

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Laila Parsons, The Commander: Fawzi Al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence 1914-1948 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2017). 

Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013). 

Sherene Seikaly, "How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38.1 (2018): 6-20. 

Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 

Constantine Zurayk, The Meaning of Disaster (Beirut: Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956).