“History as well as life itself is complicated — neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency,” wrote Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
This quote would make a fitting epigraph for Shay Hazkani’s daring and illuminating new book Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War, which upends truisms, and unsettles the binaries of most nationalist historiographies of the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba.
Hazkani, an Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, who has been among historians at the forefront of struggling for greater access to and declassification of Israel’s state archives, has utilized heretofore untouched portions of those archives to present a new interpretation of the seminal events of 1948.
He does so by utilizing captured soldiers’ diaries and battle orders from, transcripts of radio broadcasts by, and Haganah intelligence reports about the Arab Liberation Army
— source mondoweiss.net | Josh Ruebner | Jun 24, 2021