Shay Hazkani's Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War is an important contribution to the rich historical literature on the 1948 War, combining the use of new archival sources with a fresh observation on events in Palestine during the year of Israel's establishment and the Nakba. One Israeli soldier writes his observation in December 1960: “The surroundings here are full of ruined Arab villages. We were always taught that we won over the Arabs because we loved the land more, and that it's ours. But when I walk around, and see all these mountains covered with terraces, I can see it's a lie” (p. 207).

Dear Palestine traces the efforts that were made to mobilize Arab volunteers mainly in the neighboring countries, and Jewish conscripts in the West, the Middle East, and North Africa, and to indoctrinate and train the volunteer recruits to better fight the enemy. This is compared to what the Jewish and Arab volunteers declare in their words about what brought them to fight in Palestine. Later, when the results of the 1948 War became apparent to all sides, Hazkani explores the reflections of the Jewish perpetrators and the Palestinian victims of violence and bloodshed.

Hazkani demonstrates that a bottom-up critical reading and analysis of soldiers’ letters from the Israeli State Archives can yield new insights into the complex realities of that war in Palestine and its immediate consequences. Its main contribution is obviously to microhistory, allowing the reader to see the war through the lenses of Arab and Jewish volunteers who came from various parts of the world to take part in the 1948 Palestine battles, with the Arab Rescue Army (Jaysh al-Inqadh), and the Haganah and other Zionist militias, respectively.

This book is not about the major results of the war or what happened in Palestine during the eventful year of 1948 and after. The author is aware of the catastrophic price the Palestinians paid during the war and afterwards in loss and casualties: the more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns occupied by the Zionist side, and the displacement and statelessness of 750,000 refugees (p. 23), a homelessness that continues until now.

The Ben Gurion-led government of the new Jewish state had decided already in June 1948 to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and localities. Israeli soldiers played an instrumental role in conducting the ethnic cleansing policies during the 1948 War and in preventing the return of refugees to their localities in the years after, while the Jewish and Arab volunteers were marginal players in the major events of the war. However, their voices from the margins, and their personal perspectives, bring a view of the realities on the ground that are different from the elite accounts.

Under the contested title “Different Kinds of Return,” Hazkani presents what seems to be the standard Israeli narrative of the results of the war on both sides of the divide, failing to make use of some available sources on the Palestinian (and other) sides. As a result, he falls short in giving justice to issues that are missed entirely or raised only briefly. We miss reading the reflections of Druze and other Arab volunteers in the aftermath of the Hawsha and al-Kasayr battles near Haifa (in April 1948), and the dozens of Druze volunteers who switched sides after May 1948. Similarly, little is known of soldiers’ thoughts after the battle in the Druze village of Yanuh, where Druze fighters on opposing sides were killed in that bloody encounter at the end of October 1948.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, a group of critical Israeli historians attempted to bridge the gaps between the Zionist and Palestinian macro-narratives of the 1948 War. These “new historians” established some common ground for academic discussion—in a relatively short period of political relief during and in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). However, the failure to start negotiations toward a final status agreement and the resulting outbreak of the Second Intifada in the new millennium blew apart the euphoria of the peace process and historical compromise.

The repercussions of the political and military turmoil in Israel-Palestine during the Second Intifada were direct and immediate—also for Israeli historians of the conflict. Most of them turned back to full support of Zionist myths and narratives. Critical readings of history were a casualty of the bloody events in the early years of this century. However, there is a new trend of critical studies narrating different aspects of the 1948 War and its outcome. Among the new wave of microhistory scholars are Efrat Ben Zeʾev, Areej Sabbagh-Khouri, Itamar Radai, Kobi Peled, Mustafa Abbasi, Hillel Cohen, Ahmad Saʿdi, Adam Raz, and Shay Hazkani. The virtue of these microhistory studies conducted by young scholars is in allowing critical readings of the past and present realities on the ground.

The reflections of soldiers who wrote letters during the war or a short time after are different from the standard collective memory and historical narratives composed later by the Israeli state agents and institutions. The intimate personal reflections tend to be very different also from what soldiers publicly express later in interviews with journalists, scholars, and others who wrote about the 1948 War. As sincere personal thoughts, they are likely less influenced by the pressure of canonical myths and historical narratives of the hegemonic military and political elites in Israel and elsewhere. Hazkani quotes, for example, what Yitzhak wrote to his friends back home about the soldiers’ behavior toward the end of the war, in December 1948: “My staff sergeant, a great friend, was shot and killed. But we avenged his blood the way we do for our fallen … We choose a place as a target, and all the Arabs there have no choice but to flee or to be killed” (p. 159).

But the virtue of letters composed by soldiers does not override their problematic nature, which the author explains in the introduction of his book (pp. 28–31). One can wonder which letters were censored and how many letters stored in the Israeli archives remain far from the eyes of historians and other scholars. Among the “methodological concerns” that Hazkani notes is the fact that the few thousand Arab volunteers of the so-called Jaysh al-Inqadh were very marginal to the broader social history of the 1948 War. Nonetheless, Dear Palestine offers students of history an opportunity to reread critically the standard narratives of the 1948 War from a new perspective, albeit one that depends on documents in the Israeli archives.

As in every fine scholarly work, minor inaccuracies and pitfalls in Hazkani's book should be mentioned. One wonders, for example, what were the reasons for not including a list of the primary and secondary sources used to accomplish this fine research. A bibliography is a vital component of every historical study, and it is regretful not to find one in Dear Palestine. It is important to point out also an overdependence on standard Israeli sources in telling the story of Majd al-ʿAsqlan (a city, not a village) during the war of 1948 and after (p. 159). These minor points aside, Dear Palestine is a welcome study that sheds new light on the on-the-ground realities during the 1948 War in Palestine and its immediate aftermath.