Ottoman History Podcast - Dear Palestine

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

  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. « Click for More »

So I guess first of all, I'm curious where the story of this book begins. I mean, I know the book itself is about the 1948 war and the various motivations and experiences of people who fought in it. But where does the story begin for you being involved with this history? You don't feel we should start with like a full disclosure? Full disclosure that I've known about this project for a long time and you've been telling me about Soldier's Letters for more than a decade? Yes, like 13 years. You're a big part of this project, including my helping name it. And so, you know, if anyone is interested in sort of objective truth, you know, if they switch now to Michael Barbaro, The Daily, you know, that will be a good time. But, you know, if they switch now to Michael Barbaro, the daily, you know,

that will be a good time. But, you know, I felt that this full disclosure is helpful. I'm glad you got the Michael Barbaro plug in there. No, but I appreciate those kind of words. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. And that person who just gave you permission to listen to the competition is Shai Haskani, an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Maryland. His book is Dear Palestine, a social history of the 1948 war, published with Stanford University Press. As the title suggests, his book is about how Palestine mattered to different people. And the key source base is a trove of letters of ordinary soldiers and civilians.

In the first part of our conversation, we discuss how he came to get a trove of letters of ordinary soldiers and civilians. In the first part of our conversation, we discuss how he came to get a hold of those letters, and in the second part, we talk about what subversive insights they can offer for thinking about the creation of the State of this project fell on my head by accident when I was still in a very different life working as a reporter. From the early 2000s, I worked as like a correspondent first on Israeli radio and then on Israeli TV. Fortunately, that was before the age where everything is posted online, videos and recordings. And so these are not wildly available. And I'm

very thankful for that. I was very young, very naive, not really fully understanding what that place that I lived in and what the larger story of that place may be. This was a very intense time of the second intifada and I lived in Jerusalem for several years. I think it was 2007, something like that. I was a TV correspondent sort of covering national security and the Israeli military and the occupation in the West Bank. And I went into something called the IDF archives, the archives of the Israel Defense Forces. It was a place I've never been to before, and I really couldn't fully understand what is it that they have there. What I can tell you is that the first time I went there, it is essentially an army base. So

in that sense, a little creepy or a little scary or just strange. Like you have to give your backpack and all your electronics as you enter. It just feels very sterilized and sort of strange in that way. And I went there to do some research for this very short documentary project I was working on as a reporter for Israel's Channel 10 about the first Israeli-German arms deal. It was an arms deal in the mid-1950s, shortly after Israel had signed these reparation agreements with West Germany. What was surprising is that Israel had decided to sell these weapons, mostly Uzi rifle, to West Germany, which was a big scandal in Israel at the time,

because obviously this was less than a decade after the fall of Nazi Germany and the extermination of European Jews. And so it made a lot of, there was like really angry responses throughout Israel. And I was digging up some documents about that story, and this really strange document surfaced, and it mentioned something along the lines of, you know, this army bureaucrat writing to his superior officer, something along the line. You know, we also know that, you know, rank and file soldiers are really against this arms deal. And we know this because we've been reading their personal letters. And that's where they express their reservation and their anger at Ben-Gurion and the Israeli leadership. And that's the first time I basically came across

a mention of this large Big Brother apparatus that secretly intercepted and copied these personal letters for some version of sociological research. I wasn't sure what that was and what this document was referring to, and it took a long time, around a year or so, for me to actually be able to look at some of these sources and some of these letters that the Israeli intelligence had intercepted. This was an apparatus that copied soldiers' letters and Palestinian letters and Moroccan Jewish letters and tourist letters of all these different groups that were of interest to the Israeli leadership. And at what point did you begin thinking about this censorship apparatus as a way of reading against the grain of the 1948 war? When I was actually allowed to see some of these sources, one of the primary set of primary sources I use are called the opinion of a soldier. These are these reports that were issued every two weeks or so, starting in 1948 all the way till 1998.

It was a British invention, but when the British had left Palestine, they literally gave the keys to this Postal Censorship Bureau over to the Israelis. And I learned about the existence of these reports when I was doing that research still as a TV correspondent. And one of the first documents that I was allowed to see is actually a letter that I quote in the sort of epilogue,

the end of the book, is this letter by a soldier from the early 1960s that is probably sent to blow up Palestinian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by Jewish forces in 1948. And he's sent there and he just, you know, reads and tells some of his reflections, wandering around the houses. Let me read you the excerpt that I actually included in the book. So he writes the following.

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. Hundreds of years of work were put into every site here. It's unbelievable. Hundreds of years of work were put into every site here. It's unbelievable. There aren't even 50 meters without a terrace and there's a lot of carob trees. It's hard to grasp this change. People used to live in these ruins.

Maybe they loved and hated like we do. And now who knows where they are. So I read this letter. First of all, I wasn't sure that academia was what I wanted to do. And then I wasn't sure what to do with them. But I knew that they told a very different story, certainly of 1948 than the way that I was sort of indoctrinated on in Israel. And I thought that they really captured this important descent from these sort of conventional narrative that this soldier really is writing against. That's when I realized that those letters have a really interesting stories to tell. I started with these letters of Israeli soldiers, but I was very keen on locating similar or somewhat similar sources by Palestinians

and by other Arabs from around the Arab world who came to Palestine in 1948. And that's what ended up being Dear Palestine. I want to ask more about the archival question for Palestinians. But before that, I wanted to ask more generally about what kinds of archival roadblocks you encountered. I mean, this is this kind of serendipitous story of just bumping on this massive operation of surveillance and censorship and the uncomfortable secrets that it reveals. Was there pushback to trying to get access to these materials? Yes, there was major pushback. In fact, those sources have not been originally declassified, right? So that report snuck

into those documents about the first German-Israeli arms deal. But when I asked to see the bi-weekly reports by the Postal Censorship Bureau, I was told that they're still classified. So just to clarify here, you're reading a report about the German-Israeli arms deal, and there's a reference to this operation. You don't see the actual files, but you see reference to it. And so then you proceed to ask for those files. And what happens? I'm told that those files, you know, they're still classified. They contain classified information. They cannot be revealed or given to me. And then they start pushing back. And I think I was a very brash young man. I mean, some people would say you're still brash. the Israeli intelligence apparatus at that point for almost seven years, I had a good understanding

of how that system worked, you know, where those sources could be. And in some ways, I was really privileged. And that's not something that many, even those who are able to actually physically go to the IDF archives, which we know it's not everyone because many are blocked because of their political activity from even going into Israel. But even those who make it into the IDF archives may not have this sort of understanding of where these sources would be, what you should specifically demand. I'll give you an example. The IDF archives for many decades had this practice, which they don't allow you to view catalogs. You come in, you speak with an archivist, you tell them broadly speaking what you're interested in,

and then they go into the catalog and choose files for you, send them for declassification, and you may get a few, a couple of files at the end. And I said, no no i want to see the catalog if you need to declassify the catalog itself you go and do that how did they respond to that it was like well it's going to take forever and you're not going to be able to get most of these files and you know and i was like yeah that's fine and and they did that right i got these at some point, you know, several, probably 100 pages of these declassified catalog lists, oftentimes with a file number, and then just, you know, either a description or just the name of the file, and some of that was redacted as well. It took probably until 2015, where I originally located these sources in 2007, 2008, to actually get all those materials, or I shouldn't say all, but some of those materials that I was

interested in declassified. And one thing that was very helpful to me was, I would call it imagination. And I want to explain what that means. Oftentimes, I would sit with those declassified catalogs that I had received. And at that point, I was also able to find these individuals who worked within these apparatuses and sometimes do short interviews with them or just off the record conversation. And I would think to myself, OK, here's the sources I have. I have these soldiers letters from 1948, 49. But I just met this officer who worked in the postal censorship. He was already in his 80s and had now passed away.

And he told me that the copying of these soldiers letters were just the it was just the tip of the iceberg of this larger apparatus. just the tip of the iceberg of this larger apparatus and that he knew for a fact that there were also these intercepted letters of Palestinian refugees writing their families that either became Israeli citizens or were in the occupied territories, etc. You know, he said to me, well, you know, it may be called this way or that way or under that unit name or under that number name. And I kept sort of flooding the archives with these requests saying, I know, I probably shouldn't have said that because I didn't really know, but I know that these sources existed. I know that they're part of a unit called the Military Postal Censorship. a unit called the Military Postal Censorship.

But then in 51, the unit branched out to a new subunit housed in a different place in the Israeli intelligence apparatus, unit, I can't think, like 548 or 648. And, you know, I want to see these documents. And if you are saying no, that you have to say exactly, you know, cite what laws you're using in order to prevent their declassification. And they did. And then they, you know, started appealing those. And when you say appealing, we're talking about lawsuits, right? Eventually, these transformed into lawsuits. I was really fortunate to have met a lawyer

by the name of Avner Pinchuk from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. It's a well-established, one of the most important civil rights organizations in Israel. It's not that they're like, were really keen on working on archival declassification, but Avner specifically, starting in 2005, 2006, something like that, had represented one scholar, Gershom Gorenberg, in a lawsuit against the IDF archives that refused to declassify some files relating to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And he discovered this whole world where the state, Israel, has relatively liberal archival laws dating to the 1950s based on this German model of how an archive should be, but that that law is not at all being implemented and forced and that no declassification in Israel actually takes place based on those relatively liberal laws. And so he became interested and I was really fortunate because he was willing to send 20, 30 letters to the IDF archives and to the Ministry of Defense and to the state archives and to the Justice Department

with these individual files and issue that I had encountered over the years. I would say that 70, 80% of these did not amount to anything with the exception of some fascinating bureaucratic exchange that is just, you know, just that can be an interesting article. But, you know, 10-15% of it made the archives realize that they may have much more work on their hand if they automatically said no to all these requests versus giving me something. And I know it's just something. It's not, not only it's not the full extent of the sources that are available and that were looted or confiscated or taken in 1948, 1949. I know it's just a fraction of that. But for me, that fraction, or I felt, can really tell a story that would read against the grain and would tell some, I thought, profoundly different stories, at least than the

one I had known or were familiar with about the 1948 war. So you mentioned earlier the question of archives and Palestinian Arab perspectives. Could you talk more about how this archival struggle involved thinking about that absence that's talked about so often in this literature? I mean, Palestinian historians have been working on this for decades, these things that everyone knows, but there's no state archive endorsing these visions. So how did you get around that? You know, I did my BA in Israel in Middle Eastern history. And I would say that at least in my course of studying Palestinian history, oral history, the experience in Palestine pre-1948, the Nakba, was not a major theme discussed in my undergraduate education. And so only when I came to the United States, we both did our master's in Arab studies in Georgetown. That was really the first time I remembered the class, you know, it was a class with Rochelle Davis, Palestine and Palestinians. And that was really the first time that I actually read these oral testimonies of Palestinians from the Nakba. That had some really profound impact on me.

Reading Palestinian oral history from the Nakba, I think, was very interesting to me because it told a story that really didn't seem to have that much with sort of the political and diplomatic history of 1948, something that I've been familiar with, right? The Amin al-Husseini's and blah, blah. We don't need to go into those. Reading some of those Palestinian oral histories made me wonder whether sources that would be somewhat similar existed in the Israeli archives as well.

And I have already mentioned that in asking some of those people that were involved in this Big Brother apparatus, they had mentioned that, yeah, of course, you know, the letters of Palestinians were a major interest to these states and leadership and that Postal Censorship Bureau. So we've talked a lot about the archival trail and the challenges that you faced and the kind of creative ways that you worked around state secrets. Maybe we could talk now more about what those sources actually revealed. So in the book, you're writing about the 1948 war, you're focusing on Jewish volunteers, volunteers for the Arab Liberation Army, and also the experiences of Palestinians in the Nakba. What kinds of insight do these sources offer

and how does it challenge conventional wisdom about 1948? So the most acclaimed historian of the war, Benny Morris, and you know, who has written some important books about the war and later came out in support of the expulsion of Palestinians, I'm going to leave that that aside for a second. One of his major claims was that for these Arab volunteers and for Palestinians who fought in 1948, jihad, that's how he frames it, was a major motivating sort of impetus to fight. Now, he hasn't really used Arabic sources, but nevertheless, right, his findings and views on this have really been widespread in the English-speaking world. I was able to locate a few hundred letters of these Arab volunteers who came from around the Arab world to fight in Palestine in 1948.

And these were handwritten Arabic letters that were looted by IDF forces and taken from, literally, from post offices, from bases of the Arab Liberation Army and elsewhere during the 1948 war. They were just stored in these files, something with the title, Uninteresting Arabic Sources in handwriting or something like that that was actually the name yeah something like miscellaneous handwritten um miscellaneous uh handwritten documents in arabic not of interest something like that and you know i started reading those letters it was actually very difficult because of the different handwriting and the different styles of Arabic. And I was really fortunate to find research assistants and others who helped me decipher these letters. And I was reading those and, you know, wanted to examine how things such as terms relating to jihad or other religiously motivated ideas, how profound and how pervasive they were in these letters. I'm not going to say that the word jihad does not appear in those letters.

Certainly it does. But the assumption, right, because Benny Morris, what he essentially does is to create these parallels between these jihadi movement that became important around the world in the late 20th century into the 21st century. And those Arab volunteers who had fought in Palestine in 1948. And I was reading those letters, you know, certainly the term jihad appears, but so are many, many other motivations and explanations for why people come to Palestine. So, you know, Pam Arabism and sort of this state-centric nationalism and sort of family concerns and so many other narratives and stories about these individuals who ended up in Palestine. You know, I was really fortunate to locate this collection of letter of one Iraqi volunteer by the name of Maki Mahmoud from Baghdad, who came to Palestine

in 1948. And what I was just randomly found and scattered in many different files are not only letters that he sent to his mother, but letters that the family sent him and some of his close friends and relatives from Iraq. And that sort of allowed me some, I think, allowed me some, I think, interesting insight to who this person was, you know, what was the some of the ideological foundations that had brought him to Palestine, and that what are some of the beliefs circulating in his close circle of confidence and friends. And well, it's all over the place, right? Just like when you and me would have, you know, a conversation over coffee in a few hours, my sort of thinking and speaking would be a stream of consciousness, right? That's how human interaction works. And that's how it

worked with this Maki Mahmood talking about why he came to Palestine and having his friends and relatives, you know, interject why they think he went to Palestine. And so you have, you know, he certainly says that defending Palestine and the Al-Aqsa Mosque or something like that is a religious duty, but he's also saying, not only him, but his relatives, his friends, that protecting Palestine and fighting Zionism is a fight against international fascism. And he also says that fighting the British in Palestine is an extension of fighting them in the context of something known as al-Wathba. These are a wave of anti-British demonstrations in 1948 in Baghdad itself against the signing of an Anglo-Iraqi agreement. So he's basically saying,

oh, we're fighting them in Palestine, and that's helping fight them in Baghdad, right? Because this is the same story. And so there's just so much there, such richness, then to sort of go then and try and distill the motivation among these air volunteers to go fight in Palestine in 48, by the way, including Palestinian fighters to say that this idea of jihad is what explains that. That's really, I thought, not very serious scholarship. And that's something that I was really fortunate to be able to talk about in Dear Palestine. I think one of the powerful things about the book is how you're talking about so many different groups of people. I mean, it's not only people coming from Baghdad, like Maqeel Mahmoud, it's Moroccan Jews, it's American Jews, it's Egyptians, it's Syrians. In one case, it's even an Iraqi Jew who fights for the Arab Liberation Army. That's what you start the book with. I wonder if you could talk more about some of those groups

and their different reasons for coming to fight. The book starts with looking at these mobilization campaigns around the world, really, to go fight in Palestine or the land of Israel. And here, these very different groups and societies and parties and tribes, you know, they all heard that there's a war going to start in Palestine, and they may have vaguely heard that the Arab League has created this Arab Liberation Army, and obviously that the Haganah was looking for fighters. But then they sort of oftentimes use their own agendas and goals and concerns in order to mobilize mostly young men, but sometimes women as well, in various countries. And so the story really differs from one locality to the other. In Syria and Lebanon, you have these parties like the Ba'ath, for example, who really want to

basically do away with the old post-independence leaderships in the Arab world and start something new. They talk about ending internal colonialism. They talk about how these dual regimes where national elites collaborated with European colonialism and they want to get rid of those. And what they're saying is, is that for those young Syrian and Lebanese young men who would go to fight in Palestine, Palestine would be the open gambit of a larger play where they will bring down Shukri al-Kawatli and Riyad al-Sulh and some of these first generation sort of nationalist leadership in the Arab world. So you have that. But then you have all these tribal leaders that often collaborated with Zionism and sold lands to Zionism very extensively sometimes.

And in Lebanon, you have Ahmad al-Assad, a major Shiite leader that was very instrumental in selling lands in what's called the Hula Valley. And they're also mobilizing their young men to fight in Palestine in 1948. And for reasons that I speculate about, right, maybe to sort of rehabilitate their reputations. This is a new age of nationalism and they are members of the Syrian or Lebanese parliaments and they want to show that the fight, of course, against Zionism is a major national cause. And so you have some of that in the Arab world

and then, you know, in DP camps, right? Those camps set up by Americans and others in Europe where Holocaust survivors were concentrated in the aftermath of the Second World War, there you have these Zionist youth movements and sometimes the Yishuv itself mobilizing young men and women by explicitly saying that there would be another Holocaust, right, that will take place in the land of Israel, and that, you know, we know that you had just gone through, you know, the Nazi extermination campaign and survived, but you now need to go fight in the land of Israel to prevent the second part of this Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the Arabs. And these were effective messages, with some complication in places, especially like DP camps, when a lot of Holocaust survivors, even if they saw themselves as Zionists and had these Zionist persuasions,

were obviously not interested in going to fight. I mean, that seemed like a crazy idea to many of them, in going to fight. I mean, that seemed like a crazy idea to many of them. And they were sometimes sort of duped into going to fight in Palestine, sometimes in other coercive ways sent to fight there. You know, in places like Morocco, for example, where Zionist organizations basically tailored a message to Moroccan Jews. And there were all sorts of messages. There was a message that said something along the lines of, you know, this would be the opportunity to end the Vimy status, right? A classic Islamic concept that had survived in Morocco, unlike most of the other parts of the Arab world at the time. And so fighting in Palestine would be an ability to get away from this inferior status and sort of be now in a position of superiority over Muslims.

But there were also an appeal to these Francophile Jews saying, you know, you are obviously educated on the principles of the French Revolution, the idea of liberty and freedom, etc. These principles are now being fought for in Palestine against the British, against the Palestinian national movement, and you need to be part of that. And so it was really fascinating to see how this larger message of, oh, yeah, we need cannon fodder, we need fighters, was really tailored at each locality based on the immediate concerns and interests of those doing the mobilization. And how did the experiences of war itself fit with those justifications, those kind of pitches? Sometimes it fit very well, and sometimes it didn't fit at all. So, you know, I mentioned Moroccan Jews, for example. Yeah, the idea that Jews will be able to take up arms in Palestine was enchanting for some Moroccan Jews. was enchanting for some Moroccan Jews, some of the thousand or so that actually fought in the ranks of the IDF during the 48th war. About 20,000 Moroccan Jews had actually immigrated to Israel in

48-49, but about a thousand of them fought in the IDF. But then when the extent of racism became apparent to them, right, of intra-Jewish racism in Palestine, when that became apparent to these Moroccan Jews, that had caused a very different kind of sentiment. For some, it caused them to sort of re-evaluate and rethink their connections to Morocco's Arab or Muslim population. There's a famous letter that I quote in the book, someone saying after they experienced this severe racism in Israel, saying something along the line,

oh, now that I think of it, the Arabs are our brothers, not Ashkenazi Jews, that is Jews of European descent. So eventually 70%, according to statistics that were secretly collected by the Postal Censorship Bureau, 70% wanted to leave Israel and return to Morocco, right? A major blow to sort of the Zionist project in those years. And then you have, for example, American Jews.

There were several hundred American volunteers, American Jewish volunteers, who ended up in Palestine in 1948. The mobilization campaign to bring them was also pretty interesting, including a line in a pamphlet to recruit these volunteers, saying something along the lines of, you know, when you fight for Israel, you're actually fighting for America, right? So that if you want to be an exemplary American Jew, you need to fight with your brethren, Jews of Palestine. And what's interesting is that when you see some of those letters of these American Jews who fight in Palestine, you actually see a very significant dissent evolving among a subset of those volunteers.

Some of them were really horrified of what they had seen in Palestine, primarily violence against Palestinians and Arabs, and became really, really angry, ended up leaving Palestine. You know, let me read you an example of a letter that I really, really like about these American Jewish volunteers. So I would say that the American Jews are the group for which you really find a dissent that really focuses on this larger question of whether Jewish tradition, whatever that meant for them, can go hand in hand with extensive, massive campaign of violence.

And that was something, this view that Judaism and violence could work together well, was a major sort of theme in the socialization and education of Jewish soldiers once they made it to Palestine itself, right? The IDF had an education apparatus that really worked hard to disseminate that idea. And the group that we see with the most significant dissent and really rejection of that view are these American Jewish volunteers. And there's this famous letter here by one of those volunteers who had come, maybe even with his family, had fought in 1948 war, and basically writes to his

family that he wants to return to the U.S. immediately and essentially sever his ties with the Zionist movement. And he says, a golem is being formed here, and no one knows how it would turn when it grows. And we American Jews helped create this golem, but without having any say about its moves. In any rate, the Jews of Israel traded the religion for a revolver in every respect. I think you've given us a rich sense of the complicated motivations and ambivalence in some cases that people felt about participating in this war. I wonder if you could zoom out now and talk a little bit about how these specific points all put together challenge conventional wisdom about 1948. Well, there's the sort of popular narratives about 1948 that still hold pretty strong, not only in Israel itself, but also where we are right now, right in the US and other English-speaking parts of the world.

I think that with that, Beer Palestine challenges some fundamental conventional wisdoms, right? I mean, there is no one who grew up in Israel that would not be familiar with this theme of the quote-unquote Arabs in 1948 wanting to push Jews into the sea, this is literally presented and discussed as the primarily war aim in 1948. And obviously, Palestinian scholars and many, many others writing within this realm of Middle Eastern studies have debunked some of these ideas long ago but here not only did I actually discuss this question looking through education and indoctrination material produced by this Arab Liberation Army and other Palestinian militia group showing that basically there is nothing like this right That this does not

exist there. It's not to say that you can never find this genocidal rhetoric ever in any pamphlet, but that there's no sort of rot anti-Semitic undertone in most or almost all of these pamphlets that at least I was able to find. And so you have that, and then you also look at some of the materials produced by the IDF education apparatus, for example. A massive apparatus, already in 1948, where you actually see things like comparison of Palestinians and other Arab states to the Amalekites, and other Arab states to the Amalekites or the seven nations of Canaan, which are these biblical nations that the Bible commends to exterminate in the context of the occupation of Canaan or the land of Israel and, you know, modern interpretations. And so, I think that the book really helped us see that just because something has become a conventional wisdom about the supposed genocidal intents of the Arabs and the supposed war of self-defense in the Israeli side, when you

actually dive into some of these sources, you may get very, very different pictures. So that's sort of a larger sort of changing of perspectives, less in our immediate sort of word of scholarship and Middle Eastern history, but more in the way that these wars are still perceived. And I would also say that one of the things that was really striking to me when I first read some of these sources, In the recent several decades, at least in the sort of internal Israeli discourse, when someone looks at the internal Jewish resistance to occupation that have grown after the 1980s invasion to Lebanon, you know, and, you know, work, for example, of a group like Breaking the Silence Today, the assumption is, is that this is a part of the zeitgeist, in the sense that in the late 20th

century, because of all sorts of historical shifts, the discussion of human rights, of colonialism, etc, became much more pronounced, and these groups have started popping up in Israel and elsewhere. And the claim is that if you look back to 1948, that you would not be able to find such dissent that is based on moral justification. And my point is that not that this dissent is identical to the work of B'Tselem or whatever in the 1990s and early 2000. But that these voices against militarism, against the abuse of civilian population, and also serious doubts about Zionism, not in an abstract idea, but in the actual practices of, you know, settler colonialism in Palestine, in what became Israel itself, had created significant dissent already in real time.

Now, again, that dissent is not identical to 2021. No, but, you know, it's a part of a trajectory, to 2021. No, but, you know, it's a part of a trajectory, right? These ideas evolve, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, you know, kicks in in 1967 and changes some of these dynamics. But these dissent and some of these questions about what does Jewish identity mean in the modern era? You know, we see a lot of questions here among American Jews in the American Jewish community today in 2021. But I think that you can find some interesting trajectories of some of the questions being asked today already in 1948. And that's something that I feel Dear Palestine could help sort of reframe, at least to a degree. So we've talked about people who came to Palestine to fight,

and I wonder if we might also talk now about Palestinians who were there and were forced to leave, and how your book speaks to those experiences. So I start by looking at some of the mobilization also in Palestine itself of Palestinians to fight in 1948. And that's also sort of a conventional wisdom that I try and tackle because this was of a very limited scale, right? someone discusses 1948 is that when they mostly they're interested in producing propaganda they add that add the number of Arabs that existed in all Arab states together and the number of Jews in Palestine and the number of Palestinians and they say well this is clearly a few against many this was an attempt to wipe out the Jewish community, etc. But when we actually look at what actually transpired in 1948, first of all, obviously, this few of against many idea was debunked long ago, right?

At the height of the war, there were about 66,000 Arab soldiers and Palestinian fighters combined, compared to about 88,000 Jewish soldiers fighting in 1948. But more than that, I actually show that the mobilization of Palestinian men to fight was relatively of a limited scale because of all sorts of complicated reasons. Some of them go back to the 1936 revolt in Palestine and the devastation of the Palestinian population, including the jailing or killing of so many male Palestinians that had made the mobilization in 1948 somewhat ineffective. But also that there was this really important sense that sort of Arabs from around the Arab world are coming for the

rescue of Palestinians. It was a false sense, as we know today, right? The Arab Liberation Army as a creation of the Arab League was never intended to win over Zionism or take over Palestine. They knew it, the Arab leaders knew it, etc. But among Palestinians, you actually see from their personal letters, some of them were taken by Israel from postal offices and like literally mailbags that were found in, you know, Akka or Lid or elsewhere in 49 and 50. You see their personal letters initially being really, really excited about the prospects of Arabs from all around the world coming for their rescue. So that's one reason for limited mobilization. Also, of course, the internal fighting within the Palestinian elite

is another major, major cause. And so we see relatively small and ineffective mobilization among Palestinians. British, of course, have contributed to this. And clearly, the Zionist, both its armed forces and its intelligence apparatuses has also contributed quite a bit to the internal divisions. And we actually see that, you know, in personal letters that the Mdyriassin massacre, for example, and other episodes in April of 1948 had really changed some of those dynamics and caused some young Palestinian men, mostly of middle and upper classes, to mobilize and to really, you know, sometimes leave for training in Syria in the hope of going back to Palestine, fighting there.

By that point, although the Zionist military ability was already sort of well-proven and there was really very little they could do. And so the book follows some of this, but also able to capture some lectures that are discussing the process of expulsion and depopulation, more broadly speaking. And that's a complicated and really fascinating, of course, heartbreaking story of individuals, often from the middle classes in places like Haifa, for example,

that are talking about the Jewish armed forces shooting mortars at their neighborhood, for example, in Haifa. And they're corresponding with family that had already left, for example, for Beirut temporarily, or at least that was the thinking, saying, I don't know what to do. Should I stay here? Literally, our house is being bombarded every day. should I stay here? Literally, our house is being bombarded every day. One person is saying they just randomly shoot at people walking in the street. And I don't know if I should stay here and, you know, defend this house or leave and go to you in Beirut. And, you know, we'll be back here soon. And the personal letters really capture that extremely sad and difficult moment where this decision to sometimes flee for your life is being made. And I think that, or at least that for me,

that was one of the most interesting sort of letters to read. And then in the last chapter, sort of the aftermath of the war is being discussed, and there you really read those letters with immense sorrow and grief, but also with practical matters of those refugees. coming from those expelled Palestinians, right now turned into refugees and housed in these improvised refugee camps in the neighboring Arab countries. Their letters coming to their family members that by 1949, 150,000 of them or so had become Israeli citizens. So we have a refugee in Amman who's writing their relative who was a POW in Israel, captivity inside Israel. And the refugee is writing, you know, what I miss the most is Palestine's oranges because one orange here in Amman is worth a camel's head, meaning really, really expensive. And it's just really interesting to see how this person who is supposedly free, is in a refugee camp, is writing a POW and saying, you're better off because you're still in Palestine.

And what we actually see in these letters is what I call sort of a grassroots campaign of return that really starts even before the war formally ends. This grassroots campaign of return has all sorts of aspects. It has an anti-elitist aspect because of the sense that the Palestinian elite had betrayed the cause or had failed really miserably because of their internal fighting and that now the focus should shift to the people, whatever that may mean. So it has an anti-elitist element to it, but it also had this very practical sense of you have these refugees that are truly convinced that they will immediately return to Palestine. By the way,

many of them are willing to entertain the idea of living, or at least in their letters, under Israel's rule, they would contract their neighbors that had remained in Israel to till their fields so they don't go fallow and, you know, then could be expropriated by Israel, etc., because of that sense that they will be back very, very soon. because of that sense that they will be back very, very soon. Now, what of course we also know is that that exchange of letters between the refugees and their families still of Israel, the reason we have it is because it was all done under Israel's watchful eyes, right? And in fact, we know that thoseents that many refugees had thought would evade the Israeli authorities was actually used to sometimes arrest and sometimes kill those refugees trying to sneak

in and cross the border back into Israel. And it's actually an interesting story because these refugees would send these letters to Arab villages adjacent to the Israeli border, where a smuggler would take these letters, smuggle the border into Israel, and would mail it from the closest post office or post collection bin inside Israel, and that these letters were supposed to go to those Palestinians who had become Israeli citizens. And the idea was, and many refugees express it in their letters, that Israel would not be able to intercept these letters. But the reason we know of this practice is that these letters were being intercepted. Not only that they were being intercepted, these letters often describe the plans of these Palestinians at this grassroots campaign for return, right? This plan of sort of crossing the border back into their old villages.

And we know that some of these routes that are found in letters are then reported through the border police that ambushes these returnees and shoots and kill them or arrest them and expel them again. And in fact, from after the war had ended in 1949 all the way to 1956, estimates put the number of Palestinians killed at the borders at 2,500 to 5,000. killed at the borders at 2,500 to 5,000. So a very, very significant death toll that we should really consider this part of the Nakba it felt that this is another book that was published about Palestine, Israel, and that one of many, many, many books to be published every year. And there didn't seem to be much interest. But over the last few months, I've been getting, I would say, a good amount of emails from just random people from around the world

who happened to have found this book and were really interested in, including, you know, especially with these Jewish volunteers from overseas, you know, the stories that are remembered today are only the celebratory stories, right? Those American Jewish volunteers, South African Jewish volunteers, and others who went to fight in Palestine in 1948 and remembered their experience in very positive terms and celebrated it for decades later. But I think Dear Palestine shows that there was also a significant number, we don't know how many exactly, that have come back from the war really disturbed about what they saw, what they experienced, and what Zionism, the way that it was sort of implemented and the way it looked like on the ground.

And their stories were often forgotten, right? Most of them did not write memoirs. Obviously, they were not part of that celebration. And after the book came out, I had three or four people contact me from South Africa, from the US, from elsewhere saying, oh, you know, my father, my grandfather actually also fought in Palestine in 1948 and was very disenchanted. You know, the book was really interesting because they felt that they could relate to some of their experience. Some of them dug up some old letters, some

pictures and things like that. That was really, really felt good to have read these emails and correspond with some of these people. You know, some people were less excited, certainly. Why was this important to me to embark on this project? Because I felt that this idea of history from below, where you have to, as a reader, engage these individuals on like a much more personal level, all sorts of people, right? Those engaged in war crimes and violence, those that are being expelled. And so my hope is that reading the personal accounts may cause some that may not be as familiar or maybe just familiar with some of the conventional wisdoms engage with what that actually meant and the way that people felt about

this reality in real time and that may destabilize some older thinking and conceptions about what Palestine, Israel is about. And so that is really my great hope. I mean, of course, I would love undergraduate students and graduate students and scholars in the field to read it and engage with it. But my true dream is for people that are not actually in the academic circles to read and think about that. So you've been working on this for over a decade. Yeah. What does it feel like to be done and giving talks about this project?

So you know how flying and travel is often really, really stressful. And even when you get to the destinations, you sometimes still have nightmares about missing that flight, even though you've like, this is a long ended. And so sometimes I still have some nightmares about like, did I finish this? Or did I send this book in?

Or did I send the manuscript? I mean, it's been 13 years working on this project in which, as I mentioned, your role has been really unbelievable and really crucial in helping me think what to make of this, just sources that didn't really seem to fit together as well. So I'm happy to be done with it. There's something about those letters that are really, really captivating.

And so I may do one last small project with him but then I'm really happy to move on to some other things and I hope that people go back to those letters right it's such a rich source we have only scratched the surface of what should and hopefully one day would become the Palestinian archives that is literally embedded in the Israeli archive, in the IDF archive, in the Zionist archive, in the Israel State archive. Not just these letters, they're a small part of it, but tens of thousands of sources of Palestinian institutions and individuals, they're all there. We've only scratched the surface of this. And I really hope that scholars and other interested people really pursue this,

really pressure Israel and the archives to make these sources available. Thanks, Shai. Thank you so much. That's Shai Haskani. His book, Dear Palestine, is out now with Stanford University Press. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Of course, as always, you can find more information on our website,

ottomanhistorypodcast.com, including a bibliography. You can also join us on Facebook, where the community of listeners is over 35,000 strong. That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care. Thank you.