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.

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.