Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War

Shay Hazkani

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nika_86 сентября 2024 г.
Zionism was initially very influential in the DP camps established in the American zone in Germany. Many members of youth movements were eager to immigrate to Palestine from 1945 onward.
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nika_84 сентября 2024 г.
The day after the UN approved partition, fighting reignited between Jews and Arabs, with the understanding that British departure would inaugurate the ultimate battle for Palestine.
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nika_823 сентября 2024 г.
Although the protest in Baghdad was initially against the treaty, it quickly came to encompass a much wider range of demands: from calls to send Nuri al-Saiʿd (the pro-British politician who dominated Iraqi politics for decades) and Prime Minister Salih Jabr to the gallows, to calls to distribute bread to the people (which was in short supply), to calls to free Palestine. The Istiqlal party, the most outspoken in seeking complete independence for Iraq, explained as early as January 2 that the new treaty was intrinsically linked to the Palestine question, even though it was not sure whether the British were trying “to sway public opinion from the Palestine issue by preoccupying Iraqis with the treaty, or seize the opportunity when Iraq is preoccupied with the [Palestine] issue to complete amending the treaty.”
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nika_823 сентября 2024 г.
Al-Salihi’s letter demonstrates the extent to which all of these convictions and sectarian identities intersected: not only did he display an anti-Fascist sentiment but also an ideological mix of Iraqi nationalism, pan-Arabism, anticolonialism, and Islamic solidarity. Of course, this degree of ideological mixing should not surprise us, given how ideologies mutate as they make their way from the minds of ideologues to the thoughts and conduct of ordinary people.
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nika_86 сентября 2024 г.
At the same time, more violent steps were taken to convince those who refused to enlist. Already in March 1948 the third congress of Holocaust survivors in DP camps decided that those who evaded the draft “would be excluded from social and political life.” By mid-April those who refused to present themselves for conscription were fired from their jobs and many were fined; some had their apartments taken from them, and others were denied additional food rations.
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nika_86 сентября 2024 г.
Alluding to those difficult times in Palestine, a notable from Haifa, Hanna Badr Salim, wrote the editor of al-Difaʿ(Defense) in February 1948 that “we waged war on Zionism, but we were unprepared” because “we were busy fighting one another, which distracted us from the danger.” Even Amin al-Husayni himself may have realized that his rivalry with al-Qawuqji and internal opposition were detrimental to the war effort.
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nika_828 сентября 2024 г.
In the Arab world, European expansion into the Ottoman Empire was a malady of similar magnitude. France sponsored autonomous Christian rule in Mount Lebanon in 1861; Algeria and Tunisia were occupied by the French in 1831 and 1881, respectively, and Libya by Italy in 1911. Most egregious in the eyes of many was Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882. These crises spurred Arab intellectuals, religious scholars, and others to debate how to reverse what they saw as a long “decline” in Arab civilization, which had allowed its colonization.
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nika_823 сентября 2024 г.
Exaggerations in letters home were also not unique to the ALA. Soldiers writing to their families from war zones around the world have often chosen to boast about victories—real or invented—in order to placate or impress their loved ones.
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nika_819 сентября 2024 г.
One of the most effective “social cement” themes was the Bible, which had been used already in Palmach education materials before 1948 to promote the view that “activism”—a euphemism for militarism—was the only course of action for the Jewish people. Numerous education pamphlets in 1948–49 stressed the bravery of the Jews from biblical times to the present and their mastery of the sword.
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nika_810 сентября 2024 г.
The Haganah was engaged in sociopolitical training—commonly called hasbara—from its inception in 1920, but a specialized hasbara department was established only during the Second World War. The department focused on both political indoctrination and military education, and a special emphasis was placed on the question of restraint (havlagah)—the decision to cease Haganah attacks against the Arabs, so as not to antagonize the British empire. By the early 1940s, the Haganah’s hasbara department shifted its orientation and began agitating against the British policy paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine.
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