Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War by Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 war, based on personal letters of “ordinary” Jews and Arabs. The book also examines previously unexplored propaganda, disseminated by Israel and Arab states during the war. In so doing, Dear Palestine offers two narratives—the official and unofficial, the propaganda and the personal letters—to flesh out the fissures between sanctioned nationalism and individual identity. In the broadest sense, the book offers a new prism through which to look at the establishment of modern Israel on the ruins of Arab Palestine.
