#Warlike country iseral full#

Preventing Jewish attacks against Arabs, and causing casualties. Convincing the Jews that their hostility to Arabs will result in a disaster for them 2.

#Warlike country iseral full#

By contrast, the ALA promised that in the future Arab state in Palestine “Jews will live as ordinary citizens and will enjoy full rights of citizenship.”Īn ALA operational order defined the organization’s strategic goal as “preventing the partition of Palestine by performing military tasks with the aim of: 1. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, employed this analogy, marking a break from centuries of Jewish commentators who were careful not to compare Amalek to any contemporary group. The first of these is in the realm of contemporary propaganda: Hazkani notes that the ALA’s output “was more measured, less violent, and placed a greater emphasis on universal values and international law” than that of the IDF, whose pamphlets compared the Arab enemy to Amalek, the biblical nation whom the Israelites were commanded to exterminate. Hazkani’s book complicates all of these assumptions, offering three key challenges to this methodological nationalism as it relates to Israeli-Palestinian history. Specifically, readers are likely to project contemporary images of the supposedly inherent attraction by Mizrahim (Jews with origins in Arab or Muslim countries) to Israel’s ultra-nationalist right onto the Mizrahi soldiers of 1948.Īn IDF infantry unit marches during a military parade marking Israel’s first Independence Day, May 5, 1949. For many contemporary Jews, this translates into expectations that Arab volunteers and soldiers were largely motivated by antisemitism, and that Jews justified the actions of the Israeli government and army at the time, fighting what was seen as a war for survival. If Dawud’s Jewishness seems surprising, it is likely because of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck called “methodological nationalism”: the common, implicit assumption that we can deduce the motivations of individuals from the nationalities/ethnicities they belong to. The book also draws on propaganda pamphlets from the time, both those produced and captured by Israel. These letters were secretly intercepted and copied by the Israeli censorship bureau in order to gauge public opinion, and thus inadvertently preserved for future historians.

“I was such a great soldier,” he boasted, “that my officer, Husayn, who was a real bastard, told me: Abduallah, too bad you are Jewish.” The interview took place in Tel Aviv: Dawud, who was indeed Jewish, had immigrated to Israel in 1950, just two years after fighting against the nascent Israeli army.ĭawud’s story opens “Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War” (Stanford University Press, 2021), a new book by Shay Hazkani, an assistant professor of history and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, which uncovers a trove of letters written by soldiers from both the Israeli army, the ALA, and Palestinian civilians during the war, which were previously classified and stored in the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives. In 1990, Israeli journalist Sarah Leibovitz-Dar interviewed Dawud about his service in the ALA five decades later, the former soldier was still proud of his ability as a sniper. Dawud, a sniper, was one of thousands of volunteers from across the Arab world who made up the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), which had carried out the assault. One of the key battles of this time, the attack lasted for nearly two weeks, involved heavy artillery, and ended in a total of 115 casualties. On April 4, 1948, just weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel, an Iraqi soldier named Abdullah Dawud took part in an unsuccessful attack on a kibbutz in northern Palestine. “Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War,” by Shay Hazkani, Stanford University Press, 2021.