'Not All Jews Longed for a Jewish Supremacist State in the Land of Israel'

Hazkani. "To be an Israeli is to be an outcast."Credit: Limor Edrey

"The surroundings here are full of ruined Arab villages," the soldier wrote. "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 [agricultural] terraces, I can see it's a lie… People used to live in these ruins. Maybe they loved and hated like we do, and now – who knows where they are.”

Just before the disengagement, Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, got underway officially, Shay Hazkani, at the time a military correspondent for Channel 10 News, was assigned to accompany the last Israel Defense Forces armored personnel carrier to leave the Strip. For a few hours he roamed around amid the ruins of the houses in the Katif Bloc settlements, as military vehicles crammed with equipment cruised by on their way out. One of the officers asked him if he'd like a souvenir. Hazkani took a pen from the Gaza Coast Regional Council; the cameraman accompanying him found a notebook from a dismantled army command post. A few hours later, he gave that to Hazkani. "Take it, it's probably of more interest to you than it is to me," he said.

"There were numbers and reports in the notebook that I didn't understand at first," Hazkani relates. "But then I saw that officers from Unit 8200 [signals intelligence] who had been stationed at a command post in Gaza reported on their monitoring of Palestinians' phone calls. There were militants there from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, politicians and also ordinary people. The officers wrote a few words about what those people did or said. Some of the texts spoke about intentions to strike at soldiers and settlers, but there were also a lot of sex stories and items of gossip."

Hazkani was surprised to discover that the list also contained phone numbers with Israeli area codes. Today, following Edward Snowden, Pegasus spyware, and the revelations about Shin Bet security service tracking during the pandemic, his surprise might come off like a vestige of childlike naïvete. But in 2005 he could only have wondered whether Israel was systematically engaged in human rights violations and even surveilling its citizens. He began to investigate.

"There were people in Intelligence who wanted to talk, and who told me about a system of eavesdropping and monitoring of emails of Jews and Palestinians by 8200 and the Shin Bet, with very few restrictions or supervision," says Hazkani. "They also told me about the recording of sex conversations between Hollywood stars. It turns out that Israel was one of the first countries capable of doing that. By pressing a button they could read any electronic correspondence or listen to any electronic communication in the world. That was the level of Stasi work they did there."

Hazkani began working on an investigative report together with the muckraking television journalist Raviv Drucker. At a certain stage they submitted a first draft to the military censor's unit. The text was so heavily redacted that it was effectively unusable. An appeal to the Committee of Three – a secretive body consisting of the IDF chief of staff, a representative of the media-based editors committee, and a representative of the public, which in certain circumstances has the authority to reverse decisions of the military censors – wasn't successful. The committee's opinion was that exposing the capabilities of 8200 would constitute a danger to national security.

"In the meantime, the 2006 Lebanon War had erupted, Hamas came to power in Gaza, the project was shelved and I realized that I was interested in a different career," Hazkani relates. Completely by chance, my Zoom interview with him took place on the very day (September 12) that the commander of Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, informed the chief of staff that he was resigning. "Responsibility for Unit 8200's part in the intelligence and operational failure rests entirely on me," he wrote, referring to the events of October 7. Apparently, the listening and surveilling project that the unit ran under his leadership, which Hazkani had uncovered almost two decades earlier, hadn't produced the hoped-for results.

Hazkani was accepted for a master's program in Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., following which he went on to obtain a doctorate at New York University. He spent the year before he departed for the U.S. in the IDF and Defense Establishment Archive. There he learned about what turned out to be the prior incarnation of 8200's control-and-supervision mechanism: a 1949 report titled "The Soldier's Opinion," issued by an IDF unit that was in charge of censoring soldiers' letters, including private letters to their families.

Initially, the unit also issued reports about mail sent by civilians, Palestinians, new immigrants and other population groups. In 2008, when Hazkani moved to the United States, he took with him a suitcase filled with copies of these letters and reports, along with additional material he had drawn on for his doctoral dissertation. He subsequently published the dissertation in book form under the title "Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War" (Stanford University Press, 2021). The book has now been published in Hebrew translation by E-vrit Publishing, with the title "Dear Homeland: Censored Letters from the 1948 War."

The book returns to the history of Israel's War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba, but in a way this has never been done before: from the point of view of the Israelis and the Palestinians who fought here.

In addition to examining personal correspondence, the book offers a systematic survey of Arab and Zionist propaganda disseminated during the war, and puts forward a narrative that in many cases contradicts the official version on which generations of Israelis were educated. Hazkani shows, for example, that some of the Jewish volunteers from abroad (in the Mahal unit) who fought in the War of Independence found themselves bitterly disabused of the ideals they had brought with them to Israel, that some soldiers abhorred the exaggerated use of violence against the Arabs, and that immigrants from Morocco were furious at the racist treatment they endured, leading some of them to want to return to their homeland.

A decade after the war ended, the military censor's unit was still reading the letters of the next generation of soldiers. One of the first documents Hazkani came across was a letter from December 1960, signed by a soldier who had been sent to blow up Palestinian villages in Israel that had survived in part. He had discovered, to his surprise, the attachment that its Arab inhabitants had to the land. "The surroundings here are full of ruined Arab villages," the soldier wrote. "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 [agricultural] terraces, I can see it's a lie… People used to live in these ruins. Maybe they loved and hated like we do, and now – who knows where they are."

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 [agricultural] terraces, I can see it's a lie.

A soldier's letter

Hazkani: "Beyond the desire to tell about the censor's surveillance, I also wanted to show how people saw things in real-time. Their perspective was very different from the way that those of us who have gone through the Israeli education system tell this story. When I started my career as an Army Radio correspondent in the territories, organizations like Breaking the Silence were beginning to crop up. One of the arguments that was voiced against them, even before they were accused of treason, is that the discourse to which they gave expression was connected to the Zeitgeist – part of the flourishing of the idea of individualism in the 1980s and 1990s. But it turns out that there was a similar discourse in 1948, too. It wasn't the hegemonic discourse, but it existed."

As an example, Hazkani refers to a letter sent by a soldier named Rivka, who served in a reconnaissance unit. During Operation Hiram, which took place in the Upper Galilee in October 1948, she found herself in the Lebanese village of Hula, where Israeli officers had executed a few dozen local residents with submachine guns and had buried them under a house.

"Howls and rampage of soldiers, intoxicated with victory, vibrate here from every corner. I want to share with you our shouts of triumph," she wrote. "I think that such an occupation is the work of the devil. Right after the conquest of the large villages, I visited these places as a frontline scout. Our way was paved with Arab casualties. The commander said on the wireless that the corpses reached up to the knees. Entire families were shattered and only a few were left as remnants. In the houses, everything was scattered. They found a lot of food, jewelry, money and other spoils. Corpses were still lying around in the houses. Soldiers made a fortune of the plunder."

IDF soldiers in a refreshment line at a Negev kibbutz during the War of Independence. Abba Kovner's combat bulletins adjured soldiers to "Buckle down, boys… We will march in the stream. The stream of the invaders' blood."Credit: Zoltan Kluger/GPO

Not necessarily enemies

In addition to the accounts originating with Israeli soldiers, Hazkani quotes documents that came from the Arab Liberation Army, which was established, with funding from the Arab League, in order to block the creation of a Jewish state. Under the command of Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the ALA operated alongside the Army of the Holy Jihad led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the nephew of the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husayni. According to the material Hazkani compiled, the outside Arab troops were driven by a variety of motives: to assist their Palestinian brethren, of course, but some of them also saw the war in Palestine as a first step in the struggle against colonial rule in their own countries.

Why did you choose to present the stories of the Israeli and Arab soldiers together?

Hazkani: "I think that the attempt to separate the Zionist story from the story of Palestinian history is untenable. In my doctoral dissertation, I wrote according to ethnic identities: a chapter on Ashkenazi Jews and a chapter on Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin] and a chapter on Palestinians and a chapter on volunteers from Arab countries. But the editor at Stanford University Press read it and said, 'There's amazing material here, but it doesn't work. There needs to be an integrative story.'

"The Zionist story is interwoven with the rise of Palestinian nationalism. You discover that similar ideas appear in both movements; for example, the glorification of force and militarism as part of the need to struggle against the idea of a flawed masculinity that exists in both."

One of the stories in the book is that of Abdullah Dawud, a Jew who was born on the banks of the Euphrates and served in the Iraqi battalion of the ALA and actually fought against Israel in its attack on Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek in the Jezreel Valley. The episode was revealed in an article by Sara Leibovich Dar in Haaretz Magazine in 1990. "I was a good soldier," the article quotes Dawud as saying, and adding boastfully, "My officer, Hussein, who was a big bastard, said to me, 'Abdullah, too bad you're a Jew.'"

That's an exceptional case, of course, but in Hazkani's view it exemplifies the idea that identity definition in 1948 was less rigid and less self-evident than what we tend to assume; that Jews and Arabs were not necessarily enemies positioned on two sides of an impassable wall.

"Someone could say that it's the craziest thing they've ever heard – man bites dog," says Hazkani. "I say that it's not really man bites dog. Those identities, Arab versus Jew, were far less fixed. The notion that there is one thing that's called 'being a Jew' and another thing called 'being a Palestinian' is a result of historical processes that reach a crescendo in 1948 and continue to evolve afterward as well. There are [Jewish] Moroccans who said, 'The Arab is our brother, the Ashkenazi is the enemy.' According to secret statistics compiled by the state, 70 percent of them wanted to return to Morocco.

The Zionist story is interwoven with the rise of Palestinian nationalism. Similar ideas appear in both movements; for example, the glorification of force and militarism as part of the need to struggle against the idea of a flawed masculinity that exists in both.

Shay Hazkani

"So on the one hand there are Palestinians who want to return to the villages they were expelled from, and on the other hand there are Moroccans who, because of racism, want to leave Israel and go back to Morocco. It turns out that not all the Jews longed for the establishment of a state of Jewish supremacy in the Land of Israel."

One of the conclusions that sprang from the study developed into a fraught debate with the columnist Ben Dror Yemini. Hazkani maintained, in an article he published in Haaretz in December 2022, that despite official Israeli propaganda, no documentary evidence exists for a Palestinian plan "to push the Jews into the sea." Responding to Yemini's critique, which insisted that there was such a plan, Hazkani noted that Yemini doesn't read Arabic and that "his interest in what Arab and Palestinian leaders said, wrote and thought boils down to what can be used in order to advance the years-long war against 'the industry of lies about Israel.'"

We all grew up with the idea that the Arabs wanted – and still want – to throw us into the sea.

"It's actually Zionist propaganda that calls more for ethnic cleansing. Of course there were cases of murder, including the murder of prisoners, on the Arab side. Those who support the throw-them-into-the-sea theory make use of what the secretary general of the Arab League, Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, said two months before the establishment of the ALA: 'It does not matter how many Jews there are, we will sweep them into the sea.'

"The opinions about this text and its significance are divided, and the assessment of the person who found the quote was that it didn't constitute a threat of annihilation against the Jews. I went systematically through innumerable propaganda documents in Arabic, and there is no plan for genocide against the Jews. On the other hand, Ben-Gurion said already during the war that such a plan existed, and since then it has become one of Israel's most important propaganda tools."

There were other tools as well. One of the most effective of them, Hazkani says, is the enemy's categorization as the latter-day heir to the biblical "Amalek." "It's a term that hadn't been mentioned for hundreds of years in rabbinic writings in Europe, and suddenly there are all kinds of [IDF] education and culture officers, who are actually secular, who are saying that the Arabs and the Palestinians are offspring of Amalek and the seven Canaanite peoples and that they and their children and their sheep must be exterminated.

"There were differing views about this" analogy, Hazkani continues. "Some of the soldiers who came from Europe, said, 'We know what a Holocaust is, this [kind of thinking] is dangerous, because that way we are no better than the Nazis.' Others said that it was written in the Bible, and we needed to make use of it. It was interesting to discover that it's precisely the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] who come out most strongly against these ideas."

In general, we find that the discourse of hatred and revenge that has reared its head again in recent months in connection with the war in Gaza, was very conspicuous and also controversial back in 1948. One of the best remembered – and most contentious – of the declarations was that of Abba Kovner, who had been a partisan leader in the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust, and afterward a well-known poet. But during the War of Independence, Kovner was the culture officer of the Givati infantry brigade, and he gave expression to his ideas of a fearless war in dozens of "combat bulletins" he wrote for troops.

In his battle missive dated July 14, 1948, Kovner wrote: "This night will be the night of the Plague of Blood.... Because at the hour of the attack our forces were held in place by strong enemy fire, [but] Samson's Foxes [the brigade's mechanized commando unit] pushed forward! And suddenly – the land was soft – corpses! dozens of corpses under their wheels. The driver flinched: He had human beings under his wheels! … run them over! Don't flinch, sons, these are murder dogs – their sentence is blood!... Buckle down, boys… We will march in the stream. The stream of the invaders' blood."

Kovner's blood-infused calls generated a critical debate in real time, but two years later, IDF Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin read out to his officers excerpts from letters written by new-immigrant soldiers from Iraq, expressing concern that, in his perception, most of them hadn't displayed sufficient enmity toward the Arabs. He believed that it was necessary to inculcate feelings of revenge and hatred in soldiers whose origins lay in Arab countries. "Jews who lived in Iraq and were humiliated all the time," Yadin said, "in them of all people we need to stimulate this sentiment: hatred of the Iraqi Arab, even in times of peace.... and I don't care if a commander, before going into battle, would tell his soldiers: 'We have Iraqi soldiers there. This is your chance.'"

At a certain stage, Hazkani says, the army's commanders were apprehensive that they would lose control over the soldiers. In December 1948, the commander of the southern front, Yigal Allon, warned that unjustified killing of civilians was tantamount to murder, and that soldiers doing so would face a court martial. "Allon issued that memorandum after the ethnic cleansing had been completed, 500 villages had been conquered and destroyed, and 750,000 people had become refugees. There was concern about the impact this would have on voting in the United Nations. It converses totally with the situation today."

Was there a policy aimed at ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that was dictated from above?

"No smoking gun attesting to a systematic policy of implementing ethnic cleansing has come to light in the documents that have been uncovered to date. There is no order by the leader. Some Palestinian researchers talk about 'Plan D' [an actual plan devised by the Haganah pre-state army to create Jewish territorial continuity in the area that was recognized as the Jewish state under the UN partition plan], which contained a declaration on expulsion and destruction of villages that presented armed resistance, and argue that this was the smoking gun. I'm not sure that's correct. Ben-Gurion was a person who spoke to history. He didn't put certain things in writing and he reprimanded others who did write about things he knew were war crimes or were liable to be a stain on Jewish history. It has to be said in all honesty that no such smoking gun has yet been found."

Polish Jewish refugees who were being housed in the American zone of Berlin, 1946. Hazkani learned that Holocaust survivors were forced to enlist in the IDF while they were still living in DP camps in Europe.Credit: Jim Pringle / AP

You also write that there was compulsory recruitment in the European DP camps.

"That's one of the things that left me stunned. Three years after these people survived the war and their families were murdered in the Holocaust, an attempt was made to force them to serve in the IDF. Some refused, and lists of shame, as they were called, were drawn up and hung in the DP camps, and there were also sanctions, such as depriving them of work or good housing. There were also toughs who were sent to beat those who refused to be drafted."

Not a political pamphlet

Shay Hazkani, 41, is a professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Maryland. Currently on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley, he relates in an interview that he first encountered the wrongs of the occupation regime while doing his military service at Army Radio. As a reporter in the West Bank, he spent quite a few hours with the present minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his cohorts. It wasn't easy for him to find a publisher in Israel for his book, even though it won critical praise and awards in the United States. Before he got to Yosef Cohen, the publisher of E-vrit Books, mainstream publishers here "refused to touch the book or demanded that I [subsidize it with] sums of money I didn't have."

Now he's distributing copies of the book to history teachers for free via the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the German educational foundation affiliated with that country's Left Party. "I loved history very much in high school, and I have fond memories of my teachers. But things like this – expulsion of the Palestinians, the coerced recruitment in the DP camps – were never mentioned, and I wondered whether the teachers didn't know or knew and were afraid to tell. Even today there won't be a lot of people in Israel who will want to hear a different story about 1948, but I hope that there will be at least one teacher who won't be afraid of the Education Ministry and will introduce these issues into the curriculum as well."

Even today there won't be a lot of people in Israel who will want to hear a different story about 1948, but I hope that there will be at least one teacher who won't be afraid of the Education Ministry and will introduce these issues into the curriculum as well.

Shay Hazkani

In the end, people will label your book "leftist" and pigeonhole you as one more Jew who hates himself and his country.

"I don't deny that my views are those of the radical left, and I don't care if people like me or not. I devoted 10 years of my life to writing this book. I had to read hundreds of letters in manuscript form, sometimes sending texts to experts on certain Arabic phrases so they could help me understand the documents better. I didn't invest so many years and so much energy to write a political pamphlet."

Still, it must be frustrating to know that you have something important to say and that so few people are willing to listen.

"There are many tragic things about the incomprehensible breakdown we are now experiencing, and one of the most difficult things is this notion that ignorance is strength, that it's preferable not to know about the dark past of the place we live in. But the best situation for learning something new is the feeling of discomfort. To read texts that describe how the skull of a Syrian officer is smashed in and he's burned alive isn't comfortable. The Nakba is the most dramatic and important event in the history of Israel-Palestine, but even afterward there were junctions where it was possible to recalibrate and go in other directions, and there was a conscious decision, based on principle, that we would continue with the Nakba via a war against the Palestinians and the takeover of land."

Did your historical research radicalize your politics, or vice versa?

"Both of the above. When I surveyed the apartheid regime in the territories, at first on Army Radio and then on Channel 10, I saw things that accelerated the process. In the 2006 Lebanon War, I was following an artillery battalion, and the battalion commander said, 'Do you want us to shoot at villages so you'll have a great background for your report?' Another time there was a briefing of military correspondents with Gadi Eisenkot, who was then the head of the Operations Directorate [afterward chief of staff, now an MK]. Israel had begun demolishing civilian infrastructure systematically, and I pointed out that the laws of war forbid destruction for its own sake.

Shay Hazkani. "In large measure, Israel is throwing the Jews of the world to the dogs."Credit: Limor Edrey

"I obtained an M.A. at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. I was the first Israeli in the program – all the other students were Arabs, some of them Palestinians from refugee camps. On the first or second day of Operation Cast Lead [in Gaza, 2008-2009], all the students painted themselves red and lay down on the ground on campus in protest. To hear their stories was amazing – some of them became my good friends. The campus demonstrations against the [current] war in Gaza have been an inspirational occurrence for me."

Despite the antisemitic tone that has accompanied them?

"Certainly there are antisemites on the fringes, kids of 18 to 21 who say dumb things. But go out into the street where you live, in Tel Aviv, and throw a paper airplane – there's a 70 to 80 percent chance that it will hit someone who will say that all the Gazans should be exterminated or move to the West Bank. I think it's disturbed to talk about fringe events in one of the important mobilization movements of the 21st century.

"The increase in antisemitism is frightening, but Israel and the Jewish organizations are pulling a fast one. Now it's also forbidden to say that Israel is an apartheid state, that it's built on foundations of colonialism, or that it's perpetrating genocide in Gaza – all that is suddenly subsumed under the category of antisemitism. The organizations and the state are trying to say that even a political opinion – opposition to Zionism – is antisemitism. That is dangerous because universities are liable to be found in violation of [U.S. law], which outlaws discrimination, and could be deprived of funding on a scale of hundreds of millions of dollars."

Do you anticipate that the demonstrations against Israel will continue?

"The universities are acting to smash the students' protests, but tremendous pressure is bubbling up, and every attempt to stop it will not succeed. The Israeli positions drive me up a wall. Precisely in the attempt to regiment the discourse, there's a much greater danger of [eliciting] an outbreak of antisemitism. In large measure, Israel is throwing the Jews of the world to the dogs. In other words, what's important to us is that people won't say negative things about Israel."

So even for someone like you, it's not easy to live and teach in the United States?

"To be an Israeli is a complex matter, even for those who hold my political views. I've been here for 16 years and I never saw anything like it. It's not only in the pro-Palestinian circles that I'm part of, but also in the grocery store. To be an Israeli is to be an outcast. I can understand why it's happening, but it saddens me that this is the situation we're in."