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Efraim Karsh
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Efraim Karsh (; born 1953) is Professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. An historian of the Middle East, and a best-selling author, he is regarded as the most vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the conventional history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
and raised in Israel, Karsh graduated in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and obtained an MA and Ph.
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Encyclopedia
Efraim Karsh (; born 1953) is Professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. An historian of the Middle East, and a best-selling author, he is regarded as the most vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the conventional history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Background
Born and raised in Israel, Karsh graduated in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and obtained an MA and Ph. D in International Relations from Tel Aviv University.
After acquiring his first academic degree in modern Middle Eastern history, he was a research analyst for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), where he attained the rank of Major.
Academic career
He has held various academic posts at Harvard and Columbia universities, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, Helsinki University, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington D.C., and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
He has published extensively on Middle Eastern affairs, Soviet foreign policy, and European neutrality, and is a founding editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs. He is a regular media commentator, has appeared on all the main radio and television networks in the United Kingdom and the United States, and has contributed articles to leading newspapers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,The Wall Street Journal, The Times (London) and The Daily Telegraph.
Praise
Richard Bernstein of The New York Times reviewed Empires of the Sand:
- A readable, scholarly re-examination of a long and complicated Middle Eastern history [...] The Karshes provide useful historical backgrounds to the emergence of independent countries in Egypt, Greece, the Balkans and former Danube principalities like Serbia and Romania. But the main purpose of this very detailed and broad-shouldered history is to revise many of the standard interpretations that have been given to Middle Eastern history over the last two centuries. Most generally the Karshes dispute the idea that the main events and developments in the region stem from the machinations of the great powers, especially Britain and France. The ‘main impetus behind regional developments,’ they write, was ‘the local actors’ [...] The authors write clearly and authoritatively and with great geographical sweep. Those who do not know much of these events will learn a great deal from this book, while specialists with views differing from the Karshes’ will face a robust challenge to their interpretations.
Itamar Rabinovich of The International History Review commented on Fabricating Israeli History:
- Whatever the future holds for the New Historians, nobody interested in their views can afford to bypass Karsh’s insightful work..
Daniel Pipes in the Middle East Quarterly said:
- [This is] the first full-length and detailed rebuttal to those Israeli scholars who call themselves the ‘new historians’ [...] Karsh’s key strength is the application of unprejudiced common sense to clarify issues clouded by the pseudo-scholarship of propagandists..
In reviews of Fabricating Israeli History, Benny Morris was forced to concede certain refutations made by Karsh:
- Karsh has a point. My treatment of transfer thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial...He is probably right in rejecting the transfer interpretation I suggested in The Birth to a sentence in [a speech by Ben-Gurion on December 3, 1947]..
- Karsh appears to be correct in charging that I stretched the evidence to make my point..
Amir Taheri in the Sunday Telegraph praised Islamic Imperialism:
- “Anyone interested in the debate about the place of Islam in the modern world should read this book … Karsh offers a new approach. He rejects the condescending approach of the apologists and the hateful passion of the Islamophobes. Instead he presents Islam as a rival for Western civilization in what is, after all, a contest for shaping of mankind..
Criticism
Karsh's work on the Middle East has received criticism. In a review of Empires of the Sand, Dr. Anthony Toth (D.Phil, Oxford) says
This is a polemical book whose authors have extended the intemperate and unbalanced rhetoric customarily employed by dogmatic partisans of the Arab Israeli conflict to the normally sedate and measured arena of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman history.
and
The book relies mainly on Western published sources and official British documents. But their use of even these sources is limited, since they actually ignore most of nineteenth-century history. Instead, the authors emphasize those episodes they feel support their interpretations.
In an answer to Karsh's criticism on the New Historians, Morris responded in four lines:
- Efraim Karsh's article (...) is a mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies that vividly demonstrates his profound ignorance of both the source material (...) and the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict. It does not deserve serious attention or reply.
Morris later gave more extensive criticism in a review of Fabricating Israeli History:
- But this is Karsh's way, to belabor minor points while completely ignoring, and hiding from his readers, the main pieces of evidence.
and
- It is a measure of Karsh's ignorance of what actually went on in the Middle East in 1948 that he writes (p. 97) of "the Arab attack on the newly-established State of Israel, in which Transjordan's Arab Legion participated." Quite simply, it did not. and Karsh employs his usual method of focusing on the one document that seems to uphold his argument-often while twisting its real purport-while simply ignoring the mas of documents that undercut it.
Political scientist Ian Lustick describes Karsh's writing in Fabricating Israeli History as malevolent and the nature of his analysis as erratic and sloppy. The book, he wrote, is ripe with 'howlers, contradictions and distortions'. Lustick points to six instances in which Karsh gives quotes that say the very opposite of what Karsh tells his readers they say. One example he gives is of a statement made by Golda Meir that Karsh alludes to in support of his argument that there was never an agreement between Abdullah of Transjordan and the Zionist leadership. In the quote itself, according to the interpretation of Lustick, Meir explicitly writes about an agreement: 'The meeting [in November 1947] was conducted on the basis that there was an arrangement and an understanding as to what both of us wanted and that our interests did not collide'.
Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King's College London Yezid Sayigh has commented of Karsh that, "He is simply not what he makes himself out to be, a trained historian (nor political/social scientist)," and encouraged "robust responses [that] make sure that any self-respecting scholar will be too embarrassed to even try to incorporate the Karsh books in his/her teaching or research because they can't pretend they didn't know how flimsy their foundations are." Citing his doctorate in political science and international relations and his undergraduate training in modern Middle Eastern history and Arabic language and literature, Karsh wrote that Sayigh's criticism were "not a scholarly debate on facts and theses but a character assassination couched in high pseudo-academic rhetoric".
Professor of History at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University Richard Bulliet, in an academic review, describes the Karshs Empires of the Sand as "a tendentious and unreliable piece of scholarship that should have been vetted more thoroughly by the publisher" and asserts that the authors failed to "contribute a dimension of sense and scholarship that raises the debate[s in question] to a higher level." Karsh in response wondered "what credential did Bulliet possess, that a leading journal in the field should ask him to review our book? He is a medievalist who has done no research or writing on the subject. But in his spare time, he propagates the view of the Middle East and its nations as hapless victims of Western imperialism"."
Books
Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2006);La Guerre D'Oslo (Les Editions de Passy, 2005; with Yoel Fishman);Arafat’s War (Grove, 2003);Rethinking the Middle East (Cass, 2003);The Arab-Israeli Conflict. The Palestine 1948 War (Oxford, Osprey, 2002);The Iran-Iraq War (Oxford, Osprey, 2002);Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1922 (Harvard University Press, 1999; with *Inari Karsh);Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (Cass, 1997; second edition 1999);The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in The New World Order (Princeton University Press, 1993; with *Lawrence Freedman);Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (The Free Press, 1991; with Inari Rautsi-Karsh);Soviet Policy towards Syria Since 1970 (Macmillan & St. Martin's Press, 1991);Neutrality and Small States (Routledge, 1988);The Soviet Union and Syria: The Asad Years (Routledge for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1988);The Cautious Bear: Soviet Military Engagement in Middle East Wars in the Post 1967 Era (Westview, 1985).
Further reading
Articles by Karsh
- , Commentary, January 2005, pp. 33-40. Reprinted in Ha-Umma (Hebrew)
- , Commentary, December 2003, pp. 21-27]
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- , a review essay on Morris' revised edition of his book on the Palestinian refugee exodus.
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- , a review by Karsh of Robert Fisk's
The Great War for Civilisation.
Interview
- , Efraim Karsh debates 1948 with Ilan Pappe on Sky News
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