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Fabricating Israeli History
Israeli historiography is under assault by "new historians" exposing "Zionist narrative". This text takes issue with these "revisionists", arguing that they have ignored or misinterpreted much documentation in developing their analysis of Israel's history.
284 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1997
About the author
Efraim Karsh
59 books31 followersEfraim Karsh (Hebrew: אפרים קארש) is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University (where he also directs the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies). He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank.
Born and raised in Israel, Mr. Karsh earned his undergraduate degree in Arabic language and literature and modern Middle Eastern history from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his graduate and doctoral degrees in international relations from Tel Aviv University. After acquiring his first academic degree, he served for seven years as an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where he attained the rank of major.
Prior to coming to King's in 1989, Mr. Karsh held various academic posts at Columbia University, 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. In 2003 he was the first Nahshon Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at Harvard.
Mr. Karsh has published extensively on the Middle East, strategic and military affairs, and European neutrality. He is the author of fifteen books, including Palestine Betrayed (Yale); Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale); Empires of the Sand: the Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1798-1923 (Harvard); Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (Routledge); The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991 (Princeton); Saddam Hussein (Free Press); Arafat's War (Grove); and Neutrality and Small States (Routledge).
Mr. Karsh has appeared as a commentator on all the main British and American television networks and has contributed over 100 articles to leading newspapers and magazines, including Commentary, The Daily Telegraph, The International Herald Tribune, The London Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has served on many academic and professional boards; has acted as referee for numerous scholarly journals, publishers, and grant awarding organizations; has consulted the British Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as national and international economic companies/organizations; and has briefed several parliamentary committees. A recent CENTCOM directory of Centers of Excellence on the Middle East ranked Mr. Karsh as the fifth highly quoted academic among 20 top published authors on the Middle East, with his articles quoted three times as often as the best of the four non-American scholars on the list.
He is founding editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs, now in its sixteenth year, and founding general editor of a Routledge book series on Israeli History, Politics and Society.
(meforum.org)
Born and raised in Israel, Mr. Karsh earned his undergraduate degree in Arabic language and literature and modern Middle Eastern history from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his graduate and doctoral degrees in international relations from Tel Aviv University. After acquiring his first academic degree, he served for seven years as an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where he attained the rank of major.
Prior to coming to King's in 1989, Mr. Karsh held various academic posts at Columbia University, 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. In 2003 he was the first Nahshon Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at Harvard.
Mr. Karsh has published extensively on the Middle East, strategic and military affairs, and European neutrality. He is the author of fifteen books, including Palestine Betrayed (Yale); Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale); Empires of the Sand: the Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1798-1923 (Harvard); Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (Routledge); The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991 (Princeton); Saddam Hussein (Free Press); Arafat's War (Grove); and Neutrality and Small States (Routledge).
Mr. Karsh has appeared as a commentator on all the main British and American television networks and has contributed over 100 articles to leading newspapers and magazines, including Commentary, The Daily Telegraph, The International Herald Tribune, The London Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has served on many academic and professional boards; has acted as referee for numerous scholarly journals, publishers, and grant awarding organizations; has consulted the British Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as national and international economic companies/organizations; and has briefed several parliamentary committees. A recent CENTCOM directory of Centers of Excellence on the Middle East ranked Mr. Karsh as the fifth highly quoted academic among 20 top published authors on the Middle East, with his articles quoted three times as often as the best of the four non-American scholars on the list.
He is founding editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs, now in its sixteenth year, and founding general editor of a Routledge book series on Israeli History, Politics and Society.
(meforum.org)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 21, 2026
Fashion and institutional popularity cannot authenticate distorted historical facts. In an era where academic trends routinely reward ideological posturing over intellectual rigor, Efraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli History stands as a fierce, uncompromising defense of historical truth. While the "New Historians"—most notably Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappé—gained international acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s by claiming to "debunk" Israel's founding narrative, Karsh strips away their scholarly pretense to reveal a sobering reality: Karsh built his entire critique on a strict, meticulous return to the primary sources—declassified British, Israeli, and Arab archival documents—demanding that history be judged by hard textual evidence rather than ideological framing.
Decades after the 1947–1949 War of Independence, as the generation of decision-makers and eyewitnesses passed away, a vacuum opened in which documentary manipulation could easily displace living memory. This vulnerability was compounded in the Western world, where Middle Eastern studies fell under the dominant sway of political Arabists, subsidized by foreign funding, university chairs, and media pundits hungry for simplistic "David vs. Goliath" soundbites. In an environment where Israel-bashing became a prosperous academic industry, self-flagellating Israeli scholars who claimed to confess to manufactured founding sins were instantly embraced by partisan journals and mainstream television producers alike.
Yet the true power of Karsh’s work lies in his devastating textual analysis, cross-referencing revisionist claims against the actual archival record in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. What he exposes is a masterclass in academic malfeasance: truncated quotations that reverse the original speaker's meaning, statements cited that were never made, and the deliberate distortion of David Ben-Gurion’s letters to fabricate aggressive master plans that the documents explicitly refute.
Simultaneously, these revisionists completely erased Arab agency. In the works of Pappé or Shlaim, one could easily be led to believe that Arab rejectionism and jihadist ideology were modern inventions rather than driving forces of the 1948 war. Karsh sharply notes the absurd paradox that even critical Palestinian scholars like Rashid Khalidi exhibit more willingness to analyze the disastrous leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini and Yasser Arafat than the Israeli "New Historians" themselves. By reducing Palestinian leaders and Arab states to passive objects rather than active agents of their own political choices, the revisionist school commits a profound historical disservice.
Nowhere is this revisionist deceit more egregious than in its treatment of the British Mandate. Revisionist myths often attempt to frame the Jewish state as an imperialist proxy or allege a cozy "collusion" between Zionists and Transjordan with British blessing. Karsh blows this fantasy apart by documenting Britain’s relentless opposition to a viable Jewish state. From the White Paper restrictions that locked out desperate Holocaust refugees to British diplomatic maneuvering aimed at strictly minimizing Jewish territorial sovereignty, London’s policy was aggressively anti-Zionist. When war erupted, Britain did not stand neutral: it actively maintained defense treaties with Arab nations, supplied them with heavy weaponry, and allowed British officers—most notably Glubb Pasha—to command Transjordan’s Arab Legion. Meanwhile, the newborn State of Israel faced a brutal arms embargo, fighting for its very survival with severely limited access to military equipment. By restoring these crucial facts, Karsh proves that Israel’s survival was an against-all-odds triumph against a heavily armed Arab coalition backed by British power.
Ultimately, Fabricating Israeli History is a crushing blow to pseudo-scholarship. By replacing ideological mythology with unprejudiced common sense and rigorous archival proof, Karsh restores the integrity of the historical record. He reminds us that true scholarship demands the courage to follow the paper trail wherever it leads—unawed by academic trends, unbothered by media applause, and steadfastly committed to the unvarnished truth.
Decades after the 1947–1949 War of Independence, as the generation of decision-makers and eyewitnesses passed away, a vacuum opened in which documentary manipulation could easily displace living memory. This vulnerability was compounded in the Western world, where Middle Eastern studies fell under the dominant sway of political Arabists, subsidized by foreign funding, university chairs, and media pundits hungry for simplistic "David vs. Goliath" soundbites. In an environment where Israel-bashing became a prosperous academic industry, self-flagellating Israeli scholars who claimed to confess to manufactured founding sins were instantly embraced by partisan journals and mainstream television producers alike.
Yet the true power of Karsh’s work lies in his devastating textual analysis, cross-referencing revisionist claims against the actual archival record in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. What he exposes is a masterclass in academic malfeasance: truncated quotations that reverse the original speaker's meaning, statements cited that were never made, and the deliberate distortion of David Ben-Gurion’s letters to fabricate aggressive master plans that the documents explicitly refute.
Simultaneously, these revisionists completely erased Arab agency. In the works of Pappé or Shlaim, one could easily be led to believe that Arab rejectionism and jihadist ideology were modern inventions rather than driving forces of the 1948 war. Karsh sharply notes the absurd paradox that even critical Palestinian scholars like Rashid Khalidi exhibit more willingness to analyze the disastrous leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini and Yasser Arafat than the Israeli "New Historians" themselves. By reducing Palestinian leaders and Arab states to passive objects rather than active agents of their own political choices, the revisionist school commits a profound historical disservice.
Nowhere is this revisionist deceit more egregious than in its treatment of the British Mandate. Revisionist myths often attempt to frame the Jewish state as an imperialist proxy or allege a cozy "collusion" between Zionists and Transjordan with British blessing. Karsh blows this fantasy apart by documenting Britain’s relentless opposition to a viable Jewish state. From the White Paper restrictions that locked out desperate Holocaust refugees to British diplomatic maneuvering aimed at strictly minimizing Jewish territorial sovereignty, London’s policy was aggressively anti-Zionist. When war erupted, Britain did not stand neutral: it actively maintained defense treaties with Arab nations, supplied them with heavy weaponry, and allowed British officers—most notably Glubb Pasha—to command Transjordan’s Arab Legion. Meanwhile, the newborn State of Israel faced a brutal arms embargo, fighting for its very survival with severely limited access to military equipment. By restoring these crucial facts, Karsh proves that Israel’s survival was an against-all-odds triumph against a heavily armed Arab coalition backed by British power.
Ultimately, Fabricating Israeli History is a crushing blow to pseudo-scholarship. By replacing ideological mythology with unprejudiced common sense and rigorous archival proof, Karsh restores the integrity of the historical record. He reminds us that true scholarship demands the courage to follow the paper trail wherever it leads—unawed by academic trends, unbothered by media applause, and steadfastly committed to the unvarnished truth.
July 25, 2014
A little circumlocutory, this work deserves a rounding up to 4 on account of my gratitude for its service to the cause of integrity. By chance, it made passing reference to author Bernard Wasserstein's private admission of valid points for weakness to his method, but public persistence in denouncing Karsh; only the other day, I read what everyone touts as Wasserstein's complete impartiality, only to be stunned by his frequent departure for blatant bias.
Along the way of demonstrating by passage after passage how deceptive some historians are, bent upon portraying Zionism as an ultranationalist, racist force, another sad theme emerged of late British colonial policy deliberately militating against the success of the incipient nation and in favor of its Arab allies.
A small flavor of how Karsh strives to restore balance....
"What drives a person, who clearly belongs to his country's intellectual and social elite, to attack his native country in front of complete strangers, in terms well beyond the reasonable bounds of constructive criticism? . . . After all, there is a fundamental difference between voicing an opinion at a private meeting, or even a public gathering, and the investment of years of archival research geared solely to laying the basis for such an anti-Israel indictment. . . . While leafing through the book's English-language version, I came across a quote from a letter, written by David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos in 1937, stating that 'we must expel Arabs and take their places'. This rang a distant bell. Having read the book's Hebrew edition several years earlier, I recalled the letter as saying something quite different. Indeed, an examination of the Hebrew text confirmed my recollection. It read as follows: 'We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place ... All our aspiration is built on the assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.' . . . Perhaps this was merely a mistranslation, or even a typographical mistake? . . . To my bewilderment I discovered that there was scarcely a single document quoted by Morris which had not been rewritten in a way that distorted its original meaning altogether" (xvi-xviii).
"Take Morris' citation of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's words at the Israeli Cabinet meeting of 16 June 1948: 'But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war, Jaffa went to war against us. So did Haifa. And I do not want those who fled to return. I do not want them again to make war.' The key sentence here ('I do not want those who fled to return') is simply not found in the text of the meeting protocol. It is entirely of Morris's own making. The actual text reads as follows: 'But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged war on us, Bet She'an waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war. That would be not just but foolish. This would be a 'foolish hasid'. Do we have to bring back the enemy, so that he again fights us in Bet-She'an? No! You made war [and] you lost" (228-229).
Truly, as in all things, take precautions in consumption of sources.
Along the way of demonstrating by passage after passage how deceptive some historians are, bent upon portraying Zionism as an ultranationalist, racist force, another sad theme emerged of late British colonial policy deliberately militating against the success of the incipient nation and in favor of its Arab allies.
A small flavor of how Karsh strives to restore balance....
"What drives a person, who clearly belongs to his country's intellectual and social elite, to attack his native country in front of complete strangers, in terms well beyond the reasonable bounds of constructive criticism? . . . After all, there is a fundamental difference between voicing an opinion at a private meeting, or even a public gathering, and the investment of years of archival research geared solely to laying the basis for such an anti-Israel indictment. . . . While leafing through the book's English-language version, I came across a quote from a letter, written by David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos in 1937, stating that 'we must expel Arabs and take their places'. This rang a distant bell. Having read the book's Hebrew edition several years earlier, I recalled the letter as saying something quite different. Indeed, an examination of the Hebrew text confirmed my recollection. It read as follows: 'We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place ... All our aspiration is built on the assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.' . . . Perhaps this was merely a mistranslation, or even a typographical mistake? . . . To my bewilderment I discovered that there was scarcely a single document quoted by Morris which had not been rewritten in a way that distorted its original meaning altogether" (xvi-xviii).
"Take Morris' citation of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's words at the Israeli Cabinet meeting of 16 June 1948: 'But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war, Jaffa went to war against us. So did Haifa. And I do not want those who fled to return. I do not want them again to make war.' The key sentence here ('I do not want those who fled to return') is simply not found in the text of the meeting protocol. It is entirely of Morris's own making. The actual text reads as follows: 'But war is war. We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged war on us, Bet She'an waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war. That would be not just but foolish. This would be a 'foolish hasid'. Do we have to bring back the enemy, so that he again fights us in Bet-She'an? No! You made war [and] you lost" (228-229).
Truly, as in all things, take precautions in consumption of sources.
April 4, 2010
looks in depth into several instances of the very creative rewriting of historical events around the formation of Israel by those who would prefer that it hadn't been.
most readable is a late chapter on the history of UK involvement. their historic ties and treaties with the governments of the Arab countries they helped create after WWI goes a long way to explaining the continued entrenched hostility towards Israel.
most readable is a late chapter on the history of UK involvement. their historic ties and treaties with the governments of the Arab countries they helped create after WWI goes a long way to explaining the continued entrenched hostility towards Israel.
January 31, 2016
Although this is by no means a complete introduction to historical research or the Israeli/Arab conflict, the author provides many useful lessons on both topics throughout the work. I find Karsh's accusations of dishonesty, lack of balance, and sheer laziness convincing in most regards. It is difficult to acknowledge error, but malfeasance can generally only be judged by others, since humans are terrible at admitting wrongdoing. I believe that many of the writers Karsh eviscerates in this volume have the intention to deceive their audience. This is an unfortunate and growing problem in academia. I worry that this will perpetuate conflict, instead of resolving it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews