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Efraim Karsh is Professor and Head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, London. A leading historian of the Middle East, 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.

Conflicts

Islamic History

Rejecting the received wisdom in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, which views "empire" and "imperialism" as categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States, and which regards Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, as the long-suffering victims of the West's aggressive encroachments, Karsh argues that the Middle East's experience is the culmination of long existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, first and foremost the region’s millenarian imperial tradition. External influences, however potent, have played only a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the Middle East’s political development nor the main cause of its volatility.

Karsh first developed this argument in Empires of the Sand: the Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1999)- a comprehensive reinterpretation of the origins of the modern Middle East that denies primacy to Western imperialism and attributes more responsibility to regional powers. Refuting the belief in a longstanding European design on the Middle East culminating in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the notion that the European powers broke the Middle East's political unity by carving artificial states out of the defunct entity.

In Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2006) Karsh takes this argument much further. He dually claims that the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with empire, and that, unlike Christianity, Islam has retained its imperial ambitions to the present day. From the Prophet Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam, according to Karsh, has been the story of the rise and fall of imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining the "lost glory" of the caliphate and establsihing the worldwide community of believers (or umma).

In Karsh's view, this vision is not confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This was starkly evidenced by, Karsh purports, an overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

New Historians

Starting with an article in the magazine Middle East Quarterly , Karsh alleged that the new historians "systematically distort the archival evidence to invent an Israeli history in an image of their own making". Karsh also provided numerous examples where, he claimed, the new historians "truncated, twisted, and distorted" primary documents. Avi Shlaim's reply defended his analysis of the Zionist-Hashemite negotiations prior to 1948, which Karsh had particularly attacked. Benny Morris declined immediate reply , accusing Karsh of a "mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies", but published a lengthy rebuttal in the Winter 1998 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Morris replied to many of Karsh's detailed accusations, but also returned Karsh's personal invective. Karsh also published an attack on an article of Morris , charging him with "deep-rooted and pervasive distortions".

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

• Homepage at King's College London
• "Arafat Lives", Commentary, January 2005, pp. 33-40. Reprinted in Ha-Umma (Hebrew)
• "Israel's Arabs v. Israel", Commentary, December 2003, pp. 21-27]
• What Occupation?
• Benny Morris and the Reign of Error
• Benny Morris' Reign of Error, Revisited, a review essay on Morris' revised edition of his book on the Palestinian refugee exodus.
• Dear Diary: Juan Cole's Bad Blog
• Review of International Law and Politics RILP
• "Were the Palestinians Expelled?"
• "European Misreading of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Finnish Foreign Minister Tuomioja - A Case Study"

References

1. Karsh, 1996
2. Shlaim, 1996
3. Morris, 1996
4. Karsh, 1999
5. Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1995, pp. 44-62

• Israeli historians
• Jewish historians
• Academics of King's College London