About the Author:
Benny Morris is a world-renowned author and Professor of Middle East History at Ben-Gurion University. His pioneering revisionist work on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem and on Israeli-Arab relations during the 1950s has overturned some of the most basic assumptions about the formation of the State of Israel, and has made him one of the most respected and controversial historians working there today. His books include 'Righteous Victims', 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem', '1948 and After', 'Israel's Border Wars (1949-1956)' and 'The Roots of Appeasement'.
From Publishers Weekly:
Morris is one of the leading figures of the "post-Zionist" school of history, challenging what he sees as untenable myths regarding Israel's nature and founding. He is best known for asserting, in The Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, that systematic dispossession of Palestine Arabs was, at the time of Israel's founding, a conscious Israeli policy. The second intifada has seemingly altered his views on Israeli culpability in the current political situation, as a recent series of colloquies between Morris and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, published in the New York Review of Books, makes clear, but this book continues his revisionist historical work. John Bagot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, was a British officer who commanded Jordan's Arab Legion, the best Muslim fighting force in the Middle East, between 1936 and 1956. He has a corresponding reputation, fuelled by his post-retirement writings and speeches, as pro-Arab and anti-Israel, to the point of being seen as anti-Semitic. Morris makes sophisticated use of primary sources to present a more nuanced evaluation of Glubb as someone simultaneously loyal to the British government and the state of Jordan. He finds that Glubb accepted on pragmatic grounds the agreement King Abdullah made in principle with Israel's Golda Meir for the partitioning of Palestine. According to Morris, however, when Glubb and Abdullah entered the 1948 war, they did not seek the annihilation of Israel. Instead they waged limited war for limited objectives previously conceded by the Yishuv. Morris contends that Arab policy as a whole during the war followed on this action: it was designed to hurt the Jews, score domestic political points and compensate for Jordan's projected gains, but not to destroy Israel as a state.
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