David Tal (Historian)

Tal held the Kahanoff Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Calgary, where he also served as director of the university's Israel Studies program.[2] His expertise during that period included Israel's diplomatic and military history, nuclear proliferation, and disarmament.[2] He later moved to the University of Sussex, where he holds the Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies.[3][1]

Before taking his post at Sussex, Tal served as a visiting professor at Emory University and Syracuse University.[3] At Emory, he taught courses on Israeli national security and the development of the U.S.-Israel relationship.[4][5] He also led a seminar on Israeli foreign policy.[6] At Syracuse, he taught a Fall 2006 course on the Arab-Israeli conflict.[7]

Tal's 1998 book, Israel's Routine Security Policy: Foundations and Developments, 1949–1956, examined the formative period of Israeli security policy.[3] His 2004 book, War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy, addresses the military and diplomatic dimensions of the War of Independence.[3] The book was later cited as a reference for the stages of the war.[8]

His 2008 study, The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945–1963, extended his work beyond the Middle East to the broader Cold War nuclear question.[3] Tal also edited The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East (Frank Cass, 2001) and Israel Identity: Between East and West (Routledge, 2008).[3]

His 2025 book, The Strained Alliance: George H. W. Bush, Yitzhak Shamir and the US-Israel Special Relationship (Cambridge University Press, October 2025, 312 pages, ISBN 9781009687775), draws on newly declassified materials from American and Israeli state and non-state archives.[1] The study covers the period from 1989 to 1992 and addresses the peace process, loan guarantees, military aid, and what the listing calls "emotional diplomacy." Tal argues that the perception of U.S.-Israel relations as dominated by policy disagreements is misleading and that substantial cooperation continued behind the scenes throughout this period.[1]

Tal's journal output covers several distinct phases of Israeli history. On the 1948 war, he published "Between Intuition and Professionalism: Israeli Military Leadership during the 1948 Palestine War" in Journal of Military History 68, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 885–910, and "The Forgotten War: Jewish-Palestinian Strife in Mandatory Palestine December 1947–May 1948" in Israel Affairs, Spring/Summer 2000, vol. 6, nos. 3/4, pp. 3–22.[4][9] The latter examines the civil or inter-communal stage of the conflict before the Arab states intervened in May 1948.

On the lead-up to the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Tal published "The Road to the 1956 War" in International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996), pp. 59–81, and contributed "Israel's Armistice Wars, 1949–1956" to the volume A Never-ending Conflict: A Guide to Israeli Military History (2004), pp. 69–86.[4][7] His earlier article "American-Israeli Security Treaty: Sequel or Means to the Relief of Israeli-Arab Tensions, 1954–1955" appeared in Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1995), pp. 829–848.[4]

For U.S.-Israel relations more broadly, he published "Seizing Opportunities: Israel and the 1958 Crisis in the Middle East" in Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 1 (January 2001), pp. 142–158, and "Symbol or Substance? Israel's Campaign to Acquire Hawk Missiles, 1960–1962" in International History Review 22, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 304–317.[5] He also wrote "Paving the Road to War: Israeli Diplomacy and the 1967 Crisis," published in Global Politics (2001), pp. 201–218, and "The 1948 War in Palestine Historiography: The Missing Dimension" in Journal of Israeli History 24, no. 2 (Autumn 2005), pp. 183–202.[7]

In his chapter "Civilian Settlement: Not Designed to be a Fortress of Power," contributed to the INSS volume The Lessons of Operation Protective Edge (November 2014), Tal writes that the settlement-security ethos was "entirely without foundation" and rejects the traditional idea of settlements as "fortresses of power with military significance."[3] He argues that Jewish settlements were generally established in areas with relatively small Arab populations, while few were founded in heavily Arab areas such as Judea, Samaria, and the central Galilee. Hanita and Kfar Darom, he notes, were in areas assigned to the proposed Arab state under the UN partition plan. In his account, geography, demography, and existing population blocs—not the settlement map—shaped the partition borders.[3]

Tal extends this argument to military operations in the War of Independence. The IDF conquered the central Galilee despite the absence of Jewish settlements there, while Egyptian forces held Kfar Darom despite its Jewish presence, demonstrating that the military campaign did not simply follow settlement locations.[3] He also notes that Haganah and IDF leaders had not adequately prepared to evacuate civilians from frontier communities before the Arab invasion began on May 15, 1948. The evacuations that followed were improvised and difficult, yet Tal argues that they freed fighting forces to move away from the communities and concentrate on the principal military effort rather than harming the war effort.[3]

For the post-1948 period, Tal describes the regional-defense system as an attempt to use frontier settlements as obstacles to invading forces and as artificial strategic depth. He contrasts this with David Ben-Gurion's September 1949 announcement that IDF formations would be built around attack forces rather than static defense. Despite Ben-Gurion's declaration, Tal argues that the settlement-security ethos persisted as a cultural and political idea even though frontier settlements played no practical role in defense against an Arab invasion. He cites the evacuation of civilians from the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as another case in which settlement played no military role.[3]

In the same 2014 INSS chapter, Tal applies his historical analysis to Operation Protective Edge. He credits Iron Dome with preventing serious casualties and giving the Israeli government greater freedom of action, noting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that the system influenced his decision not to send IDF forces into the heart of Gaza.[3] At the same time, Tal distinguishes between the protection Iron Dome provided and the exposure of western Negev communities to heavy mortar fire, short-range rockets the system could not adequately intercept, and the threat of cross-border tunnels.[3]

Tal argues that Israel should have organized evacuations for civilians exposed to those threats, while acknowledging objections based on economic concerns and fears of signaling a Hamas victory. He contends that evacuating civilians does not constitute relinquishing sovereignty, pointing to Israel's retained sovereignty over sparsely populated border areas. He presents Britain's preparations to evacuate children from cities threatened by German bombardment during World War II as a relevant historical precedent and concludes that the principal obstacle to organized civilian evacuation in Israel is conceptual rather than organizational.[3]