Efraim Karsh

Karsh was born on September 5, 1953, in Israel.[1][2] He studied Arabic language and culture and modern Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, receiving a B.A. in 1975.[3] He subsequently earned an M.A. in international relations at Tel-Aviv University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in the same field in 1985.[3]

His academic training overlapped with military service: from 1974 to 1981, he worked as an intelligence analyst in the Israel Defense Forces and reached the rank of major.[3] He is married to historian Inari Rautsi, with whom he co-authored Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography.[1]

From 1982 to 1985, Karsh was director of studies in international relations at Israel’s Open University.[3] He served as a senior research fellow at Tel-Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies from 1984 to 1989 and as a lecturer in political science at the university from 1986 to 1989.[3] His research interests included Middle Eastern affairs, particularly Israel and Iraq and their relations with Europe and the United States, as well as Soviet foreign policy.[1]

Karsh joined King’s College London as a lecturer in War Studies in 1989 and became a reader, or associate professor, in 1992.[3] In 1994, he founded its Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program, which he directed until 2010.[3] The program provided postgraduate teaching and research on the region’s history, politics, economics, and international relations.[3] He held a professorship in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from 1996 until October 2014.[3]

His visiting and research appointments included Harvard University, Columbia University, Helsinki University, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.[1][3] He was director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia from 2011 to 2012.[3] In 2013, he joined the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies as a senior research associate and became a professor at Bar-Ilan University.[5] His areas of specialization included the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, superpower involvement in the Middle East, and Islamic history and politics.[5]

Karsh succeeded Efraim Inbar as director of the Begin-Sadat Center in November 2016.[6] His later curriculum vitae dates his directorship to 2016–2021 and his professorship in political studies at Bar-Ilan to 2013–2021, followed by emeritus status at Bar-Ilan and King’s College London.[4]

Alongside university appointments, Karsh developed an extensive editorial career.[3] He became founding editor of Israel Affairs in 1994 and editor of Middle East Quarterly in 2010.[3] He also founded a Routledge series on Israeli history, politics, and society; his 2023 curriculum vitae states that the series had published more than 70 books.[4] That figure describes the series’ output, rather than the number of books Karsh himself authored.[4] A 2016 professional biography listed his own output as more than 100 scholarly articles and sixteen books.[7]

Karsh also provided expert evidence in litigation concerning British Airways aircraft in Kuwait.[8] A 2003 UK Court of Appeal judgment records that he and Lawrence Freedman, his co-author on The Gulf Conflict, testified for opposing parties.[8] On the disputed question of whether the aircraft had been targeted as part of an Iraqi policy of plunder, the trial judge preferred Freedman’s interpretation.[8]

Karsh’s early books examined Soviet policy, military intervention, and regional security.[1] They included The Cautious Bear: Soviet Military Engagement in Middle East Wars in the Post-1967 Era (1985), The Soviet Union and Syria: The Asad Years (1988), and Neutrality and Small States (1988).[1] His broader publication record includes work on the Iran-Iraq War, Israeli security, and Middle Eastern diplomacy.[1]

Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, co-written with Inari Rautsi, first appeared in 1991.[1] Karsh and Lawrence Freedman also co-authored The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order, listed in his curriculum vitae with a 1993 publication date.[3] With Inari Karsh, he published Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 in 1999.[1]

Fabricating Israeli History: “The New Historians” appeared in 1997, with an expanded second edition in 2000.[3] In it, Karsh challenged interpretations advanced by historians commonly grouped as the New Historians.[3] His criticisms included allegations of mistranslation, quotation out of context, misquotation, and alteration of source material, as well as objections to the underlying premises of the interpretations he examined.[1] Related articles addressed Benny Morris, David Ben-Gurion, and the idea of population transfer.[3]

His later books included Arafat’s War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (2003), Islamic Imperialism: A History (2006), Arab Imperialism: The Tragedy of the Middle East (2006), and The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The 1948 War (2009).[1] In Islamic Imperialism, Karsh challenged explanations of Middle Eastern conflict centered primarily on Western dominance since World War I, arguing instead for the importance of Islam’s own history of imperial expansion.[1] The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East followed in 2015.[3]

Palestine Betrayed, published by Yale University Press in 2010, presented Karsh’s interpretation of the period from 1920 to 1948 and the events surrounding Israel’s War of Independence.[9] In his review, historian Itamar Rabinovich described it as a counter-revisionist account grounded in years of archival research.[9] Karsh’s central argument was that Palestinian leaders and Arab states, rather than Britain or the Zionist movement, betrayed the Palestinian cause.[9]

In Rabinovich’s account of the book, Karsh maintained that most Palestinians were not opposed to the Zionist enterprise before the later Mandate years and that Jewish-Arab economic cooperation and coexistence continued during that period.[9] Karsh argued that, after World War II, the Mufti and his allies regained control of Palestinian politics, rejected compromise with Zionists, and joined Arab-state leaders in rejecting the United Nations partition resolution.[9] He also argued that most Arabs who left territory under Jewish control did so voluntarily, while acknowledging instances of expulsion.[9]

Karsh further maintained that Palestinians initially attributed their 1948 catastrophe to their own leadership, with Israel becoming the principal culprit in their national narrative only from the early 1950s.[9] In a supportive review, Asaf Romirowsky highlighted the book’s accounts of Arab leaders preferring the departure of Haifa’s Arabs to a truce with the Haganah and of Ben-Gurion calling for peace with Israel’s neighbors after a ceasefire.[10] An Israel Hayom opinion article subsequently reported Karsh’s estimate of Palestinian refugees as between 583,121 and 609,071, based on figures organized by city, town, and village.[11]

In his 2016 study The Oslo Disaster, Karsh called the Oslo process “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history.”[12] He argued that it harmed both Israelis and Palestinians and made peace and reconciliation more remote.[12] He attributed the failure in part to what he regarded as the Palestinian leadership’s use of Oslo to subvert Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state alongside it.[12]

Karsh’s shorter historical studies have also examined the Six-Day War and the Balfour Declaration.[6][13] In a 2017 article on the Six-Day War, he rejected an explanation centered simply on accidental escalation or miscalculation.[6] He identified Arab rejection of Jewish statehood as the broader cause, while distinguishing it from the immediate events of June 1967 and examining pan-Arab politics and Nasser’s decisions during the crisis.[6]

In another 2017 study, Karsh challenged the portrayal of the Balfour Declaration as a cause of the Nakba.[13] He argued that Britain consulted its wartime allies before issuing the declaration, that it subsequently received international endorsement, and that Palestinian Arab leaders’ rejection of partition shaped the course leading to the Palestinian catastrophe.[13] A Tikvah Ideas selection presenting his argument also highlighted his claims of support from Emir Faisal and Emir Abdullah and of an Ottoman expression of sympathy in August 1918 for a Jewish religious and national center in Palestine.[14]

The Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King’s College London, Israel Affairs, and the Routledge series on Israeli history, politics, and society are institutional and editorial projects Karsh founded during his career.[3] His work combined postgraduate teaching, scholarly publishing, and strategic-policy research, including leadership of the Begin-Sadat Center.[3][4]

His articles have also appeared in teaching materials on Israeli foreign policy.[15] A Center for Israel Education syllabus included “Zionism and the Palestinians,” published in Israel Affairs 14, no. 3 (2008), pages 355–373, and “How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were There?,” published in Israel Affairs 17, no. 2 (2011), pages 224–246.[15] His bibliography spans Soviet involvement in the Middle East, Iraqi leadership, international diplomacy, Islamic history, and Israel’s history.[1][3]

Karsh’s criticism of the New Historians and his account of Palestinian displacement form part of a sustained historiographical dispute over Israel’s War of Independence and early history.[3][9] In his review of Palestine Betrayed, Itamar Rabinovich argued that Karsh’s concentration on Palestinian and Arab leadership obscured Israel’s role as the other protagonist in a national conflict.[9] He also criticized the book’s treatment of the post-1948 period as oversimplified and described the exchanges between Karsh and Benny Morris as sometimes resembling a personal feud.[9]

One specific disagreement concerned a handwritten letter from Ben-Gurion to his son Amos.[16] Karsh argued that its context contradicted an interpretation presenting it as evidence of support for expulsion.[16] Morris subsequently reconsidered his reading of the passage and acknowledged its difficulties, while maintaining his broader disagreement with Karsh over Zionist leaders’ attitudes toward population transfer.[16]

Reception of Arafat’s War also varied: reviews ranged from a qualified library recommendation emphasizing its pro-Israeli perspective to praise for its argument, pace, and scope.[17] These responses, like the debate over Palestine Betrayed, concern the interpretation and emphasis of Karsh’s historical writing rather than a single agreed assessment of it.[9][17]