Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh | |
|---|---|
אפרים קארש | |
 Karsh in 2019 | |
| Born | 6 September 1953 |
| Academic background | |
| Education |
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| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Historian |
| Institutions | King's College London |
Efraim Karsh (Hebrew: אפרים קארש; born 6 September 1953)[1] is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies[2] at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University (where he also directs[3] the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies).[3] He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum,[4] a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Early life and education
Born and raised in Israel to Jewish immigrants to the Palestine Mandate, Karsh graduated in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and obtained an MA and PhD 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 Defense Forces (IDF), where he attained the rank of major.[citation needed]
Academic and media career
Karsh 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. In 1989 he joined King's College London, where he established the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program, directing it for 16 years. 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, and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. 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.[5]
Views
In his 2010 book Palestine Betrayed, followed by a 2011 editorial in Haaretz, Karsh articulated his belief that the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight was "exclusively of their own making". Karsh writes that many Palestinians fled their homes as the result of pressure from local Arab leaders "and/or the Arab Liberation Army that had entered Palestine prior to the end of the Mandate (Mandatory Palestine), whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state." He stated that there is an "overwhelming and incontrovertible body of evidence" to support his position including "intelligence briefs, captured Arab documents, press reports, personal testimonies and memoirs..."[6] Karsh states that "the deliberate depopulation of Arab villages and their transformation into military strongholds" began in December 1947.[6]
Karsh rejects the Palestinian demands for a right of the return, citing a need for Israel to maintain its Jewish character. "However, even if the more restrictive Israeli figures were to be accepted, it is certainly true, just as Amos Oz darkly predicts, that the influx of these refugees into the Jewish State would irrevocably transform its demographic composition. At the moment, Jews constitute about 79 percent of Israel's six-million-plus population, a figure that would rapidly dwindle to under 60 percent. Given the Palestinians' far higher birth rate, the implementation of a 'right of return', even by the most conservative estimates, would be tantamount to Israel's transformation into an 'ordinary' Arab state."[7]
Selected book summaries
Empires of the Sand
Karsh's Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1922 was published in 1999, co-written by his wife Inari Rautsi-Karsh.
Daniel Pipes called it a "tour de force that offers a profoundly new understanding of a key issue in modern Middle Eastern history:" and said that " Drawing on a wide range of original sources, and writing in a clearly organized fashion and in fast-paced prose, the Karshes make a very compelling case for their revisionist position, establishing it point by point and in elegant detail".[8][unreliable source]
Anthony B. Toth wrote in a review: "This is a polemical book whose authors have extended the intemperate and unbalanced rhetoric customarily employed by dogmatic partisans of the Arab Israeli conflict to the normally sedate and measured arena of nineteenth - and early twentieth-century Ottoman history. The book relies mainly on Western published sources and official documents of the British government. But their use of even these sources is limited, since they actually ignore most of nineteenth-century history. Instead, the authors emphasize those episodes they feel support their interpretations".[9]
Richard Bulliet, professor of history at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University wrote that Empires of the Sand is "a tendentious and unreliable piece of scholarship that should have been vetted more thoroughly by the publisher" and asserts that the authors failed to "contribute a dimension of sense and scholarship that raises the debate[s in question] to a higher level."[10] Karsh in response wondered "what credential did Bulliet possess, that a leading journal in the field should ask him to review our book? He is a medievalist who has done no research or writing on the subject. But in his spare time, he propagates the view of the Middle East and its nations as hapless victims of Western imperialism. In Middle Eastern studies that in itself is a sufficient credential to pronounce on anything. In his review, Bulliet rushes to absolve the Ottomans of responsibility for crimes they committed in their effort to keep their own empire intact. The evidence be damned - for it would not so well have served Bulliet's interest.".[11][better source needed]
Charles D. Smith, professor emeritus of Middle East history, states that the book is "essentially a work of propaganda, but still of use to students who wished to see how scholars could misrepresent sources".[12] In his 2010 review of the book, Smith says that "In order to sustain their arguments, the Karshes, as judged by their citations, ignore nearly all scholarship of the past thirty years or more on British policy generally or as it pertained to the Middle East during World War I.".[13]
Karsh states that his book "has incurred the ire of the Arabist establishment" and that "scathing indictments have been made, on the basis of hearsay, without writers taking the trouble to read the book. A leading academic has even urged fellow academics to place negative reviews on the website of a major Internet bookstore, so as to warn potential readers of our book."[14] Karsh further said "[the]conventional view – absolving Middle Easterners and blaming the West – is academically unsound and morally reprehensible. It is academically unsound because the facts tell an altogether different story of modern Middle Eastern history, one that has consistently been suppressed because of its incongruity with the politically correct dogmas of the Arabist establishment. And it is morally reprehensible because denying the responsibility of individuals and societies for their actions is patronizing and in the worst tradition of the 'white man's burden' approach, which has dismissed regional players as half-witted creatures, too dim to be accountable for their own fate... Little wonder therefore that Empires of the Sand was more favorably received by Middle Eastern intellectuals, fed up with being talked down to and open to real revisionism of their region's history after suffering decades of condescension from their paternalistic champions in the West."[14]
Islamic Imperialism
In 2006 Karsh published Islamic Imperialism: A History, stating that Islam started out as a Great Jihad that lasted over a thousand years, and persisted in the Ottoman Empire right up through World War I, and is still alive today with the jihad against Israel, the 9/11 Attack, al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc.[citation needed]
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In a review, professor of history Richard Bulliet stated:[15]
In a review, professor of history Robert Tignor stated:[16]
Writing in International Review of Modern Sociology, California State University professor Henry E. Chambers concluded his review with the words: "This politically driven history will lead readers astray and offers a flawed version of the Middle East."[17] In the review, professor of history Marian Gross writes:[18]
Reviewing the German translation of the book in Die Welt Des Islams, Erlangen University professor of history Thomas Philipp wrote:[19]
Jonathan Berkey writes in his review, that the core argument of the book is "controversial, and many readers will find it unconvincing". He finds Karsh's "discussion of premodern Islam misconstrues its history in some important ways". As for the use of "Islamic Imperialism", Berkey says that "At best, there is a tendency here to fall back on broad and unsupportable generalizations about Islam and Muslims that recent historians have rightly shunned".[20]
Reviewing the book, history professor William E. Watson from Immaculata University writes that "book destined to become a seminal study on the history of radical Islam"[21]
Palestine Betrayed
Karsh's 2010 book Palestine Betrayed is about the breakdown of relations between the Jewish and Arab communities between 1920 and 1948.
According to Karsh:
- "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution... There was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."[22]
In a review published by The Middle East Journal, Charles D. Smith was highly critical of Palestine Betrayed. Smith says that throughout the book, Karsh presents the Zionists as "sincere and open with Palestinians, as are the British", whereas "Palestinians and other Arabs, especially their leaders" are presented as "corrupt and untrustworthy". Karsh, according to Smith, deliberately distorts the main thrust of the Peel Commission Report and is "incapable of accepting the idea of Palestinian national aspirations".[12]
Israeli historian Benny Morris describes Karsh's portrayal of the British government as betraying the Jews in Palestine and ultimately reneging on their commitment to support Jewish statehood as "one-sided and without nuance".[23]
Hillel Cohen wrote a highly critical review of the work in The American Historical Review, describing "evasions of basic facts", and stating that "a book that discusses the 1948 Arab refugees yet fails to mention, for example, the psychological warfare waged by the Jewish forces, the transfer idea in Zionist thought, or the aerial bombardment of Palestinian towns—all topics on which abundance of information can be found in the very archives that were examined for this study—cannot be considered an authoritative book on 1948."[24]
Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, wrote favourably of the book in a review published by The National Review, saying: "With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees."[25]
Reception
Howard Sachar described Karsh as "the preeminent scholar-spokesman of the Revisionist (politically-rightist) Movement in Zionism."[26]
Prominent New Historian Benny Morris called Karsh's Fabricating Israeli History "a mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies that vividly demonstrates his profound ignorance of both the source material... and the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict," titling his article "Undeserving of a Reply".[27][better source needed] Morris adds that Karsh belabors minor points while ignoring the main pieces of evidence.[28]
Political scientist Ian Lustick commented that Karsh's writing in Fabricating Israeli History was malevolent, and his analysis erratic and sloppy.[29][30]
Yezid Sayigh, professor of Middle East studies, wrote that Karsh "is simply not what he makes himself out to be, a trained historian (nor political/social scientist)."[14][better source needed] Karsh accused Sayigh of a "misleading misrepresentation of my scholarly background" and retorted that Sayigh's remarks were "not a scholarly debate on facts and theses but a character assassination couched in high pseudo-academic rhetoric".[14]
In a review of Rethinking the Middle East, El-Sayed el-Aswad writes "It seems, in many cases, that whatever does not match the author's views is charged with fraud and deception".[31]
Published works
Books
- Palestine Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010). read online
- Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2006). read online
- La Guerre D'Oslo (Les Editions de Passy, 2005; with Joel S. Fishman). read online
- Arafat’s War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (Grove, 2003). read online
- Rethinking the Middle East (Cass, 2003). read online
- The Arab-Israeli Conflict. The Palestine War 1948 (Oxford, Osprey, 2002) - republished under the new title The Arab-Israeli Conflict. The 1948 War (Rosen Publishing Group, 2008). read online
- The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 (Oxford, Osprey, 2002). read online
- Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1922 (Harvard University Press, 1999; with Inari Rautsi-Karsh) read online
- Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (Cass, 1997; 2nd ed. 2000) read online
- Israel at the Crossroads, with Gregory Mahler, ( I.B. Tauris, 1994)
- 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). read online
- Soviet Policy towards Syria Since 1970 (Macmillan & St. Martin's Press, 1991). ISBN 978-0-333-52297-4
- Neutrality and Small States (Routledge, 1988). ISBN 978-0-415-61199-2
- 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).
Articles
- "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? Archived 16 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine
- Dear Diary: Juan Cole's Bad Blog
- "Were the Palestinians Expelled?"
- "European Misreading of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Finnish Foreign Minister Tuomioja – A Case Study" Archived 18 April 2007 at the Wayback Machine
- Beirut Bob, a review by Karsh of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation.
- "From Oslo to Be’eri: how the 30-years-long peace delusion led to Hamas’s 10/7 massacres" (Oct 2024)
Interview
- Sky News, Efraim Karsh debates 1948 with Ilan Pappe on Sky News
References
- "Karsh, Efraim". Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 8 March 2021.
- Professor Efraim Karsh, King's College London Research Portal
- "Posts by Prof. Efraim Karsh on Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies".
- Middle East Forum List of Staff
- Curriculum Vitae of Efraim Karsh
- Reclaiming a Historical Truth, Haaretz
- Efraim Karsh (2003). Rethinking the Middle East (Israeli History, Politics and Society). Frank Cass Publishers. p. 166.
- Daniel Pipes' review of 'Empires of the Sand', Commentary
- Toth, Anthony B. (January 2002). "Recent Books". Journal of Palestine Studies. 31 (2): 85–98. doi:10.1525/jps.2002.31.2.85.
- Richard W Bulliett. The Middle East Journal. Washington: Autumn 2000. Vol. 54, Iss. 4; p. 667–8
- "The Unbearable Lightness of My Critics", Efraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002, Volume 9: Number 3.[1]
- Smith, Charles D."Palestine Betrayed (review)." The Middle East Journal, vol. 65 no. 1, 2011, pp. 155-158. Project MUSE
- Smith, C. D. “Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 32, 2000, pp. 559–565.
- "The Unbearable Lightness of My Critics", Karsh, Efraim. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002.
- Bulliet, Richard W. (2008). "Review: Islamic Imperialism: A History by Efraim Karsh". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 40 (3): 485–486. doi:10.1017/S0020743808081038. JSTOR 40205968. S2CID 162527157.
- Tignor, Robert L. (7 February 2007). "Islamic Imperialism: A History. By Efraim Karsh (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006) 276 pp. $45.00". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 37 (4): 668–670. doi:10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.668. ISSN 0022-1953. S2CID 142830179.
- Chambers, Henry E. (2008). "Review: Islamic Imperialism by Efraim Karsh". Review of Modern Sociology. 34 (2): 315–317. JSTOR 41421690.
- Gross, Mary T. (1 April 2007). "Islamic Imperialism: a History: Efraim Karsh". Digest of Middle East Studies. 16 (1): 165–167. doi:10.1111/j.1949-3606.2007.tb00085.x. ISSN 1949-3606.
- Philipp, Thomas (2009). "Review: Imperialismus im Namen Allahs: von Muhammad bis Osama bin Laden by Efraim Karsh". Die Welt des Islams. New Series. 49 (1): 134–136. doi:10.1163/157006008X424995. JSTOR 27798287.
Imperialismus im Namen Allahs ist das Buch eines kenntnisreichen Historikers, der dem modischen Trend der pauschalisierenden Verunglimpfung des Islams und der Araber folgt und dessen politische Interessen seine Terminologie und Geschichtsanalyse deutlich dominieren.
- Berkey, Jonathan (September 2007). "Islamic Imperialism: A History ? By Efraim Karsh". The Historian. 69 (3): 513–515. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.2007.00189_2.x. S2CID 145654779.
- Watson, William E. (1 July 2006). "Islamic Imperialism: A History". History: Reviews of New Books. 34 (4): 135. doi:10.1080/03612759.2006.10526973. ISSN 0361-2759. S2CID 141512875.
- Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, (Yale University Press, 2010), xx.
- Morris, Benny. “Revisionism on the West Bank.” The National Interest, no. 108, 2010, pp. 73–81. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42896324.
- Cohen, Hillel (2011). "Review of Palestine Betrayed". The American Historical Review. 116 (2): 545–546. doi:10.1086/ahr.116.2.545. ISSN 0002-8762. JSTOR 23307856.
- Daniel Palestine Betrayed, Reviewed by Daniel Pipes, National Review 17 May 2010
- Sachar, Howard. "Palestine Betrayed Reviews". Yale University Press. Archived from the original on 22 January 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2011.
- "Morris, 1996, "Undeserving of a Reply", The Middle East Quarterly". Archived from the original on 16 August 2006. Retrieved 26 May 2006.
- Benny Morris, "Refabricating 1948", review of Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians." by Efraim Karsh, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Winter, 1998), pp. 81–95.
- I. Lustick, 1997, 'Israeli History: Who is Fabricating What?', Survival, 39(3), p.156–166
- I. Lustick, 1997, Survival, 39(4), p.197–198
- el-Aswad, el-Sayed (April 2004). "Rethinking the Middle East; Efraim Karsh". Digest of Middle East Studies. 13 (1): 82–85. doi:10.1111/j.1949-3606.2004.tb00996.x.
- 1953 births
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Efraim Karsh
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Efraim Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, and Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London.
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.
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Combine EditionsEfraim Karsh’s books
Average rating: 3.69 · 1,177 ratings · 165 reviews · 64 distinct works • Similar authors
Islamic Imperialism: A Historyby
Efraim Karsh
3.69 avg rating — 347 ratings — published 2006 — 13 editions
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The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988 (Essential Histories, 20)by
Efraim Karsh
3.72 avg rating — 180 ratings — published 1989 — 14 editions
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Palestine Betrayedby
Efraim Karsh
3.86 avg rating — 138 ratings — published 2010 — 9 editions
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The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948by
Efraim Karsh
3.58 avg rating — 106 ratings — published 2002 — 10 editions
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Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923by
Efraim Karsh
3.80 avg rating — 95 ratings — published 1999 — 5 editions
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Saddam Hussein: A Political Biographyby
Efraim Karsh,
Inari Rautsi
3.78 avg rating — 77 ratings — published 1991 — 11 editions
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The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle Eastby
Efraim Karsh
3.31 avg rating — 51 ratings — published 2015 — 8 editions
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Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquestby
Efraim Karsh
3.88 avg rating — 33 ratings — published 2003 — 8 editions
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Fabricating Israeli Historyby
Efraim Karsh
4.03 avg rating — 30 ratings — published 1997 — 7 editions
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Războiul Arabo-Israelian 1948by
Efraim Karsh,
Ruxandra Tudor (Translator)
3.41 avg rating — 17 ratings
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More books by Efraim Karsh…
Quotes by Efraim Karsh (?)
“On 20 March 1982, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, Khomeini announced that ‘as a special favour’ schoolboys between the ages of 12 and 18 years would be allowed to join the Basij and to fight for their country. Consequently scores of youths volunteered for action and were hastily recruited and provided with ‘Passports to Paradise’, as the admission forms were called. They were then given rudimentary military training, of a week or so, by the Pasdaran, and sent to the front where many of them ‘martyred’ themselves.”
― Efraim Karsh, The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988
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“In all these operations Iraq made extensive use of chemical weapons which, apart from Saddam’s determination to get the Iranians off Iraqi territory at all costs, reflected the generals’ lax attitude towards this operational mode. For all his lack of moral inhibitions and respect for international norms, Saddam’s overwhelming preoccupation with his political survival injected a strong element of restraint into his behaviour, which his generals lacked completely. For them chemical weapons were yet another category of armament whose use depended purely on their military value in the relevant circumstances. As Abd al-Rashid put it, ‘If you gave me a pesticide to throw at these swarms of insects to make them breathe and become exterminated, I would use it.”
― Efraim Karsh, The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988
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“The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.”
― Efraim Karsh, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948
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Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh is Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies; Professor Emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London; Professor of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University; Principal Research Fellow (and former Director) of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia), where he also edits the Middle East Quarterly.
He is a former Israeli military intelligence officer whose expertise and academic reputation was developed largely in officially oriented think-tanks and academic institutions, including one with significant links with the Israeli intelligence services. In recent years his academic impact has declined whilst he has become associated with organisations that have been criticised for their extremist politics and their spreading of misinformation about Muslims and the Middle East.
Institutional affiliations
Professor Karsh was awarded a BA by the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1974. He then served as an Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for seven years, where he ‘dealt with superpower involvement in the Middle East rather than with Arab affairs’. During this time he studied an MA at Tel Aviv University (which he completed in 1980).
Professor Karsh left the IDF in 1981 at the rank of Major and in 1982 became Director of Studies in International Relations at Israel’s Open University and an Assistant and Instructor in International Relations at Tel-Aviv University. He was awarded a PhD in political science and international relations by the latter institution in either 1984 or 1985.
Until 1989, Professor Karsh was a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, during which time he was seconded to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London (1985-86). In 1989 he joined King’s College, University of London as a Lecturer and then Reader in the Department of War Studies. He was appointed to the position of Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies in 1996. He has also held a number of fellowships and visiting positions at other institutions over the years.
Since the beginning of his academic career, Professor Karsh has worked at officially oriented think-tanks and academic institutions with close links with military and intelligence services. According to his CV, he began his post-graduate studies whilst a serving Israeli intelligence officer and was awarded his PhD whilst a research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies
The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies was founded in 1977 by Aharon Yariv, a retired major general and a former head of military intelligence at the Israel Defence Force (IDF). As Professor Nicholas J. Cull notes, prior to establishing the Center for Strategic Studies, Aharon Yariv was the Israeli government’s head of propaganda:
In response to a sense of increasing diplomatic distress over international criticism of Israel’s control of territories conquered in the Six Day War, the government decided to concentrate propaganda efforts in a special official body, the Information Ministry, entrusted to Brig. (res.) Aharon Yariv…
Though it claimed to be committed to the ‘highest academic standards’, the Jaffee Center, by its own account, was not a scholarly institute. Rather its research sought to ‘address the strategic community in Israel and abroad’ and to contribute to ‘Israel’s national security agenda’ and it maintained very close links with the Israeli military and intelligence services. In addition to Aharon Yariv and Ephraim Karsh, the Center employed a number of other former intelligence officers over the years, including Yossi Alpher, Shlomo Brom, Ephraim Kam and Aryeh Shalev. Indeed, so close was the relationship between the Center and Israeli intelligence that the Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence states that it can ‘be considered the academic equivalent to the Military Intelligence (MI) unit of the Israel Defense Forces’.
The Middle East Forum
In 2011, Professor Karsh was appointed director of the Middle East Forum (MEF), a right-wing think-tank that launched the controversial ‘Campus Watch’ and ‘Islamist Watch’ programmes. Karsh is also currently the editor of its flagship publication the Middle East Quarterly.
The MEF was founded by Daniel Pipes, a former scholar of the Middle East who since the mid-1980s has worked largely as a right-wing essayist and activist. Pipes and the MEF have been widely criticised for their campaigns against mainstream Middle Eastern scholarship in Canada and the United States. The Center for American Progress has argued that the MEF, and Pipes, are part of ‘a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts’ that ‘peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam’.
According to former MEF board member Jerry Sorkin, the MEF began to adopt a particularly extreme and pro-Israel position after the September 11th attacks. In 2002 it launched Campus Watch, an organisation described by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as a ‘transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars’. Daniel Pipes has labelled more than a hundred American scholars as ‘apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam’. The US scholar Juan Cole has accused him of ‘smearing and bullying people with whom he disagrees’ and of having spied on, threatened and lied about scholars on the Middle East. Professor Cole describes Pipes as a propagandist and an extremist who has supported ‘aggressive annexationist policies’ and ‘brutal murders and repression’ ‘to the hilt’. He also claims that Pipes has misrepresents Palestinians politics and specifically Palestinian attitudes towards Israel. According to Eyal Press, a journalist with The Nation, Pipes has a habit of ‘lifting quotes out of context’.
Professor Karsh has edited Daniel Pipe’s Middle East Quarterly since 2010, having first written for the journal in 1996. Karsh’s immediate predecessor as editor of the journal was Denis MacEoin, an author of crime thrillers and ghost stories with a background in religious studies. MacEoin, who remains a Senior Editor of the journal, emerged as a right-wing activist in 2007 after authoring a controversial report for the British think-tank, Policy Exchange. The report, titled The Hijacking of British Islam, claimed to ‘demonstrate unequivocally that separatist and hate literature, written and disseminated in the name of Islam, is widely available in the UK.’ The BBC subsequently uncovered evidence that the evidence in the report had been fabricated. After a mosque named in the report denied issuing one of the receipts for the ‘hate literature’, the BBC examined all the receipts that had been passed to them by Policy Exchange. Its expert identified concerns about five of the receipts. According to BBC Newsnight’s then editor Peter Barron:
- 1. In all five cases the mosques involved said the receipts did not belong to them.
- 2. The expert analysis showed that all five had been printed on an inkjet printer - suggesting they were created on a PC.
- 3. The analysis found ‘strong evidence’ that two of the receipts were written by the same person.
- 4. The analysis found that one of the receipts had been written out while resting on another receipt said to be from a mosque 40 miles away.
In addition to his role at Middle East Forum, MacEoin now runs a blog entitled ‘A Liberal Defence of Israel’ and is involved with pro-Israel advocacy in the UK.
The MEF is connected to other organisations involved in pro-Israel advocacy, and in spreading misinformation on Islam and Muslims, via its donor networks. An investigation by RightWeb found that the funding for the MEF comes primarily from pro-Israel organisations and other right-wing outfits. A number of its key donors support other alarmist outfits also identified by the Center for American Progress as part of ‘the Islamaphobia Network in America’. It found that between 2001 and 2009 the Middle East Forum received grants from six of the seven largest donors to anti-Muslim groups, meaning that it shared donors with all eight of the key anti-Muslim organisations identified by the authors of the report. In addition, the Middle East Forum has itself provided research grants to other allegedly Islamophobic organisations detailed in this report, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Center for Security Policy, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, MEMRI and NGO Monitor.
Bibliographical analysis
Professor Karsh is a prolific author. He refers in his CV to his own ‘vast scholarly output – 15 authored books, 15 edited volumes, 5 monographs, over 100 academic articles, and some 60 op-ed pieces’. A bibliographical analysis of his scholarly output however indicates a notable decline in citation by other scholars over the decade to 2013, whilst an examination of the themes of his writing suggests a shift away from conservative scholarship, towards far-right, pro-Israel, political activism.
The academic indexing service, ISI Web of Knowledge, as of 2013 contained a total of 99 articles authored or co-authored by Professor Karsh dating back to 1985 (roughly half of which were published in magazines and other non-peer reviewed publications). Together, these 99 articles were cited a total of 43 times in other articles indexed by ISI Web of Knowledge (38 times excluding self-citations).
The articles indexed by ISI Web of Knowledge between 1985 and 1990 (Professor Karsh’s first five years of academic publishing) overwhelmingly appeared in publications affiliated with foreign policy think-tanks, rather than scholarly journals. Of the thirteen articles indexed by ISI Web of Knowledge from this period, three were published in World Today and four in International Affairs, both of which are associated with the UK think-tank Chatham House (and only the latter of which is a peer reviewed publication). Two indexed articles were published in the German foreign policy magazine Europa-Archiv, one in the Middle East Journal, which is published by the Middle East Institute, and one in the peer reviewed scholarly Journal of Peace Research. Another two indexed articles were published in Orbis, the journal of the hawkish US Foreign Policy Research Institute. At that time, Daniel Pipes was the director of the US Foreign Policy Research Institute (out of which his Middle East Forum later emerged) as well as the editor of Orbis.
These early articles – which were largely strategic analyses of superpower rivalry in the Middle East – along with a number of other scholarly and non-scholarly articles published in the 1990s, remain Professor Karsh’s most cited body of work. Books are not included in ISI Web of Knowledge’s databases, but their scholarly impact can be gauged by Google Scholar, according to which Professor Karsh’s two most cited publications are The Gulf conflict, 1990-1991: Diplomacy and war in the new world order, a 1993 book co-authored with his King’s College colleague Lawrence Freedman, and Saddam Hussein: A political biography, a 1991 book co-authored with his partner Inari Rautsi.
As already noted, since the 1990s, Professor Karsh’s academic impact (as gauged by the citation of his articles in ISI Web of Knowledge’s databases) has declined significantly. For a decade now his work has appeared largely in non-scholarly publications and has been very rarely cited by other scholars. Figure 1 displays the total citations of articles authored or co-authored by Professor Karsh (indexed by ISI Web of Knowledge) by their year of publication.
--Figure 1 -- 
As shown in the graph, though Professor Karsh’s articles authored between the mid-80s and mid-90s have been fairly widely cited, indexed articles authored in the decade to 2013 have been cited only three times in total. These three citations are of two articles; one co-authored article published in the scholarly Journal of Contemporary History in 2004, and another published in Israel Affairs – a scholarly journal founded and edited by Professor Karsh (where Daniel Pipes is also a member of the editorial board).
In addition to those two cited articles, Professor Karsh has authored a further 23 indexed articles since 2003 which have not been cited by any other indexed articles in ISI Web of Knowledge’s databases. These include fifteen articles in the political magazine Commentary – which has described itself as ‘the intellectual home of the neoconservative movement’ – and another four in Karsh’s Israel Affairs journal.
This overall decline in academic impact has been contemporaneous with Professor Karsh’s increased engagement in right-wing activism, culminating in his appointment as director of the Middle East Forum in 2011.
Selective and misleading use of evidence
Professor Karsh’s affiliation with controversial right-wing pressure groups appears to have stemmed from his outspoken criticisms of Israel’s ‘new historians’ – a term used to describe a number of Israeli scholars who from the mid-1980s began to question key aspects of official Israeli history.
In 1996 – by which time he had by his own account ‘[given] up political history’ – Professor Karsh wrote several highly critical reviews of work produced by ‘new historians’ Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé. Responding to an article by Professor Karsh published in Daniel Pipes' Middle East Quarterly, Avi Shlaim accused him of distortion and misrepresentation and of making claims ‘without any basis in fact’. Similarly, Benny Morris referred to Professor Karsh’s article as ‘a mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies’. More recently, Morris has described Professor Karsh as ‘completely politically motivated, often unscholarly, and, in large part, propagandistic’.
Karsh’s criticisms of the ‘new historians’, and his defence of official Israeli history, led to the publication in 1997 of his third most cited work (according to Google Scholar), Fabricating Israeli History, which was republished in 2000. Reviewing the book on its original publication, Ian Lustick, founder and former President of the Association for Israel Studies, wrote:
- [H]owever likely readers are to be impressed by the intensity of Karsh’s pristine faith in Zionism, they are sure to be stunned by the malevolence of his writing and confused by the erratic, sloppy nature of his analysis. Errors, inconsistencies and over-interpretation there may be in some of the new Israeli histories, but nothing in them can match the howlers, contradictions and distortions contain in this volume.
Reviewing the second edition of the book, Professor Karsh’s King’s College colleague, the British-Israeli political scientist Ahron Bregman, wrote:
- Fabricating Israeli History, even in this new edition, is part of a disappearing school of thought, while a new generation of Israeli historians – open minded enough to look at all the evidence – is emerging.
Professor Bregman’s reference to ‘all the evidence’ (his emphasis) is significant since Professor Karsh has been repeatedly criticised for focusing on sources which support his argument, whilst failing to engage with the full range of evidence.
In a sympathetic review of his most recent book, Palestine Betrayed, Colin Shindler, Professor of Israeli Studies at SOAS, noted that Professor Karsh uses ‘selective quotation’ to argue that Palestinians are dedicated to an ‘eternal struggle’ against Israel.
Reviewing Professor Karsh’s 1999 book, Empires of the Sand (co-authored with his wife Inari Karsh), Charles D. Smith, noted the authors’ ‘extreme selectivity in citing their sources’, their ‘[failure] to consult key sources’ and their tendency to ‘[distort] the meaning and context of evidence they use.’ Professor Smith noted that
- They extract sentences out of context, or juxtapose documents that conflict with each other, to buttress their case, with no indication that their material as a whole often points in a different direction.
He continued:
- It is difficult to know how much of the misrepresentation in this book is deliberate or due to incompetence, but it is clear that material has been arranged to create impressions at odds with the full documentary evidence.
At least one example however, according to Professor Smith, pointed to a ‘deliberate selectivity of sources to obscure what occurred.’ He concluded that the book was ‘essentially a work of propaganda, but still of use to students who wished to see how scholars could misrepresent sources.’
Professor Karsh has also been accused of misrepresentation by the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). In 2010 Professor Karsh authored a New York Times opinion piece in which he sought to refute the ‘conventional wisdom that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a prerequisite to peace and stability in the Middle East. Since Arabs and Muslims are so passionate about the Palestine problem’. The ‘poll’ around which the piece was based was in fact not a scientific poll at all, but a website readers survey, whilst its wording referred not to Palestine or Palestinians but to respondents’ ‘level of interest in the “Middle East peace process”’. FAIR commented that:
Karsh’s claim that the Arab public is presently ‘apathetic’ about the plight of Palestinians rests on an unreliable Internet poll, and on excluding other polling that would suggest precisely the opposite. According to the Zogby/University of Maryland poll of Arab public opinion (5/09), 76 percent of respondents put ‘the Palestinian issue’ as either the ‘most important’ issue or as one of their ‘top 3 priorities.’
It concluded that Karsh had ‘erroneously treated an unscientific website poll as if it were a meaningful survey of public opinion, and misrepresented even its findings’. Funding In 1990/1, Professor Karsh’s research received support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s main funding body for social sciences, and he subsequently received some funding from the British Academy. Since 2003, however, his research has been supported by private foundations.
In 2007-10, he received a $260,000 grant (by far the largest he has ever received) from the Hertog Foundation for a book on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Hertog Foundation is the philanthropic foundation of the neoconservative businessman, Roger Hertog. It supports a number of right-wing, alarmist groups and extremist pro-Israel organisations. In recent years the Hertog Foundation has supported the Middle East Forum; the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which is used as a source by a number of proposed experts in this case; Commentary magazine, where Professor Karsh is a regular contributor; the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation notorious for smearing critics of Israel as anti-Semites; the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think-tank spun off from the leading US pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC; the Institute for Zionist Strategies, an Israeli organisation known for attacking Israeli academics; and the Centre for Security Policy. Two other notable grant recipients are the Central Fund of Israel and the Israel Independence Fund, both of which support far-right Israeli settlement organisations.
Conclusion
Though Professor Karsh is an accredited scholar, he has no particular expertise in Palestinian politics or society.
Moreover, his scholarly impact has declined significantly as he has become closely affiliated with individuals and organisations criticised for spreading propaganda and misinformation.
His writings, which have been funded by right-wing foundations, have been widely criticised as propagandistic and unscholarly, and he has been accused of misinterpreting information and quoting out of context.
He cannot be considered a trustworthy source of independent expertise.
Affiliations
- Middle East Forum - Karsh is the editor of its flagship publication Middle East Quarterly
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