Ebook: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948

Parts of Efraim Karsh's history on the 1947-48 Arab-Zionist wars, mainly descriptions of Zionist/Israeli troop movements and tactics, are perhaps of some historical value, but much of the material is simply a rehash of long-ago discredited Zionist myths and canards.

That Efraim Karsh was still claiming in 2002 that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled their homes on "orders" from Arab leaders rather than as a result of forcible expulsions and numerous massacres committed by Zionist forces is a testament to either Karsh's blatant dishonesty or his incompetence as a historian, or perhaps both. His bold assertion that rapes of women by Zionist fighters "never happened" is just one example of Karsh creating his own historical "facts" out of whole cloth, as he apparently never bothered to consult Israeli military archives let alone accounts by Palestinian and Israeli witnesses.

At every turn Karsh goes to great extremes to cast Zionist and Israeli behavior in a benevolent or noble light, while invariably portraying Palestinian and other Arabs as greedy and cowardly and thus deserving of their catastrophic fates. His glaring omissions of critical information, such as the many warnings from prominent historical players, including Jews, that attempting to establish an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine against the wishes of the Palestinian population would lead to generations of strife reveals his utter inability to provide a credible or useful accounting of the conflict. Karsh's contention that the only reasons for British and American opposition to the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine were related to Cold War strategies or oil concerns is wholly disingenuous.

Most of the material in this book is better suited for a romantic (and racist) fantasy like Leon Uris's "Exodus" than it is for a serious work of history. Extremely disappointing.