Israeli history's definitive rewrite - Eureka Street

Israeli history's definitive rewrite

PHILIP MENDES JANUARY 09, 2009

Morris, Benny; 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press, 2008. RRP $32.50. ISBN 9780300126969


Israeli history's definitive rewrite - Eureka Street: "Overall, this is a beautifully written and comprehensively researched book.

There are a few minor omissions in the bibliography. For example, Morris does not directly respond to the contentious 'ethnic cleansing' thesis advanced by the anti-Zionist Israeli author Ilan Pappe in his two recent books. Nor does he cite the key works by Israeli historians Moshe Gat and Maurice Roumani on the respective Jewish exoduses from Iraq and Libya.



And surprisingly he makes no reference to local author Chanan Reich's book Australia and Israel in discussing the Australian approach to the 1947 UN vote.
But these caveats aside, this dispassionate and nuanced history is likely to be widely accepted as the definitive account of the 1948 war.
Benny Morris is speaking to a public forum at Monash University in Melbourne this Sunday night, 14 September. Details
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