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December 19, 2016

Old Historians, New Historians, No Historians:
The Derailed Debate on 1948

Was Israel born in sin?

Raphael Israeli

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Was Israel born in sin? Alleged atrocities launched by the Jews during the 1948 War, the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, the conduct of the War of Independence, and the ensuing issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict refuse to disappear from our horizon 70 years later. Dr. Raphael Israeli contends that these recriminations are exaggerated and some historians are guilty of not having consulted the Arabic sources. They show that the basic hatred and rejection of nascent Israel by the Arabs would have been remained unchanged regardless of Israel’s actions.

Raphael Israeli

Raphael Israeli is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A graduate of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in History and Arabic Literature, he received his PhD in Chinese and Islamic History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Israeli has written 30 books and some 100 scholarly articles in the fields of Islamic radicalism, Islamic terrorism, the Modern Middle East, Islam in China and Asia and the Opening of China by the French. His books include The Iraq War: Hidden Agendas and Babylonian Intrigue and Living with Islam: The Sources of Fundamentalist Islam. His most recent book (2012) is The Oslo Process: The Euphoria of Failure

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