This excellent book studies the career of John Glubb Pasha, the most influential of the British 'orientalist' corps of officers and officials serving in the Middle East until 1956. He commanded the Transjordan Arab Legion from 1939 to 1956 and played an important part in setting up modern Jordan by helping King Abdullah to establish his rule. In 1948 he led the Legion to a limited victory in the first Arab-Israeli war.

Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian, has based his book on extensive study in the archives of David Ben Gurion, the Israel Defence Forces, the Israeli State, the UN, the Haganah and St Anthony's College Middle East Centre, including the Glubb Papers, and in the Public Record Office.

Glubb retained the typical imperial contempt for both Jews and Arabs, especially for educated or urban people. But his opposition to Zionism was not based on his anti-Semitism, any more than his support for Arab aspirations was based on his anti-Arabism. He believed that opposing Zionism and supporting Jordan were policies that would strengthen Britain's hold in the Middle East. He was always a loyal servant of the British Empire, acting in what he saw as its best interests.

Morris supports the contention, made most notably by Avi Shlaim in his 1988 book, Collusion across the Jordan, that Israel and Jordan collaborated during the 1948 war. He shows how Israel and Jordan came to a secret understanding in November 1947 to partition Palestine and not to attack each other. Since the Transjordan Legion was much the best Arab force opposing Israel, the agreement showed that this war did not really threaten Israel with annihilation.

Jordanian forces invaded Palestine not to attack Israel but to annex its Arab-populated eastern regions. The Legion did not attack any area that the UN had planned for Israel. Israel broke the agreement by attacking the Legion in May, July and October 1948. The Legion took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, saving them from Israeli conquest. King Abdullah had done what the British government wanted, strengthening Jordan at the Palestinians' expense.

Despite of 500 pages of text the book however does not contain the details of secret operations. The fact of operation is stated and the poor detail is given. Also the book contains big and , to my mind, useless and bore description of internal MOSSAD intrigues. Few action. I've expected to find more.

Israel was spying on its Arab neighbors before it even formally existed, and has been doing it ever since. Back when the Haganah was battling the irregular Arab insurgents in the period of the British Mandate, warning of when those insurgents were going to attack, and where, was almost required. Fortunately, various Israelis who had lived among the Arabs and spoke their language were able to infiltrate those Arab groups, or suborn members of them, and gain the needed information.

When the War of Independance was won, the Israeli intelligence network settled into three different services: the Mossad, for external intelligence, the Shin Bet, for internal security, and the Aman, for military intelligence. This book covers all three in about equal measure, with digressions for other services like the small research unit that employed Jonathan Pollard, for instance. Much of the story remains classified, and is therefore either murky or just incomplete, or even unknown and not repeated here at all.

There's a scene in the movie Gettysburg where a Confederate spy named Harrison (played by the actor Cooper Huckabee) complains to his employer, Confederate General James Longstreet (Tom Berenger). Harrison had been an actor before the war, and he doesn't like spying because if you do it well, no one knows. It's only when you screw up that you get noticed. The same thing is true in the case of this book: especially in the last chapters, the story is a chronicle of the times the organization was in the news, and a spy organization like the Mossad or Shin Bet does its best to stay out of the headlines. When they fail, it's usually because of something they did wrong, or something they tried that failed. It would have been interesting to read about some of their successes too.

There is one further thing that I should register in the way of negativity. This isn't exactly a criticism, but it definitely detracts from the value of the book. Since the book was published in 1991, it's very dated, and could stand an update, if either or both of the authors would be able. I'm sure that some of the uncertainties of the late 80's in the book have been resolved, and it would be interesting to have the book continued into the 90s and beyond. Until that book comes out, this one is worthwhile, notwithstanding that it's more than a decade old.

This was a very interesting book. It gave a good background ans history of the intelligence services that serve Israel. You have to remember that Israel's very existance depends upon them having an above average intelligence machine. The Intelligence network of Israel have been acclaimed the best in the world.This book besides describing the intelligence services also tell of some of the operation that have been launched by these services. This book describes how the Israel intelligence services provided the location of all aircraft of the Arab world allowing the Israelis to destroy the aircraft of the Arab world and turn the six day war into a rout. The book also details the Israeli services gaining revenge on the terrorists who were responsible for the murder of the Israeli Olympic team during the 1972 olympics. There is also a section about the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann(the man in charge of the Final Solution) from Argentina. Especially interesting was the bombing of the Iraqui nuclear reactor that was made possible by Israeli intelligence. This book contains some very interesting reading about the accomplishments of Israeli Intelligence. This is an outstanding book that I certainly enjoyed.

This book, a series of somewhat related essays on the subject, has neither the impact nor the focus of the original work. It is a good book, however, and it fills in some interesting details.

There are a number of good things and a number of bad things about this book. In its favour, within each chapter, the narrative flows mellifluously and is far more readable than otherwise more informative books on the subject. Arguably, this is because Professor Morris is presenting more than facts alone, but also judgements, and despite claims for objectivity on the cover and in the preface, the very title of the book, Righteous Victims, is emotively loaded. While within each chapter the writing reads elegantly, between chapters are gaping holes in the history and, at the book's worst, the chapters jump from 1956 to 1967. Admittedly, the book portends to be an analysis of the Zionist-Arab conflict, rather than a general history, and some years were perhaps calmer than others. Yet over one decade is a substantial amount of time, given that the State of Israel's existence spans just over fifty years, and it is a stretch of imagination to believe that during the period between the Suez-Sinai War and The Six Day War nothing relevant to the subject happened. Other omissions in the book include a failure to account for the Jewish refugees from Arab lands who found sanctuary in Israel. In numbers these equalled the Arab refugees, the Palestinians, and were never compensated for their possessions, which remaining in Arab Lands, were also greater in value than that which the Palestinians lost. Surely these Jews from Arab lands significantly contribute to the political conciousness of Israel and its approach to its Arab neighbours? The acceptance of Jewish refugees from historical Arab persecution, besides for inspiring among a very small number of Israeli politicians the idea of the completion of a population exchange (the idea of repatriating Palestinians in Arab lands), must also undermine the putative justice behind the idea of a complete "right of return" which the Arab states demand for the Palestinians and which has played a central role in the conflict. The criticisms levelled by Professor Karsh against Morris for his account of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem remain relevant and unanswered (See Karsh's book "Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians'") . Given the extensive mobilisation of Egypt's army and Nasser's rhetoric, the description of the Six Day war as a product of mutual miscalculation on the part of the Israelis and the Egyptians seems outlandish at best. And there are similarly fishy appelations, interpretations and explanations which pepper the book, including a description of the moonlight as a main consideration for Egypt's choice to launch the surprise October War on Israel's holy Day of Atonement, which falls on the tenth day of a lunar month. The referencing is aesthetic, but I found the indexing very incomplete. Ultimately, the book's readable, but sometimes history appears to be the righteous victim. I'd feel hard done by if I were an Israeli, and if you purchase this book, I advise you to read it together with another history, perhaps Sir Martin Gilbert's "Israel : A History", to fill in the gaps and offer a more objective, purely factual account without any central argument.

Any book on the Arab Israeli conflict that is not 100% pro- Israel is labeled as objective, critical and balanced in the US. In his book, Benny Morris discusses some aspects of the Palestinian sufferings such as mass uprooting and deportations of the Palestinian people and to limited extent other forms collective punishments which makes his book a balanced book for the NY Times and the Washington Post. But as a Palestinian I do not see his book as objective but rather as an attempt to lay the blame squarely on the Palestinian people. He portrays the Palestinians as uncompromising, prone to violence, unsympathetic for the Jewish suffering and human suffering as well while the Israelis as the opposite: civilized, compromising, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

He begins his book by stating that Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, had killed many Jews during his era. He states this without going into the context of those events. It is simply stated as to some how show that as the Europeans, the Muslims had forced the Jews to find a home land and the Palestinians being mostly Muslims are partly to blame for their own suffering.

The overall tone of the book I thought was pro-Israel addressed to the liberal readers who are patient enough to read how Israel at times had to act inhumanely towards the Palestinians and commit acts that are not reflective of its "democratic" and "civilized" society but were forced to do so because the Palestinians forced them or gave them no other choice.

His thesis is basically Israel had acknowledged the Palestinian problem and was willing to make "painful compromises" to find a resolution but the Palestinians refused because the prefer terrorism as a way of life. Anyone familiar with Palestinian history realizes that Palestinian are the ones who made the painful compromises by giving up 78% of their home land and seeking to establish a state on only 22%. Even before the current intifada, Israeli settlers and forces subjected Palestinians to the daily killings of women and children, home demolitions, land confiscations, economic constraints and all forms of abuse and humiliations. For the Palestinians to be "true peace seekers" they have to endure all this torture and watch the Israelis elect new leaders that scrap previous agreements at their whim and continue to expand the so called settlements which are in fact cities being built on the Palestinian homes and blood.

Again very good read for the pro-Israel liberals that want a sophisticated way to blame the whole conflict on the Arabs and the Palestinians.

Benny Morris "Righteous Victims" is a survey of the entire Arab-Israeli Conflict, a task that Morris admits is probably too large for any one Historian. Neverthless, Morris has produced an extremely well-written and gripping overview of the conflict. Morris' book is easy to read, a result of both his writing style and the periodization, which divides up the historical eras in a coherent fashion. Still, this book has taken much criticism, mostly as a result of some questionable materials that Morris uses for his sources. For example, Morris attributes a quote to Ben-Gurion, in which the Israeli leader states the Jews are the aggressor and the Arabs only defend themselves. This strange quote was taken from Simcha Flapan, a Zionist who worked with Ben-Gurion in the 1930's, and later turned on him, writing a book who sole purpose was to discredit Ben-Gurion. Needless to say, this should not be a primary source for information. Morris also makes some very questionable assertions, claiming that it was always the Jewish leaders' goal to transfer the Arabs out of Palestine, which they did not view as immoral. He also claims that the Peel Commissions discussion of transfer in 1937 made the actual transfer undertaken in the 1948 war easier. Despite these flaws, this remains a highly readable book, and for the most part it seems on target.

Several readers refer to the meticulous and thorough research Benny Morris conducted. Indeed Morris intentionally packages his arguments to encourage us to think so. But one must reassess the validity of the purported discoveries and conclusions of this revisionist military history which did not include research into the archives of the two main Jewish/Israeli military groups of the period -- the Haganah and the IDF. As scholars in The Middle East Forum ... have pointed out:

There is more than meets the eye here. In The War for Palestine, Morris concedes that: "When writing 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949' in the mid-1980s, I had no access to the materials in the IDFA [IDF Archive] or the Haganah Archive and precious little to first-hand military materials deposited elsewhere."

Morris inadvertently reveals the falsehood of "New Historian" scholarly pretensions. This group insists on tracing its origin -- indeed its raison d'être -- to the opening of Israeli state archives in the late 1980s, but now its foremost member admits to having written the single most influential "revisionist" work without the use of the most important archives.

To make matters worse, Morris also admits that "some of the material relating to the [Palestinian exodus] may have been open to researchers in the early and mid-1980s, when 'The Birth' was written, but I was not then aware of its existence."

In other words, Morris not only made no use of these indispendably significant Israeli archives, but did not do so due to his own ignorance. This is neither meticulous nor thorough research on the part of an academic, and reinforces much of the subsequent critique of Morris' scholarship as slipshod. Read this book with many grains of salt.

Book writers, and as a result, their books, can be biased, practicularlly when they are dealing with such a politicaly burning topic, and with wounds that aren't healed. They might also hold a certain opinion, and in order to proof it, they ignore certain documents that doesn't fit their thesis. Biased books can be called "Historically incorrect" but they do not lie. Ignoring documentation, though, if made with full awarnace, is, in my opinion, wrong because it is deliverly mistaking the reader. However, that's not a lie too, it's just a struggle to proof a wrong idea.

I believe that in every history book there is a core of true and correct facts. It might be covered with half-truthes, rumors, biased opinions and lacking documentaion, but some basic core is still factually correct. Our job as readers or scolars is to find this core and by using it build the most objective and unbiased model of history. In order to do that we need to read books from the radical-left to the fanatic-right. We need to compare every book to what we know and what we've learned from other books. By doing that, and using alimination, we could try and find this core of truth, or at least build a research-based opinion on a given subject.

As it comes to "The New Historians" I believe Prof. Karsh (author of "Fabricating Israeli History") when he says they ignored certain facts. However, their is a core of facts in their books: There were cases when Israelies were involved in things that we can't be proud about, i'm sure we did, there are spots in the history of every country in the world.

However, these things, if happened, were isolated cases, not a part of a master plan to expel Plestinians. I believe the major part of the Palestinian runaway was self-planned, driven by the natural fear of a civilian population from combat, the Dir-Yassin fight/massacare and the rumors about the cruelity of the Jews. The faith in the sterngth of the Arbain armies, and the belief that they could return when the war will end in the victory of the Arabs, make it easier for them to leave.

Another problem in writing the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, a problem that Morris himself admits, is the fact that it is almost impossible to get any documentaion from the Arabian side, and as a result it is impossible to know what was the Arabian stand about the refugee problem, and what was their part in its creation.

In Addition, in the 1980, when this book was written and published, there was a phenomenon of breaking mythes in the Israeli soceity, known as "The Trumpeldor syndrom", maybe we can see this book, and others, as a part of this phenomenon.

I believe that the motivation of the New Historians, as a part of the 'Trumpeldor Syndrom' is "A joy for other man's troubles, motivated by a Provocative tendency to amaze and annoy" (Taken from "(Criticism on) Roman Russi"-by Meir Shalev", in "Zionism and Sabarism in the Israeli Romance" by Yosef Oren).

This book shouldn't be read solely. It is crying foR compartion with other history books. This book does not give a full review on the creating of the Palestinian refugee problem asit claims to give. However, it gives an interesting point of view.

I think this book is important as a representer of a certain opinion, and as a history book with a core of truth, that can, and should be used by the historians of the future, along with many other books, to understand what really happened in the 1948 war.

Mr. Morris lays out the particulars of a very intricate and sensitive issue with adeptness rarely seen. This book doesn't puport to be the final word but a factual statement of the matter at hand.

A must read for those wishing to learn more about the Palestinian and Israeli issues that are as relevant today as when this book was written.

If not more so!

Israel's leading revisionist historian returns to the archives and argues that Israel was ultimately the party most responsible for keeping the Arab-Israeli conflict going right after the 1948 war. With their eyes on gaining more Arab territory, Israeli leaders did not take advantage of the peace offers coming from Jordan and Syria. Most important, according to Morris, Israelis misinterpreted the many thousands of Arab infiltrators each year into their country, turning simple refugees trying to reclaim their houses and farmers working their fields into politically motivated enemies. Far from sponsoring these attacks, Arab regimes actually opposed them. Oblivious to the limited, even defensive nature of 90 percent of the raids, Israelis retaliated against Arab neighbors with great force, killing Arab civilians without mercy. This in turn led Arab governments to reply by organizing state-run guerrillas, known as fedayeen. Before you know it, the Suez War resulted, and with it the enduring enmity that has long characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict. Like revisionist historians reviewing Soviet-U.S. relations, Morris is determined to show, against all experience and commonsense, that the democratic and liberal country is the one that initiated, maintained, and benefited from conflicts. Let's just say that if David Ben-Gurion was, in Morris' description, a "virtuoso manipulator of facts," then Morris has established himself as a virtuoso manipulator of archival records.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1994

Wow, one review here is from the "expert" Daniel Pipes who, after the Oaklahoma City Bombing, suggested in USA Today that the blame belongs to Muslim extremists. What a fascinating and disturbing ideologue.

I can only suggest that the information here largely comes from from primary Israeli sources.

Judge for yourself. I found it important.