A New Look at 1948 explores new research on the first Arab-Israeli War has concluded, regarding the war aims of the Zionists\Israelis, the Palestinians and the participating Arab states; the nature of that war (conventionally seen as a political war between nationalist movements but today also seen as a Muslim jihadi enterprise, a religious war); the creation of the three refugee problems as a result of that war (Israelis, Palestinians and Jews from Arab countries); and the balance of forces between the various participants in that war (“David” and “Goliath”) – who in fact was stronger?

Event Cosponsored by JCRC 

Made possible with the support of the Seligman Foundation.

Benny Morris is one of Israel's leading historians and public intellectuals. He was born in Israel in 1948 and was educated at the Hebrew University (BA) and Cambridge University (Ph.D.). He served in the IDF in infantry and paratroops. He was a journalist at The Jerusalem Post from 1978 to 1990 and was a professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University from 1997 to 2017. From 2015 to 2018, he was visiting Israel studies professor at Georgetown University. He has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Munich University, the University of Maryland and Dartmouth College, and was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Morris has published ten books on Middle East and European history, with a focus on the Arab-Zionist conflict. His books include "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (Cambridge University Press); "1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War" (Yale University Press); and "Righteous Victims, A History of the Arab-Zionist Conflict, 1882-1999" (Knopf).

Morris’ most recent book, co-authored with Prof. Dror Ze'evi, is "The Thirty-Year Genocide, Turkey's Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924" (Harvard University Press), published in April 2019. He is currently working on a biography of the (Jewish) master spy, Sidney Reilly. He has published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, Liberation, Die Welt, and Haaretz.