Since October 7, editorials by and interviews with the historian Avi Shlaim have been showing up throughout international media. Shlaim’s celebrity can be attributed to the fact that he is an Israeli with a professorship at Oxford who blames the Jewish state (along with Britain) for all its woes and insists that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Jonathan Leaf takes a close look at how he acquired his reputation as a great scholar:

This reputation is based on a series of books he has written, . . . starting with his supposed magnum opus, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Running to 686 pages, this hefty tome is regarded by its many anti-Zionist admirers as a definitive analysis—proof—of a conspiracy theory that, if true, would lay upon Israel much of the responsibility for the present absence of a Palestinian state.

But there is a curious thing about this book. Now past the 35th anniversary of its publication, it has never been reprinted. Instead, its author arranged for it to be somewhat abridged, re-titled, and put out in paperback with a number of its major contentions rewritten. In the new version, the word “Collusion” is taken out of the title and one of the basic arguments of the first book has been sliced away.

Shlaim, however, has never publicly acknowledged the obvious: that his first book made claims that were refuted by the release of previously unavailable documents, and that had he republished it as originally written, he would have made himself a laughingstock in his field. It is an astonishing act of chutzpah. Without ever admitting the baldness of his errors, he refashioned the book upon which his reputation was founded but stripped out some of his wilder mistakes.

But is the new version of his conspiracy theory reliable? Is the account he now provides of the subject at least credible in its basic claims and suppositions? Unfortunately, the new version is only marginally better than the old and, in some respects, actually worse.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.