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.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.