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.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/jonathan-leaf/avi-shlaim-anti-israel-revisionist-history/