2024 Winner, Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, The Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute One of the Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2023 Named a Booklist **Editors' Choice in History: Adult Books, 2023 Finalist, Writing Based on Archival Material: National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, Sophie Brody Medal, American Library Association"Kessler has done an exceptional job and opened new vist...

In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives, and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict. The revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting all in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself. British forces' aggressive counterinsurgency took care of the ...

Israel has always won. They are winning now. And they must always win in the future.In The Sword of Freedom, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen pulls back the curtain on Israel’s success in the face of never-ending war. Cohen has played a pivotal role in shaping Israel’s modern defense strategy. Blending personal stories and the nation’s history, he offers a rare glimpse into how Israel has defied existential threats and built a cutting-edge defense system. N...

This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side-where the archives are still closed-is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.Morris stresses the

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return."In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee...

Righteous Victims, by the noted historian Benny Morris, is a comprehensive andobjective history of the long battle between Arabs and Jews for possession of a land they both call home. It appears at a most timely juncture, as the bloody and protracted struggle seems at last to be headed for resolution.With great clarity of vision, Professor Morris finds the roots of this conflict in the deep religious, ethnic, and political differences between the Zionist imm...

“What is so striking about Morris’s work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone’s prejudices, least of all his own,” David Remnick remarked in a New Yorker article that coincided with the publication of Benny Morris’s 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. With the same commitment to objectivity that has consistently characterized his approach, Morris now turns his attention to the present-day legacy of the events of 1948 and the concrete options for the fu...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first comprehensive account of the epoch-making Six-Day War, from the author of Ally—now featuring a fiftieth-anniversary retrospectiveThough it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of figh...