• Author: Benny Morris (Israeli historian)
  Born- 1948 in
  Biography: Born in 1948 on an Israeli kibbutz, Benny Morris has seen firsthand the full sweep of modern-day Israel's troubled history. Morris attended Cambridge University and has taught history at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He has written both as a journalist and as a historian, and his writings have been read, and argued over, in his homeland and abroad. His 1988 book, THE BIRTH OF THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE PROBLEM, was a stunning event that shook the Israeli establishment--it argued that the Israeli national narrative was in many ways a myth. Because of his writings, and because the label was applied over and over again, Benny Morris is always lumped together in a group referred to as the "revisionist historians." So it was a surprise to many when, in 2006 or after, Morris's views seemed to harden, and his writings in the press reflected a harder line toward what he saw as Palestinian intransigence and the impossibility of achieving a peaceful solution to the decades-long conflict.

The year of 1948 was the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict that began with the arrival in Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), or Palestine, of the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s.

"[A] meticulous, disturbing and frustrating book....Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively."