Efraim Karsh

Efraim Karsh was born in 1953 in Israel

Efraim Karsh was born on 6 September 1953 in Israel and grew up there. His parents were Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine.

He studied Arabic and modern Middle East history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then earned an MA and a PhD in international relations at Tel Aviv University. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 1984, dealt with neutrality and small states.

After his first degree, he worked as a research analyst in the IDF.

Karsh held posts at Harvard, Columbia, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and other institutions. In 1989 he joined King's College London, where he set up and led the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies program for 16 years. He founded the journal Israel Affairs, edited the Middle East Quarterly and comments often in British and American media.

His books include Empires of the Sand, written with his wife Inari Rautsi-Karsh, and Palestine Betrayed, in which he argued that Arab leaders bore responsibility for the 1948 Palestinian flight. He is a critic of the New Historians. Since 2013 he has been a professor at Bar-Ilan University, and from 2016 to 2021 he directed the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.