Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

May 1, 2026

The Scholars Who Deliberately Ignore Hamas’s True Nature

A message from one new historian to another.

In the 1980s, Benny Morris coined the term “new historians” to refer to himself, Avi Shlaim, and a few other Israeli scholars who were revising accepted patriotic narratives about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Since then, Morris, a committed empiricist, has modestly revised some of his original conclusions. Shlaim meanwhile has moved in an increasingly radical direction, rejecting Zionism and, in his most recent book, revealing himself as an apologist for Hamas. Morris writes:

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