...Our second conclusion was that when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most fundamental aspects. Mr. Bacque misuses documents; he misreads documents; he ignores contrary evidence; his statistical methodology is hopelessly compromised; he makes no attempt to look at comparative contexts; he puts words into the mouth of his principal source; he ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively deals with his central accusation; and, as a consequence of these and and other shortcomings, he reaches conclusions and makes charges that are demonstrably absurd.

Apart from its assessment of Mr. Bacque's findings, however, the conference - along with the book itself - raises a larger issue: how are readers who are not experts to judge a work that makes new, startling, indeed outrageious, claims? Without the knowledge or the time to investigate, how are they to know if an author has finally revealed the truth "after a long night of lies," or is simply misleading an unwary public?...

...There remains, finally, the larger issue. It took a conference of experts to challenge Mr. Bacque's charges. Individual scholars have hesitated to take him on because to do so required checking through his research - in effect, rewriting his book. Instead, many of them have said in their reviews in Britain, France, Germany and Canada that they cannot believe what Mr. Bacque says about Eisenhower is true, but they cannot disprove it. Mr. Bacque has all the paraphernalia of scholarship; it looks impressive enough to bamboozle even scholars. Under these circumstances, what is a lay reader to do?...

The collapse and dispersion of Palestine's Arab society during the 1948 war is one of the most charged issues in the politics and historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Initially, Palestinians blamed the Arab world for having promised military support that never materialized.[1] Arab host states in turn regarded the Palestinians as having shamefully deserted their homeland. With the passage of time and the dimming of historical memory, the story of the 1948 war was gradually rewritten with Israel rather than the Arab states and the extremist and shortsighted Palestinian leadership becoming the main if not only culprit of the Palestinian dispersion. This false narrative received a major boost in the late 1980s with the rise of several left-leaning Israeli academics and journalists calling themselves the New Historians, who sought to question and revise understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict.[2] Ostensibly basing their research on recently declassified documents from the British Mandate period and the first years of Israeli independence, they systematically redrew the history of Zionism, turning upside down the saga of Israel's struggle for survival. Among the new historians, none has been more visible or more influential than Benny Morris...