| Tom Segev | |
|---|---|
 Tom Segev at the Leipziger Buchmesse, 2005. |
|
| Born | March 1, 1945 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine |
| Occupation | Journalist, Historian |
Tom Segev (Hebrew: תום שגב) (born March 1, 1945) is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives.
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Early life
Segev was born in Jerusalem in 1945. He studied history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a doctorate in history from Boston University in the 1970s.[1]
Career
Segev worked during the 1970s as a correspondent for Maariv in Bonn.[2] He was a visiting professor at Rutgers University (2001-2002),[3] the University of California at Berkeley (2007)[4] and Northeastern University, where he taught a course on Holocaust denial. He writes a column on historical curiosities for the newspaper Haaretz.
Research
In The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (2000), Segev writes that the Jews in Palestine during World War II were more interested in their own state than in saving Jews in Europe. The book is highly critical of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and its publication created a strong reaction in Israel.
In One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (2000), Segev contends that violent conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism was inevitable as the two groups could not coexist given their contrary aims. He argues that the British were pro-Zionist, and that British support for Zionism stemmed from a misguided, and anti-Semitic, belief that Jews "turned the wheels of history."[citation needed]
In his history of the Six-Day War, 1967 (2006), Segev contends that Israel considered deporting local Arabs to Iraq when the war was over as part of a population transfer. The plan was never implemented.
Criticism
Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War, and currently Israel's ambassador to the U.S., gave Segev's book on the Six Day War a scathing review, saying "Laboring to prove his point forces Segev not only to contradict himself but also to commit glaring oversights." He also says "...by disregarding the Arab dynamic and twisting his text to meet a revisionist agenda, he undermines his attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the war. Such an understanding is vital if Arabs and Israelis are to avoid similar clashes in the future and peacefully co-exist."[5]
Published works
- 1949: The First Israelis (Hebrew: 1984, ISBN 965-261-040-2; English: 1998, ISBN 0-8050-5896-6)
- Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps (1988, ISBN 0-07-056058-7)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (2000, ISBN 0-316-64859-0)
- The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (2000, ISBN 0-8050-6660-8)
- Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (2003, ISBN 0-8050-7288-8)
- The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (2004, ISBN 1-56584-914-0)
- Israel in 1967. And the land changed its visage (Hebrew: 2005, ISBN 965-07-1370-0)
- 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, Metropolitan Books (2006)
Notes
Further reading
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