Separating Fact from Fiction in the Middle East

On the occasion of the release of Middle East scholar Martin Kramer's new book, "The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East," the Institute hosted a lively discussion on the nature of proof and bias with the author and historians Benny Morris and Hussein Ibish. The October 21, 2016 event was moderated by Executive Director Robert Satloff. Martin Kramer is the author of the landmark Washington Institute study Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, published exactly fifteen years ago. Since then, he has presided over the formation of Israel's first and only liberal arts college, Shalem College, where he served as founding president and continues to teach modern Middle Eastern history. The Institute's longtime Wexler-Fromer Fellow, he had a twenty-five-year career at Tel Aviv University, where he directed the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Benny Morris is the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor in Georgetown University's Department of Government and professor of history at Ben-Gurion University. He is the author of ten books, including The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, which received the National Jewish Book Award. He is currently completing a book on Turkey's relations with its Christian minorities in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. His exchange with Martin Kramer on events in Lydda in July 1948 appears in The War on Error. Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, a weekly columnist for the National (UAE), and a monthly contributing writer for the International New York Times. He has appeared three times on Foreign Policy's "Twitterati 100," which lists the top "must-follow" Twitter feeds on foreign policy. The author of What's Wrong with the One-State Agenda? and other books, he holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.