Historian Benny Morris will speak about several aspects of the 1948 War, including the nature of the conflict (conventionally seen as a nationalist-political struggle); the aims of the various sides (the Zionists\Israel, the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states); the creation of the three refugee problems during and in the wake of the war; and the balance of forces between the sides. He will also touch on problems of documentation and historiography concerning the war.

Benny Morris, born in Israel in 1948, teaches Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is currently teaching at Georgetown University. He was educated in Israel and England, and has written widely on the history of the Arab-Zionist conflict, including The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge UP, 2004); Righteous Victims (Knopf, 2001); and 1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale UP, 2008). He is currently completing a book on Turkish-Armenian-Greek relations, 1878-1924.

The Washington History Seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.wilsoncenter.org/collection/washington-history-seminar for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for their support.