Edward Selim Atiyah (Arabic: ادوار سليم عطية; 1903 – 22 October 1964) was an Anglo-Lebanese author and political activist.
He came to England to study at Brasenose College, Oxford University,[1] and there met and married a Scottish woman, Jean Levens.
But it was also, and in many parts of the country, largely due to a policy of deliberate terrorism and eviction followed by the Jewish commanders in the areas they occupied, and reaching its peak of brutality in the massacre of Deir Yassin.
In a letter in The Spectator of 23 June 1961, he wrote in a first comment that the passage quoted by Kohn omitted the next sentence: "But it was also, and in many parts of the country, largely due to a policy of deliberate terrorism and eviction followed by Jewish commanders in the area they occupied, and reaching its peak of brutality in the massacre of Deir Yassin.” Having thus referred back to what in his book he considered to be two partial reasons for the exodus, Atiyah then continued, however, in his second comment, to state that there is '"no suggestion whatever in what I wrote that the exodus of the Arab refugees was a result of a policy of evacuating the Arab population.
What I said is something quite different from the Zionist allegation that the Arab refugees were ordered or even told by their leaders to evacuate, [...]" [4] Atiyah died in 1964 at the age of 61 while taking part in a debate on Arab-Israeli relations at the Oxford Union.