Efraim Karsh (Hebrew: אפרים קארש; born 6 September 1953)[1] is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies[2] at King's College London.

"However, even if the more restrictive Israeli figures were to be accepted, it is certainly true, just as Amos Oz darkly predicts, that the influx of these refugees into the Jewish State would irrevocably transform its demographic composition.

[8][unreliable source] Anthony B. Toth wrote in a review: "This is a polemical book whose authors have extended the intemperate and unbalanced rhetoric customarily employed by dogmatic partisans of the Arab Israeli conflict to the normally sedate and measured arena of nineteenth - and early twentieth-century Ottoman history.

[12] In his 2010 review of the book, Smith says that "In order to sustain their arguments, the Karshes, as judged by their citations, ignore nearly all scholarship of the past thirty years or more on British policy generally or as it pertained to the Middle East during World War I.".

It is academically unsound because the facts tell an altogether different story of modern Middle Eastern history, one that has consistently been suppressed because of its incongruity with the politically correct dogmas of the Arabist establishment.

And it is morally reprehensible because denying the responsibility of individuals and societies for their actions is patronizing and in the worst tradition of the 'white man's burden' approach, which has dismissed regional players as half-witted creatures, too dim to be accountable for their own fate... Little wonder therefore that Empires of the Sand was more favorably received by Middle Eastern intellectuals, fed up with being talked down to and open to real revisionism of their region's history after suffering decades of condescension from their paternalistic champions in the West.

[citation needed] In a review, professor of history Richard Bulliet stated:[15] Pursuing the myriad problems called up by the evidence Karsh presents to support his case would be pointless.

Its polemics and its obvious intention to arouse strong responses should not deter readers, since it is a work deserving to be read for its penetrating analyses of the long history of Islam as an expanding and proselytizing faith.Writing in International Review of Modern Sociology, California State University professor Henry E. Chambers concluded his review with the words: "This politically driven history will lead readers astray and offers a flawed version of the Middle East.

"[17] In the review, professor of history Marian Gross writes:[18]The ingenuity of Karsh’s monograph is that it portrays Islamic imperialism in the same light as all other imperialism—accentuating the utter normalcy of Muslim rulers’ imperialist ventures, goals, and means.[...]

[12] Israeli historian Benny Morris describes Karsh's portrayal of the British government as betraying the Jews in Palestine and ultimately reneging on their commitment to support Jewish statehood as "one-sided and without nuance".

[23] Hillel Cohen wrote a highly critical review of the work in The American Historical Review, describing "evasions of basic facts", and stating that "a book that discusses the 1948 Arab refugees yet fails to mention, for example, the psychological warfare waged by the Jewish forces, the transfer idea in Zionist thought, or the aerial bombardment of Palestinian towns—all topics on which abundance of information can be found in the very archives that were examined for this study—cannot be considered an authoritative book on 1948.

"[24] Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, wrote favourably of the book in a review published by The National Review, saying: "With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.