His work on Iraq is widely considered the preeminent study of modern Iraqi history.
[3] Born in Jerusalem in 1926 to a Palestinian Arab Christian family, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the Nakba.
He gained his doctorate at political science in Harvard University in 1960, with a dissertation titled The Shaykh and the Peasant in Iraq, 1917-1958.
From the late 1950s on he traveled to Iraq several times, and succeeded in gaining access to communist political prisoners and secret police files before the revolution of 1958.
He was allowed access to security service archives from various periods of Iraqi history, up until the 1970s, and used this and his personal contacts from different political movements to write a book on political change in Iraq, The Old Social Classes and New Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (published in 1978).