Tom Segev

Tom Segev (born 1 March 1945) is an Israeli historian and journalist whose books have fundamentally reshaped the historical understanding of Israel’s founding, the Holocaust’s role in Israeli identity, and the 1967 war. A member of the “New Historians” school — alongside Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim — Segev combines meticulous archival research with a journalist’s narrative skill and a willingness to challenge national mythologies that has made his work both celebrated and controversial in Israel and beyond.

Life

Segev was born in Jerusalem to parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His father was killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War when Segev was an infant — a biographical fact that gives his historical investigations of Israel’s wars and founding a personal dimension he rarely discusses but that pervades his work. He studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his Ph.D. from Boston University.

For decades he was a columnist for Haaretz, Israel’s newspaper of record, writing about politics, history, and culture. His journalism and his scholarship are deeply intertwined: both are characterised by a scepticism toward official narratives, a reliance on primary documents (diaries, letters, government minutes), and a gift for finding the telling detail that upends conventional understanding.

1949: The First Israelis (1984)

Segev’s first major book — based on newly declassified documents from Israel’s first years of statehood — challenged the heroic narrative of Israel’s founding. The book reveals a far more complicated reality: the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs, the ruthless treatment of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish immigrants by the Ashkenazi establishment, the seizure of Arab property, and the bitter political conflicts within the new state.

The book was a bombshell in Israeli public discourse. For the first time, a mainstream Israeli historian — writing in Hebrew, from Israeli archives — documented what Palestinians had long claimed and Israelis had long denied or minimised. The book helped launch the New Historians’ project of revising the national narrative.

The Seventh Million (1991)

Segev’s most important and most controversial book examines the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust. The title refers to the Israeli Jewish population — the “seventh million” after the six million who perished — and the book argues that Israel instrumentalised the Holocaust for political purposes.

Segev documents how the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) responded to news of the genocide, how Holocaust survivors were treated when they arrived in Israel (often with condescension or hostility), how the Eichmann trial (1961) was used by Ben-Gurion to consolidate national identity, and how the Holocaust became the central pillar of Israeli political rhetoric and self-justification.

The book is meticulous in its documentation and devastating in its implications. It does not diminish the Holocaust — it asks what was done with the Holocaust’s memory, and whether that use was always honest or always served the interests of the survivors themselves.

One Palestine, Complete (1999)

A comprehensive history of the British Mandate period (1917–1948), based on British, Arab, and Jewish archives. The title quotes the receipt a British official signed when taking charge of Palestine after the First World War. Segev portrays the Mandate as a period of impossible promises, administrative incompetence, and escalating violence, examining the triangle of British, Arab, and Jewish interests with unusual balance.

1967 (2007)

Segev’s account of the Six-Day War dismantles the myth that Israel fought a purely defensive war. Using newly available documents — cabinet minutes, generals’ diaries, diplomatic cables — he shows that Israel’s political and military leadership were less reluctant and more calculating than the official narrative suggests. The book also examines the occupation’s immediate aftermath and the decisions that made it permanent.

Other Work

• Soldiers of Evil (1987) — based on interviews with former commandants of Nazi concentration camps, examining how ordinary men became managers of genocide
• Simon Wiesenthal (2010) — a biography of the famous Nazi hunter, examining the gap between Wiesenthal’s public legend and the more complicated reality
• A State at Any Cost (2019) — a biography of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, using previously unavailable diaries and documents

Critical Standing

Segev is regarded as one of the most important historians of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work has been praised by historians worldwide for its archival depth, its narrative power, and its moral seriousness. Within Israel, he is a polarising figure: admired by the academic and liberal establishment, attacked by the political right as anti-Zionist or self-hating — charges Segev rejects, arguing that honest history is patriotic, not treasonous.

His work stands alongside that of Benny Morris (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem) and Avi Shlaim (The Iron Wall) as the foundation of modern critical Israeli historiography. Where Morris focuses on military history and Shlaim on diplomacy, Segev’s distinction is social and cultural history — how ordinary people experienced the events that shaped their nation.

Collecting Segev

Segev’s books were originally published in Hebrew (Am Oved, Keter, Dvir) before English translations appeared from Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Hill and Wang. Hebrew first editions are collected by Israeli bibliophiles. English first editions are readily available for $10–$30.