Writing an Arab Officer into the 1948 War for Palestine

Laila Parsons is a historian specializing in the modern Middle East. She received her D.Phil. from Oxford in 1996, and taught at Harvard and Yale before moving in 2004 to McGill University, where she is currently Associate Professor of History and Islamic Studies. Parsons’ research focuses on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on the role of narrative and biography in the field of modern Middle Eastern History. She has published widely in this area, including her books The Druze between Palestine and Israel, 1947–1949 (St Antony’s/Macmillan, 2000) and The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Liberation, 1914-1948 (Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2016), which uses the life-story of an Arab officer and anti-colonial rebel as a prism through which to tell the story of the Eastern Arab World in the first half of the 20th Century. She is currently writing a new book on Palestinian participation in the Peel Commission (1936-1937), with a focus on how the procedures of the commission were determined, and on whether or not the Commission was a space of real political possibility for the Palestinians.