Professor Motti Golani

Faculty Member

​Professor Motti Golani is a Professor for Jewish History, and chair of the Jewish History Department at Tel Aviv University, where he also heads the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel. His main research interests concern questions of morality, memory, politics, and war in the pre-state Zionist era and in the history of the State of Israel. A scholar of the British Mandate period from the perspective of Zionist-British relations, he chairs the Israeli Mandate Research Forum. Professor Golani’s books include: Zion in Zionism: Zionist Policy and the Question of Jerusalem, 1937–1949 (1992); Israel in Search of War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955–1956 (1998); Wars Don’t Just Happen: On Memory, Force, and Choice (2002);  The End of the British Mandate for Palestine, 1948 (2009);  The Last Commissioner: General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, 1945–1948 (2011);  Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948, Two Narratives of the 1948 War and its Outcome (2011, with Adel Manna);  and Palestine Between Politics and Terror 1945–1947 (2013). He is currently co-authoring (with Professor Jehuda Reinharz) a third and final volume of the biography of Chaim Weizmann, which covers the years 1922 to 1952, and is due to be published in 2019.