Mark Levene is a historian and emeritus fellow at

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

. Levene's work and research focuses on

genocide Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

, Jewish history and anthropogenic climate change. His book ''The Crisis of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912–1953'' received the biennial Lemkin Award from the New York-based Institute for the Study of Genocide in 2015. In 2015, Dr. Peter Hilpold, a Professor at the

University of Innsbruck The University of Innsbruck (; ) is a public research university in Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol (state), Tyrol, founded on October 15, 1669. It is the largest education facility in the Austrian States of Austria, ...

reviewed the book. He stated that the book makes a valuable contribution, although the study's foundational assumptions are questioned. Levene does not use the same

definition of genocide Genocide definitions include many scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide, a word coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.Oxford English Dictionary "Genocide" citing Raphael Lemkin ''Axis Rule in Occupied Europe'' ix. 79 The word is a ...

as found in the UN

Genocide Convention The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was ...

The Balfour Declaration – a case of mistaken identity

In this 1992 essay, Levene followed the people behind the

Balfour declaration The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman regio ...

which during the First World War gave birth to the British Mandate of Palestine and to what later became the state of

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. According to him, historians were perplexed about the reasons behind the declaration, or they were simply getting it wrong. He wrote:

"Barbara Tuchman in all seriousness proposed that 'the English Bible was the most important single factor'."

Levene discovered that an anti-Zionist Jew,

Lucien Wolf Lucien Wolf (20 January 1857 in London23 August 1930) was an English Jewish journalist, diplomat, historian, and advocate of rights for Jews and other minorities. While Wolf was devoted to minority rights, he opposed Jewish nationalism as expres ...

, had actually proposed the idea to the "then clearly anti-semitic" British Foreign ministry and that it was accepted precisely because of that, with the British believing that supporting the Zionists would bring "World Jewry" and especially the Jews in the United States to side with Britain and actively enter the war against Germany (and the Ottoman Empire who ruled Palestine at the time). Later on, Wolf backed off, and when the declaration was realized, other considerations came into play.

Works

* ** * * * * * *Levene, Mark (2019). “Harbingers of Jewish and Palestinian Disasters: European Nation-State Building and Its Toxic Legacies, 1912–1948.” In ''The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History'', edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, 45–65. New York: Columbia University Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levene, Mark Living people Academics of the University of Southampton Year of birth missing (living people) 20th-century British historians 21st-century British historians Genocide studies scholars