Motti Golani (1954-2025)

Professor Motti Golani, Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College 1994-95 and 2014, tragically passed away following a hiking accident.

Born in Kibbutz Givaat Brenner in 1954, Motti Golani was a leading historian of the British Mandate in Palestine and the early decades of the State of Israel. His scholarship explored the political, military, and cultural forces that shaped Israel’s formation, focusing on war, memory, and diplomacy. His major works examined Israel’s road to the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Zionist policy on Jerusalem, Israeli collective memory of war, the final years of British rule, and the life of key figures such as Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham. He also made an important contribution to bridging historical narratives with Two Sides of the Coin, co-authored with Adel Manna, which presented both the Israeli and Palestinian experiences of the 1948 war.

He served as Chair of the Israel Studies Department at the University of Haifa (2001-2005) before moving to Tel-Aviv University, where he was appointed Rosenberg Professor for Jewish Studies and served as director of The Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel. In addition, he was a Senior Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

His cherished ‘baby project’, in which I was involved for many years, was the creation, in 2011, of a forum for young researchers studying Mandatory Palestine. He emphasized the importance of making it a cross-university forum that would bring fresh insights and voices. During the same year, he published, together with Adel Manna, the book Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba, 1948. The term ‘entangled histories’ was not fashionable then, but the two were paving the way in that direction. Sadly and tragically, the gap between the academic historians’ realization that one cannot but put Israeli and Palestinian narratives side by side and the wider public that is sinking into tribalism, dehumanization, and hatred has only widened since.

Since his first book on the roots of the 1956 war, Motti has developed a profound conviction that war is a kind of human ailment. War, Motti used to say, is a kind of human disease. Yes, there is an irony here, which he was perfectly aware of: His last name, Golani, was picked up by his father, a Holocaust survivor from the Carpathians, who wanted to replace his European and exilic name with a Hebrew one. His mother, a Hungarian Jew who came to Palestine in 1949 as an orphan refugee, was also a product of Europe’s horror. I remember vividly the time we talked about the fact Motti carries with him the name of a famous Israeli army battalion wherever he goes. And we also talked about the two kinds of encounters with the horrors of war. The first is the firsthand experience of the soldier on the battlefield. The other is that of the historian who revealed records of this war in the archive.

It was not an abstract discussion. Very early in his career, as part of his doctoral work (1993), while conducting archival work on the Suez Crisis/Sinai Campaign of 1956, he stumbled upon forgotten stories: how Israeli forces dug defensive trenches along the Egyptian border in anticipation of war; how internal political struggles — not just security concerns — shaped the Israeli leadership’s decisions; how rumors and poor communication nearly provoked an accidental war. He uncovered vivid examples of how misunderstanding, mistrust, and bad information between Israeli military commanders and political leaders in the 1950s almost led to catastrophic escalation. These discoveries reaffirmed a bitter truth: wars are often the product of human error and dysfunction rather than necessity. He soon realized that it was a mistake to separate the military from society, especially in the Israeli context. He concluded it would make much more historical sense to think of Israel’s conventional wars during its early decades not as a series of separate campaigns but as one long 25-year war (between 1948 and 1973). He did not shy away from mixing autobiographical reflections with historical analysis in his 2002 book Wars Do Not Just Happen, which is a fascinating hybrid read. As expected, he fell in love with England while researching at St Antony’s College, Oxford. It’s hard to imagine a bigger contrast between this and Kibbutz Givaat Brenner. He admitted to me that his pivot to British imperial history later in his career was both an attempt to move away from the bloody Israeli experience and to understand the pre-1948 incubator in which it was hatched.

During the 2010s, Motti and I collaborated on several occasions, including co-editing a double special issue in Hebrew marking the centenary of the Palestine mandate and offering an overview of the history and historiography of the period and organizing workshops, symposia, and more. We both worked on the genesis of the Palestine partition plan, and I was delighted when Motti contributed an important chapter on Chaim Weizmann, Victor Jacobson, and the roots of the 1937 Partition Plan for a volume I co-edited in 2019, which came out with Stanford University Press. Over the years, we shared an ongoing dialogue — working together at the Weizmann Archives in Rehovot, exchanging aged gossip about women in Weizmann’s life and academic politics at Oxford during Isaiah Berlin’s time, sharing tips about where to find decent coffee when visiting libraries at Oxford or Harvard, discussing developments at the University of Haifa, an institution we both ultimately left, and reminiscing about his beloved Kibbutz Givat Brenner, how it was like to hear lectures of literature from Amos Oz as a high schooler, and more.

I want to remember Motti in his own words, which were wise, often full of humor, and always sensitive and self-reflective. Here is the final paragraph from a personal autobiographical essay Motti published in 2020, written in beautiful Hebrew, in my crude English translation:
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“Ultimately, I came to realize that Oxford, London, and Britain more generally will never truly feel like home to me. More than Britain itself, what fascinates me is what Britain has done — and continues to do — to us, to me: an Israeli, a Jew, a Zionist whose culture is Hebrew. I am deeply drawn to the vital encounter between Zionism and Britain. It is impossible and wrong to ignore this encounter through which the State of Israel came into being. It is not merely a lesson in survival. It is a complex historical meeting where a young national movement, on its path to independence, was able to take the best from a patron who was not always enthusiastic but nevertheless provided an unprecedented historic opportunity, along with a system of values without which Israel would struggle to continue existing.

History is not a wheel; it never truly repeats itself. History is a process in which change outweighs continuity. Yet, despite the ever-changing historical context, there will always be certain enduring features that cannot be ignored. One of them, in my view, is the ability to maintain a positive, fruitful symbiosis with those outside the boundaries of the familial, tribal, ethnic, religious, or national collective. Such symbiosis is a lifeline. The Jewish people would not have survived without it. Will Israel also know how to act accordingly?”
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Motti’s death is an incalculable loss. His intellectual rigor, warmth, and enduring curiosity will be deeply missed. I’m sending my heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family.

Arie Dunbov
April 26, 2025