Mark Levene is a historian and emeritus fellow atUniversity of Southampton.
Levene's work and research focuses ongenocide, Jewish history and anthropogenic climate change.[1]
His bookThe 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.[1]
In 2015, Dr. Peter Hilpold, a Professor at theUniversity of Innsbruck 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 samedefinition of genocide as found in the UNGenocide Convention.[2]
In this 1992 essay, Levene followed the people behind theBalfour declaration which duringthe First World War gave birth tothe British Mandate of Palestine and to what later became the state ofIsrael.
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, 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.[3]