Laila Parsons is professor of modern Middle East history at McGill University. She is the author of The Druze between Palestine and Israel, 1947–1949 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), and numerous journal articles on the 1948 war, on rebel soldiers in the interwar period, and on the place of narrative and biog- raphy in the historiography of the modern Middle East. Her most recent book, The Commander: Fawzi al- Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914–1948 (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2016), was the recipient of the 2017 Palestine Book Award and the Society for Military History’s 2017 Distinguished Book Award.
