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