becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state." He stated that there is an "overwhelming and incontrovertible body of evidence" to support his position including "intelligence briefs, captured Arab documents, press reports, personal testimonies and memoirs..." Karsh states that "the deliberate depopulation of Arab villages and their transformation into military strongholds" began in December 1947. Karsh rejects the Palestinian demands for a right of the return. "However, even if the more restrictive Israeli figures were to be accepted, it is certainly true, just as Amos Oz darkly predicts, that the influx of these refugees into the Jewish State would irrevocably transform its demographic composition. At the moment, Jews constitute about 79 percent of Israel's six-million-plus population, a figure that would rapidly dwindle to under 60 percent. Given the Palestinians' far higher birth rate, the implementation of a 'right of return', even by the most conservative estimates, would be tantamount to Israel's transformation into an 'ordinary' Arab state." Selected book summaries Empires of the Sand Karsh's Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1922 was published in 1999, co-written by his wife Inari Rautsi-Karsh. Daniel Pipes called it a "tour de force that offers a profoundly new understanding of a key issue in modern Middle Eastern history:" and said that " Drawing on a wide range of original sources, and writing in a clearly organized fashion and in fast-paced prose, the Karshes make a very compelling case for their revisionist position, establishing it point by point and in elegant detail". Anthony B. Toth wrote in a review: "This is a polemical book whose authors have extended the intemperate and unbalanced rhetoric customarily employed by dogmatic partisans of the Arab Israeli conflict to the normally sedate and measured arena of nineteenth - and early twentieth-century Ottoman history. The book relies mainly on Western published sources and official documents of the British government. But their use of even these sources is limited, since they actually ignore most of nineteenth-century history. Instead, the authors emphasize those episodes they feel support their interpretations". Richard Bulliet, professor of history at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University wrote that Empires of the Sand is "a tendentious and unreliable piece of scholarship that should have been vetted more thoroughly by the publisher" and asserts that the authors failed to "contribute a dimension of sense and scholarship that raises the debate[s in question] to