Kedourie 's doctoral thesis ( afterwards published as '' England and the Middle East '' ) was critical of Britain 's interwar role in Iraq . It was refused a University of Oxford DPhil , but was published in 1956 . It castigated British policy makers for their encouragement of Arab nationalism and contained a very negative view of T. E. Lawrence . Kedourie attacked British policy-makers for first creating in 1921 the Kingdom of Iraq out of the former Ottoman '' vilayets '' ( provinces ) of Mosul , Baghdad , and Basra and then imposing " a militantly Arab nationalist regime upon a diverse society " . Kedourie refused to make the changes requested by one of the examiners , Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb , and did not get the degree . Given the prestige of a DPhil at Oxford , Kedourie , in the words of the American historian Martin Kramer , displayed " much courage " in refusing to change his thesis . Kedourie 's personal history helps to explain his viewpoint . Starting with the very first Iraqi ruler , King Faisal I and continuing on to the present , Iraqiness was and still is defined as being Islamic Arab ; and , as an Iraqi Jew , Kedourie simply did not fit into the society that was being created in Iraq in the 1920s , 1930s and the 1940s . Iraq once had a large and flourishing Jewish community whose existence ended in the 20th century , as most Iraqi Jews fled to Israel to escape persecution in Iraq . For Kedourie , the idea that someone like Lawrence was a romantic hero was absurd as Kedourie saw him instead as an irresponsible adventurer who by encouraging Arab nationalism had created a new state , Iraq that people like him did not belong in . In his view , it was no accident that , within less than a year after the granting of independence in October 1932 , one of the first acts of the Iraqi state was the " Assyrian Affair " of August 1933 , when the state sponsored the slaughter of the Assyrian minority , establishing from the start its intolerant and violent character . Far from an " awakening " , Kedourie saw the rise of nationalism in the Middle East as a retrogression to the region 's worst autocratic tendencies . As someone from the Middle East , Kedourie accused many Western Orientalists of having an idealised view of the Near East , arguing that Western civilisation was not as rotten as the Orientalists would have it , nor was the Middle East the virtuous and innocent victim of Western imperialism that historians like Arnold Toynbee sought to present . Michael Oakeshott brought Kedourie back to the LSE in 1953 . In 1964 , Kedourie was founder and editor of the academic journal , '' Middle Eastern Studies ''
Assyrian Affair
Simele massacre
Elie Kedourie