Uri Milstein (Hebrew: אורי מילשטיין; born 1940) is an Israeli military historian and poet.
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Uri Milstein was born in Tel Aviv to Avraham Milstein, a volunteer in the British army in World War II, and Sarah Milstein, a kindergarten teacher. He studied at Hayil school in Tel Aviv's Yad Eliyahu neighborhood, Hadassim youth village and a high school in Tel Aviv. In 1958, he was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces and served in the 890th Airborne Battalion of the Paratroopers Brigade as a soldier, squad commander and combat medic. Before being discharged, deputy commander of the brigade, Rafael Eitan, appointed him as the historian of the paratroopers. He served as a medic in the Six Day War, the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, and did his reserve duty in the history department of the Israeli Air Force.
Milstein is married to the actress Shifra (Ben David) Milstein, with whom he has two daughters. His daughter Dalit is the co-founder and director of Notzar Theater.
After completing his service in the IDF in 1960, he studied economics, philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He wrote his PhD on religion and legislation in Israel. After the Six Day War, he published "War of the Paratroops," and at the beginning of 1973 he published a military history of the early days of Israeli statehood, "In Blood And Fire Yehuda." In the 1980s, he taught military history at the IDF Command and Staff College. In 1989, Milstein published the first volume of his series on the War of Independence, in which he alleged flawed functioning of commanders who were considered heroes in Israel. In 1993, he published "Crisis and Its Conclusion," criticizing the functioning of the IDF in the Yom Kippur War.
In 1995 he published "The Rabin File: How the Myth Was Inflated" about Yitzhak Rabin as a commander of the Palmach. [1] In a police raid of Yigal Amir's room after the Rabin assassination, "The Rabin File" was one of the books they found. [2] Milstein described Yigal as a "good" and "very interested" student.[3]
Milstein established Survival Institute and a book publishing house called "Survival."
Milstein was one of the first academics to openly criticize the Israeli defense establishment.[4] He is described as being too extreme in his conclusions, but his "contribution to the knowledge is enormous and he is willing to suffer his devotion to the truth."[4]
In "The Blood Libel of Dir Yassin – The Black Book," he claims that the Deir Yassin massacre was a myth created by the Israeli left to prevent the Irgun from forming an independent unit inside the IDF and keep Menahem Begin out of the first national unity government under David Ben Gurion.