In 1970, he attacked another British celebrity, Arnold J. Toynbee, in the essay "The Chatham House Version", and held him partly responsible for the British abdication of responsibility for the state of the Middle East. Kedourie attacked Toynbee for his criticism of the British Empire, arguing that contra Toynbee that the British Empire had been a positive institution whose decline had brought disaster to its former colonies, most notably in the Middle East. Kedourie argued that multi-national empires like the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Empire had allowed different peoples to live together in peace, and the break-up of empires had led to wars as nationalists fought each other for dominance. For Kedourie, Toynbee's work had denied the "civilizing role" played by the British Empire and white-washed the brutal tendencies of Third World nationalists whom Kedourie argued were far worse than the colonial powers they had replaced, which is why Kedourie attacked the "Chatham House version of history" with such vehemence. Kedourie had no use for nationalism, which saw as dividing people up, and believed that importing Western ideas of nationalism into the Middle East had been a disaster, as it turned people who once lived together in harmony into enemies as various peoples started to see themselves as part of this or that nation. The Israeli historian Major Efraim Karsh criticised Kedourie for his thesis that the era of the Ottoman Empire was one of peaceful co-existence of peoples who did not have national identities, citing the Wahhabi raids; the wars of independence in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria; the anti-Christian pogroms and massacres in the Levant in 1859–60; and the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, to demonstrate the limits of Kedourie's "peaceful co-existence" thesis.