As Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza rages on, leading Israeli “revisionist historian” Avi Shlaim has re-focused in a new book on unravelling the false narrative of Israel’s victimhood.

Over the five decades of his distinguished academic career, Shlaim has emerged as a brilliant scholar who has tried to debunk the myths behind the establishment of Israel by providing a fascinating political and historical critique of Zionism.

The Oxford University emeritus professor depends this time on his own autobiography to discuss the highly contentious debate about Israel’s self-righteousness. He aims to tear up the already collapsing Zionist script and establish that Israel’s calamity is self-inflicted.

As Israel prepares to invade Gaza and to push its 2.3 million population towards death or exile, Shlaim’s book offers much-needed insight and guidance into what needs to be done in order to arrive at an accurate story of the unfolding war instead of listening to Israel’s propaganda discourse.

In chapter after chapter of “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew,” Shlaim, an Iraqi-born Jew, sheds light on the story of his family’s uprooting from Iraq, a country in which the Jews were never persecuted and were once celebrated for their ancient heritage and rich culture.

In an interview with Shlaim in Oxford, this award-winning scholar, a fellow of the prestigious British Academy, reviewed the Israeli version of the nature of Zionism and the birth of Israel through the lens of his own and his family’s tragedy.

Shlaim’s delving into the ideology and practices of Israel, which he never hesitates to describe as terrorist even just a few days before the recent dramatic escalation, casts light on Israel’s genocidal policies as it unleashes its ruthless retaliation against Gaza.

His description of Israel as “a deeply entrenched apartheid regime” that is “fundamentally built on the oppression of the Palestinians” provides special insight into the heated debate about terrorism in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Whatever the colour of the government of the day, the Israeli regime is fundamentally built on the oppression of the Palestinians,” Shlaim writes. “It is deeply entrenched in Apartheid.”

Shlaim fascinatingly moves between his personal memoirs and the story of an Iraqi Jewish family leaving its homeland under duress and that of Israel’s creation as a state dominated politically and culturally by Ashkenazis, or Jews from Eastern Europe.

In Shlaim’s view, the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 disenfranchised the Arab Jews of the region by persuading them to migrate to the new state only to treat them as second-class citizens.

The book conveys a sense of profound anguish at separation and the loss of an identity and lifestyle and portrays an environment of trauma, grief, and anxiety in the new “Promised Land.”

“Three Worlds” is a memoir of an Arab Jew unfolding across Iraq, Israel, and the UK, but it is centred on Shlaim’s first 18 years of trying to cope with the devastation inflicted on his wealthy family that found its high social status transformed into a nightmare of need and the desperation to get by.

But the book, by a seasoned historian, is more than just autobiography. While he tackles the psychological damage incurred by the chain of events in which he found himself in Israel, Shlaim also aims to untangle the Zionist mentality and tactics.

Shlaim was forced to leave Baghdad with his family for Israel as a five-year-old boy on the pretext that Iraq was no longer a safe place for Jews after the creation of Israel and the concomitant outrage of Arab public opinion.

As a result of Zionist propaganda, some 110,000 Jews left Iraq in 1950 and 1951, members of a Jewish community that could trace its origins back to ancient Iraq where Babylon emerged as a spiritual centre and Nehardea, Sura, and Pumbedita (modern Fallujah) were seats of Talmudic scholarship.

Stripped of their savings, homes, and cultural environment, the Iraqi Jews did not see their “return to Zion” as the attractive place they were promised, but instead saw it as a foreign entity where they wept instead in memory of the waters of the Euphrates River they left behind.

The Iraqi Jewish community numbered about 150,000 in 1947, a year before the establishment of the state of Israel. A census taken some years earlier concluded that 40 per cent of the total population of the Iraqi capital Baghdad was Jewish.

In April 1941, the British ousted an anti-British government in Baghdad, and in the midst of the turmoil that followed mobs who blamed the Jews for allegedly being complicit in the British action in Iraq and later in the Nakba in Palestine, attacked Jews in their synagogues and homes, killing 179 and destroying and looting Jewish property.

Though Shlaim states that the Iraqi Jews did not face anti-Semitism until the 1940s, some became more receptive to the Zionist message of emigration to the then British Mandate of Palestine. In July 1948, the Iraqi government passed a law that stripped Iraqi nationality from those Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel.

Once in Israel, the Iraqi Jews were transformed from being a flourishing mercantile community into impoverished migrants living in tent cities and struggling to cope with economic difficulties and disintegration.

According to Shlaim, Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Arab world had to deal with the discriminatory and patronising prejudice of the Israeli pioneers, many of whom were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. Unlike other Jewish migrants, they were sprayed with DDT upon their arrival in Israel.

He adds that the Zionist project led to Jews from across the Arab countries going from being respected fellow citizens in their countries of origin to something akin to a fifth column allied with the new Jewish state.

One of his fascinating conclusions is what many readers have called his “undeniable proof” of Zionist involvement in the 1950s terrorist attacks on Iraqi Jews to drive them out of Iraq and hasten their transfer to Israel.

Shlaim’s central contention is that as pro-Palestinian sentiments and the rejection of Israel gathered pace in Iraq, Zionism deliberately engineered the exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel.

To achieve its goal, the Zionist movement and later Israeli intelligence used underground agents to spread fear among Iraqi Jews in order deliberately to push them to leave for Israel.

The most fascinating part of the book concerns Shlaim’s detailed investigation of the bomb attacks on Baghdad’s Jewish community that preceded their mass flight from Iraq in the early 1950s.

Although the Iraqi archives and research works have also shown evidence of Israeli intelligence being behind the bombings in the early 1950s, Shlaim has succeeded in ascertaining what happened through his historical mechanism and insights.

According to his thorough investigation, based on interviews with elderly Iraqi Jews, some of the bombs were planted by Zionist Iraqi Jewish activists working with Israeli intelligence. Other bombings were the work of locals who were hired or bribed by underground Zionist activists.

Two Iraqi Jews, Yusuf Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom, confessed to three of the bombings. They were hanged in January 1952. Several others were tried and sentenced to death or prison sentences for their collaboration in the Zionist plots.

Shlaim’s revelations add a dark twist to Israel’s boasts that it “saved” the Jews of the Middle East from a hostile situation and shows once again the wicked methods the Zionist project relied upon to ensure Israeli state-building and the country’s survival.

The Baghdad bombings also echo loudly in the “Operation Susannah” or “Lavon Affair” in Egypt in 1954, when a number of Egyptian Jews and Israelis were arrested for planting bombs in Egypt to encourage Egyptian Jews to leave their country for Israel.

One of those arrested was Meir Max Bineth, the same Israeli intelligence officer who had directed the Baghdad operations from his base in Iran three years earlier. Bineth, a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli Intelligence Agency the Mossad, was sent to Egypt undercover as a German businessman.

He later committed suicide in his prison cell to avoid confessing to his Mossad involvement.

With the Israeli war on Gaza now receiving unwavering support from the US, the European countries, and much of the rest of the world, on the grounds that it is an act of Israeli self-defence against a terrorist group, Shlaim’s new book helps to deconstruct the myth of Israel’s victimhood and its being an “oasis of democracy” in the Middle East.

On previous occasions, he has disputed Israel’s claim that its attacks on Gaza are part of “a war on terror.” In fact, he wrote, they are “acts of state terrorism.” He has written that the population of Gaza has been subjected to devastating Israeli onslaughts and has blamed the Western countries for supplying Israel with weapons that are repeatedly used to bomb a defenceless people.

Shlaim’s works have done much to provide a solid historical analysis and critique of Zionism by highlighting the movement’s aggressive strategies and reliance on the displacement of the Palestinians.

Among his outstanding works is “Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine,” which details the illicit agreement between the Zionist leaders and the then Jordanian monarch on the partitioning of Palestine in exchange for Jordan’s annexing the West Bank to the Hashemite Kingdom.      

He has also written “The Politics of Partition, War and Peace in the Middle East,” “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World,” “Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace,” and “Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations.”

All these books are aimed at refuting Israel’s version of the Middle East conflict. A main part of that is Israel’s claim that its Palestinian victims are saboteurs and terrorists and that it has no Arab partners working for peace.

“The problem was not the Arabs. I have showed that all the Arab leaders were pragmatic and were prepared to negotiate,” Shlaim has said, referring to initiatives made by several Arab leaders to solve the conflict peacefully.

Shlaim has also co-edited “The Cold War and the Middle East,” “The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948,” and “The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences.” He is a regular contributor to the media, including the UK newspaper the Guardian,  The Spectator magazine, Aljazeera, and Middle East Eye.

In the interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Shlaim elaborated further on his Jewishness, his academic work, his views and opinions, and the criticism he has received for his writings.

One of the main themes in his new memoirs is his being an Arab Jew, which he admits is seen as controversial in Israel and as an “ontological impossibility” by the Zionists and a contradiction in a state that defines itself as being Jewish.

But for Shlaim, Arab Jewishness is an “important aspect of the history of the region”. “Europe had a Jewish problem,” he says. “Iraq did not have a Jewish problem. We were the children of the country.”

Therefore, Shlaim insists that his use of the words “Arab Jew” to describe himself and other Jews coming to Israel from the Arab world “is not an abstraction.” “There is such a thing as an Arab Jew. We [Arab Jews] are not newcomers or invaders. We were inhabitants for millennia long before Islam.”

Asked whether the “new historians” in Israel, who also include Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, have succeeded in changing the intellectual discourse in Israel towards Zionism, Shlaim’s short answer is no, though he does believe that their arguments came as a shock to the establishment and “made their way into Israel’s intellectual mainstream.”

“Gradually, we influenced more and more people,” he said.

Shlaim said there has not been criticism of the new historians from “serious” scholars in Israel, with the attacks coming instead from ardent Zionists. He said the charges made against their work include that they are “professionally deficient,” provide “distorted evidence,” are “selective,” and “have an axe to grind.”

“I am a historian, and my agenda is to write a history of the conflict as fully, accurately, and interestingly as I can,” Shlaim replies to such accusations. “We were attacked for political reasons. It is very difficult to argue with facts,” he adds.

“Whether I have succeeded or failed only history will tell.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 October, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly