A Baghdadi Jew's Israel

Historian Avi Shlaim's memoir challenges the foundational pillars of Israeli society, portraying Zionism as a European construct to which non-European Jews have no affinity

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew

Author: Avi Shlaim

Publisher: OneWorld Publications

Pages: 336

Price: Rs 2,088

As Israel Defence Forces kill, maim and displace thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, world opinion has shifted. Sympathy for Israel after Hamas abducted 253 hostages, including women, children and the elderly and killed over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023 has dissipated into revulsion at the genocide against the Palestinian people. Just two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians and Hamas — on record — as “human animals”. Such statements could be dismissed as bluster from a representative of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.

Read Israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s memoir Three Worlds to understand why Mr Gallant’s comment is not a new normal for Israeli society but a foundational plinth.

Dr Shlaim, a respected Israeli historian of Zionism, is a Jew of Arab origin from Baghdad. In the 1950s, his family, like hundreds of other Iraqi Jews, was forced to flee to the new state of Israel. With this “Big Aliyah” to the Promised Land, a prosperous family of merchants was reduced to penury and humiliation.

At the bottom of this misfortune lay a truth that is often suppressed under the heroic myth of Israeli statehood. Far from being an egalitarian safe harbour, the Israeli state is a construct of Ashkenazi or European Jews who looked down on and discriminated against Sephardis, Jews from Africa and Asia. If the Palestinians were the primary casualties — the “victims of victims” as Edward Said eloquently described them — of the Israel project, the Arab-Jews, Dr Shlaim maintains, were another category of victims of racism.

“If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex. I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans…. I unquestioningly accepted the social hierarchy that placed European Jews at the top of the pile and the Jews of Arab and African lands at the bottom,” he writes in the opening chapter.

Having arrived at the age of five, he tried to fit in, as children like to do. In the Prologue, he poignantly recalls his deep shame when his father addressed him in Arabic rather than Hebrew in front of his friends. Being young, he had easily picked up Israel’s official language, reconstructed from the Biblical language for the modern age. His father in his mid-fifties, struggled to learn this complex language or adapt to the unsophisticated society in which he was a reluctant participant. Dispirited by the loss of wealth, which was confiscated by the Iraqi state when the family emigrated, and felled by bad health and fraudulent partners in Israel, this dynamic businessman remained unemployed for the rest of his life.

Dr Shlaim’s spirited socialite mother becomes a telephonist to make ends meet.    

The transition from cosseting servants in mansions with manicured gardens and partying with the high society of multicultural post-Ottoman Iraq to a bleak state-provided apartment has its roots in tectonic political shifts after World War I; in the creation of Arab nations from the ruins of the Ottoman empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 under which the British promised Jews a “national home” in Palestine. This latter deal was partly the product of guilt at age-old European persecution of Jews that produced the Zionist movement that, in turn, gained impetus after the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Dr Shlaim provides parallel accounts of how the fortunes of the Jewish community in Iraq, which dated back to two and a half millennia, changed with the creation of Israel. The emigration of some 125,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel between 1950 and 1953 has been portrayed as the result of pan-Arab anti-Semitism, especially after military losses to Israel, as a result of which Jews felt the threat of annihilation. Dr Shlaim’s account veers to a “post-Zionist narrative”, which he corroborates with forensic research.

He maintains that the great majority of emigrants did not want to leave because they had no ideological affinity with Zionism. His grandmother, who considered Baghdad her paradise, described it as “an Ashkenazi thing”. In Iraq, heir to the benign if neglectful tolerance of the Ottomans, less than 2 per cent of Jews were Zionists. He shows that Iraq’s Jews were victims of bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad, instigated by Israel to spark a mass flight to Israel. Why would Israel do this? Because the new state needed people to populate it and provide labour for construction projects and the military.

Dr Shlaim describes Zionism as a European construct that transformed Judaism into a “settler colonialist” project. That is why, he has argued in other books, conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism was misplaced. The remarkable point about Three Worlds — Iraq, Israel and Britain, where he finds his metier as a historian — is that Dr Shlaim comes to this realisation much later. In his childhood and youth, he is a staunch patriot, serving his time in the military (which he says was far more egalitarian than Israeli society at large) and fully imbibing the Kool-Aid of national myth-making. Only the outstanding mediocrity in school hints at deeper social traumas. Sadly, this memoir stops short at the 1967 war, which marked “the crest of my Israeli patriotism and receding zeal for the state of Israel”. He does not adequately describe his intellectual journey from unquestioning loyalty to a critic. For that, watch a delightful discussion between Dr Shlaim and Palestinian author Ghada Karmi. It’s available on YouTube and offers an empathetic understanding of the Israel-Hamas confrontation from an insider who’s been there, done that.