Interview: Avi Shlaim on Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew

Fonie Mitsopoulou

Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Fonie Mitsopoulou is a writer currently based in Cairo.

Iwould like to start off by talking about your intentions behind writing Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew. Did you come into it with the intention of recounting some really interesting stories that you’ve experienced? Or was it to shed a light on these issues that you’ve been writing about from an academic perspective for so much time, but instead from a more personal angle?

My academic discipline is international relations. And my main research interest is the Arab­Israeli conflict. So I always knew that the main victims of the Arab­Israeli conflict are the Palestinians. In 1948, when Israel was born, they suffered. In Israel, it’s called the 1948 War, the War of Independence. For the Palestinians, it was the Nakba, the Catastrophe.

But, much later in life, in the last decade or so, I began to realize that there was another category of victims of Zionism. And that is the Jews of the Arab lands. And that’s when I became much more interested in the history of the Jews in Iraq, and the history of my family, and the impact of the Zionist movement on our community. One major factor that enabled me to start writing [my memoir] was reading a book by an Israeli scholar, Orit Bashkin. She wrote a wonderful book, New Babylonians, a history of the Jews in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century. And I learned a huge amount from this book about the place of the Jews in Iraqi society. And having read that book, I was able to place my own story and my family’s story within the wider context of the Jews of Iraq — more broadly, even, Arab Jews, and the impact of the Zionist movement on Arab Jews.

It is quite interesting to think about the oral histories of your family being passed from [your mother’s] grandmother to herself to you. I was wondering how you made the decisions on how to situate your stories within the wider political context of the time?

Yes, that was an issue that preoccupied me because my book is not a traditional au­ tobiography, which is simply about the person who is writing it. And, therefore, the key challenge was to interweave, to combine, interlace the personal with the political. And I tried to do this as best I can, by telling my story, or in the case until we moved to Israel, the family story, but set it against the wider canvas of what was happening in Iraq at the time.

So the book is chronological. And at every stage, I tell the family story against the wider background. For example, in 1948, when the war in Palestine broke out, the Jews were very, very insecure, uneasy, because they were associated with the Zionist movement. And it was a period of anxiety for Iraqi Jews and for my family, because Zionism gave the Jews a territorial dimension, which they didn’t have before. Until Israel was born, we were a minority in Iraq, just one minority among many — were treated no better, but no worse, than the other minorities. And there was a long tradition of religious tolerance in Iraq. So unlike Europe, which had a Jewish problem, Iraq did not have a Jewish problem. Nor did it have a history of antisemitism. Antisemitism is a European malady. From Europe, it was exported to the Middle East. And interestingly, there was no antisemitic literature in Arabic. So European literature had to be translated.

We, the Jews, had been in Iraq since the Babylonian exile two and a half millennia ago. We were not newcomers. We were not outsiders. We were there long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century. But Zionism changed all that. Or, perhaps I should say, nationalism changed all of it. Because nationalism is a very divisive, a negative force. For nationalism, you need enemies. And nationalism is divisive be­ er was the Zionist movement, which was in the process of dispossessing the Palestinians from Palestine and taking over the country. flict about land. There were two peoples in one land; this is what the conflict is about. And to put it even more simply and crudely, it’s a real estate dispute over land. But obviously, there are different layers to this conflict — religion is one of them. tween us and them, We and the Other. So, the two forces that changed the situation of the Jews in Iraq for the worst: one was the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1930s and the oth­

So, once Israel was created, it was possible for Iraqis to say to Jews, ‘You’re not from here. You don’t belong here. You’re outsiders. You are the allies of the Zionists who are dispossessing Palestinian brothers.’ And also there were right­wing parties, like Hizb al­Istiqlal, the Independence Party, which attacked the Jews and regarded them as a fifth column. Having been a very positive and constructive element in Iraqi society, the Jews now were viewed as a problem, as the outsider. And that was the background to the persecution at the official level that began a persecution of the Jews by the government after the end of the 1948 War.

To what extent does religion make a nation? Because, on the one hand, you talk about how you are, in a way, a proponent of a one state solution. You talk about how easily, in Iraq, Jewish people and Muslims could coexist until a certain point. On the other hand, you point out that when Iraq was created, it was created in a way that did not account for different religious groups.

As a continuation of this question, what was your family’s experience like going to Israel, having come from a very different background and very different culture, different language from all the European Israelis. Was religion enough to create a sense of nationhood at the time?

The role of religion is not crucial. In the Arab­Israeli conflict, it’s a factor. But the Arab­Israeli conflict is basically conventional geopolitical con­

And, in fact, religion has been of growing importance in this conflict. For example, look at the rise of Hamas within the Palestinian community. But that’s not what it is essentially about. Judaism is a religion. It’s also, as Martin Buber said, a civilization. And there is a right­wing view associated with the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington called “clash of civilizations,” which says that conflict in the mo dern world is not between countries and nations, but between civilizations. And I think this is a really silly and superficial notion. But it was taken up by some right­wing Israelis to say that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not a traditional conflict. It’s a clash of civilizations.

And what the story of my family demonstrates is that there was nothing preordained about hostility between Muslims and Jews. Arabs and Jews will live very happily together for generations. It’s nationalism that got in the way. So the problem that my community faced in Iraq was not a cultural one. It’s a political one. We were Arab­Jews. We spoke Arabic. Our culture was Arabic. Food was Arab food, Middle Eastern food. My parents’ music was a very attractive blend of Arab and Jewish music. So that’s the key point in the book: that the problem which led to the displacement of the Jews of the Arab world to Israel was not cultural or religious or ideological. It was political. The Zionist project of an independent Jewish state in Isra­ el created a deep rift between Jews on the one hand and Arabs on the other hand.

You mentioned before this feeling of being between three different worlds. Could you expand a bit on how your identity was formed spending all those years in the UK, also being raised by a family that felt distinctly Arab but having spent a lot of the formative years growing up in Israel? How do you think this has impacted you and the thinking behind this book?

The three worlds are Iraq, from when I was born in 1945 until 1950, when I was five years old and we moved to Israel. Then Israel, from the age of five to 15. And London, where I went to school from the age of 15 to 18. And when I was an international relations scholar, I didn’t know anything about social history. Only international history — history from above, not history from below. And very naively I thought that we are given an identity and off we go.

But when working on this nov­ el, trying to make sense of my own life, I learned that identity is a much more complex thing. First of all, we all have multiple identities. But secondly, we don’t entirely form our own identity, it’s formed for us. And not only by positive forces, but also by negative forces. In my case, my initial identity was that of an Arab­Jew. There’s no better way to describe my first identity. I was an Arab­Jew. But in Israel, the term Arab­Jew is very much frowned upon. It is erased my Arab identity and gave me a new identity as an Israeli. And this affected me profoundly. said to be an ontological impossibility. You’re either Jewish, in which case you’re not an Arab, or you’re an Arab, in which case you are not a Jew. But for me, the hyphen in Arab­Jew doesn’t divide. That hyphen unites. And Zionism largely affected my identity. It

The book starts with an episode when I was about 10 years old, playing with my friends in the street in Ramat Gan, wearing shorts and sandals. And my father comes towards us and he looks foreign. He looks alien. He wears a three piece suit with a white shirt and a tie. And he speaks to me in Arabic. And I’m acutely embarrassed because Arabic is the language of the enemy. Arabic in Israel was considered a primitive and ugly language. So I’m acutely embarrassed, and I reply in monosyllables. What I wanted to say to him is that, ‘it’s okay to speak Arabic at home, but in front of my friends, I’d rather you spoke to me in Hebrew.’ But I was very confused and I just wished the Earth would open up and swallow me.

So that’s just one illustration of the imposition of an identity on a young and impressionable boy. And there was also the education that we all received at school. There was a very strong Zionist element of indoctrination of “them” and “us”. All the focus was on the history of the Jews of Europe. I learned nothing at school about the rich history and civilization of my own community. So, identity is a very fluid thing. And one of the benefits that I gained from writing this memoir is to recapture and to gain actual pride in my identity as an Arab­Jew rather than be ashamed of it. So the end result, for me, of writing this memoir is that I’ve been able to reinvent myself as an Arab­Jew.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can watch the full interview with Avi Shlaim on YouTube by visiting https://bit.ly/ avi-shlaim-opr or by scanning the QR code below.