For four decades, Avi Shlaim, Oxford historian, has been an influential scholar of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. One of Israel’s “New Historians,” he has worked to present an unvarnished and a non-hagiographic account of the founding of the State of Israel. Among his eight celebrated books are Collusion Across the Jordan  (1988) and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1999). But there are many, many other books as well as an array of political writing and activism in the United Kingdom, where he has lived for many years. Most recently, and most germanely for this conversation, he’s turned to his own Iraqi / Israeli / British past for a memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.

Shlaim joins Recall This Book host John Plotz and Yuval Evri—Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jewish studies at Brandeis and author of The Return to Al-Andalus—to discuss ways in which class and caste differences in Israel serve to deepen ethnonationalist ideologies cresting so destructively in Israeli mainstream politics. A longer version of this conversation can be found at the Recall This Book or New Books Network sites.

John Plotz (JP): Yuval, I’m going to invite you to start us off by setting the scene before we pivot to talking about Avi’s wonderful book, in part because many of our readers, even those who know the older Ashkenazi-Sephardi distinction, are likely unfamiliar with what it means to talk about some Israeli as Mizrahi or even as Arab Jews.

Yuval Evri (YE): When I read Avi’s book, I was a bit surprised, but very happy, to see on the cover of the book: “Memoirs of an Arab Jew.” I’m sure the category of Arab Jew is on purpose, because there are many names for Jews of Arab lands that are common in scholarly work and literature. The American audience might be most familiar with the Sephardic Jews. It goes back to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the move to the Ottoman Empire. It’s also a halachic religious category; in America, people probably know that there is Sephardi shuls or synagogues and Ashkenazi synagogues.

The Mizrahi category is the most common today in Israel. Mizrach means east in Hebrew, and Mizrahi Jews are the name of the Oriental dimension of the category vis-à-vis the Western Jews, [who are] supposed to be Ashkenazi. We can problematize this category because most of the Ashkenazi Jews are coming from Eastern Europe. For many, many years, [from] the ninth century, they were considered as the Eastern Jews by the Western European Jews.

JP: My own Brooklyn grandmother would speak about Eastern Jews, meaning Jews from Poland!

YE: It reversed itself. Eastern Jews from Europe now see themselves as Western and look down at the Arab Jews or the Jews from the Arab land as Mizrahi, Oriental, as well as the Palestinian Indigenous people. Since the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, since Zionism came to the fore, Arab Jew became the most problematic category, even though I think it’s the most obvious category.

In the Arab land, you have many minorities speaking Arabic. You have Arab Christians. You have Arab Muslims. We have different kinds of denomination for Christians, Armenians and Turkomans, and then you have Yazidis. You have many groups for whom Arabic is part of their tradition, their cultural affiliation, their language, and Jews are part of it. And you have Arab Jews going back even before Islam.

But this kind of category is becoming something as a contrast, because Arabs and Jews, from the early 20th century onward, are in confrontation. And [it seems] you can’t be an Arab and a Jew together. Arab and Jew is the name of the conflict. One of my courses at Brandeis is “Arab-Jewish Modern Thought and Culture.” And many of the students who are coming to the class are sure that the course is about the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. They don’t think about the hyphen that  actually connects “Arab-Jewish,” rather than separating the terms.

It’s not a conventional autobiography. It’s an attempt to tell a family history and, through it, to tell a bigger story of the Jewish community in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century.

Avi Shlaim (AS): There is a vast literature about the history of the Jews of Europe, but there is very, very little literature about the Jews of the Arab lands. My book is an attempt to make a contribution to this second category of literature. It’s not a conventional autobiography. It’s an attempt to tell a family history and, through it, to tell a bigger story of the Jewish community in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century, and to go a bit farther back to tell the yet bigger story of Iraq’s history since the Second World War, and particularly the role of British colonialism in shaping modern Iraq.

The book isn’t entirely about myself. The first half is impersonal. I think about it as my impersonal autobiography. My wife read the book chapter by chapter as I was writing it, and one day, she said to me, “Avi, I’m very worried. I’m on chapter 5, and you haven’t been born yet.”

I went to school in Israel from the age of five to 15. When I was 15, I was about to be thrown out of high school in Israel, and my parents preempted and sent me to school in London. So the “third world” is London, from the age of 15 to 18. And after school in London, I went back to Israel, served in the IDF for two years, and then I came back to England and studied history at Cambridge and international relations at the LSE. I’ve stayed here ever since.

So the narrative goes up to when I was 18. But then there is a long epilogue in which I trace the evolution of my thinking about Israel-Palestine, and I give the reasons why, today, I’ve given up on the two-state solution and advocate one state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity and religion.

But the pivotal concept in the book is that of an Arab Jew. And as Yuval explained, this is a very controversial concept in Israel. Israelis regard it as an oxymoron, as an ontological impossibility. If you are a Jew, you cannot be an Arab. And if you are an Arab, you cannot be a Jew. I beg to differ. And it’s not for others to define my identity. It’s for me to define my identity, and now I define my initial identity as that of an Arab Jew.

Zionists don’t like my book at all. But in the Arab world, there’s been a lot of interest in it. And the reason is not that I’m an important person or that this is an especially well-written book. The reason is that they see something that they didn’t know. I recreate a unique Jewish civilization of the Near East, which was blown away in the 20th century by the cold winds of nationalism.

In all Arab countries, there were thriving Jewish communities. In Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, of course, in Egypt, throughout the Maghreb: There were Jewish communities. And by and large, they lived in harmony with their Muslim neighbors. For my family and me, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea or a distant dream. It was the everyday reality.

Zionism changed the whole landscape in the Middle East. And from my perspective, it changed it for the worst, because it was an open space, with pluralism, with religious tolerance. And after the birth of Israel, nationalism was a dominant, divisive force.

JP: You also make a very striking, specific historic argument about things that happened in Baghdad right around that time, and I was hoping you could say more about how it was that the Iraqi Jewish community eventually was persuaded to move to Israel.

AS: In 1950, there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq. By the end of 1952, there were around 10,000, and around 125,000 Jews ended up in Israel. Why did this happen? The master Zionist narrative says that antisemitism is the reason, that antisemitism was endemic and pervasive and perennial and it drove the Jews of the Arab world and of Iraq to seek refuge in Israel.

And there is another claim that the newly born State of Israel, which was facing many challenges, nobly went to the rescue of the Jews of the Arab world who were facing the real danger of a second Holocaust. My book is a refutation of this Zionist narrative. I do not deny that official persecution was a factor in the exodus, but I add that there was another factor, and that is the bombs that exploded in the streets of Baghdad in 1950, ’51.

In March 1950, the Iraqi government passed a law that said, “Any Jew who wants to leave the country is free to do so. They have a year to register.” And only a few thousand Jews chose to leave, because the Jewish community had very deep roots in the country, going back two-and-a-half millennia.

Then in the following year, five bombs exploded. In Israel, there were persistent rumors that the Mossad had a hand in planting these bombs. All my family and relatives and all the Iraqis I knew were certain that Israel had a hand in the bombs, and that fueled the resentment of the reception that they received once in Israel.

Israel always denied any involvement, and there was never any evidence. But when I was doing the research for my book, I came to find two pieces of evidence that confirmed Mossad involvement in three out of the five bombs. One source of evidence was Yaacov Karkoukli, an elderly Iraqi Jew who was an activist in the Zionist underground, and he told me about their activities, about paying bribes, forging documents. And most significantly, that one of his colleagues, Yusef Basri, was responsible for three of the bombs. He also told me the name of his controller, the Mossad officer called Max Bineth. That’s one source of evidence. The other is that Yaacov Karkoukli gave me an Iraqi police report, which named Yusef Basri and reported what he said during the interrogation. So I concluded that the Mossad, working through Zionist activists in Baghdad, was responsible for these three bombs.

And I described this under the heading “Cruel Zionism.” I didn’t invent the term, but it seems to fit this particular false-flag operation. And some of my critics say, “Even if it’s true that the Zionist underground was involved in precipitating the exodus, it wasn’t an important factor. It’s insignificant.” My answer to them is: Even if I knew for certain that not a single Iraqi Jew left Iraq for Israel because of the bombs, I would still indict Israel, because Israel was created to offer a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. And here, we have Israel recruiting decent local Iraqi Jews, turning them into spies and into terrorists against their own people.

JP: You mentioned that in the Iraqi Jewish community within Israel, this was a widely circulating or accepted rumor. And I wanted to connect that to one of the big questions I have, now that I’ve just recently learned about the Mizrahi “Israeli Black Panthers” of the 1960s, about the way in which there were possible moments in which Mizrahi in Israel might have made common cause [with Palestinians] through that Arab-Jewish identity.

The received wisdom in the West now is that Mizrahi Jews do not make common cause across the religious divide. But you’re describing a moment when these rumors were circulating in the ’50s and maybe up into the ’60s. Do you have a general account of how it is that the politics of the Arab Jew might have had this kind of galvanizing political effect [of solidarity across religious lines], but why within the current-day politics of Israel, it doesn’t operate that way?

AS: A very important factor in Israeli politics throughout the periods from 1948 to the present is that the Mizrahi Jews have voted in large numbers for Herut, which later became the Likud, the right-wing party, and other parties of the right. And the official explanation for this phenomenon of Jews from the Arab lands supporting nationalist parties and far-right parties in Israel is that these people lived with Arabs. They know what the Arabs are like. They understand the “Arab mentality” and they know that the only language that Arabs understand is the language of force. That’s why they vote for right-wing parties. And my explanation for this phenomenon is that the Mizrahi Jews were indoctrinated in Israel to hate the Arabs and to see the Arabs as the enemy. This was my experience in Israel as a young Mizrahi.

Another explanation for this phenomenon is that marginal groups tend to adopt the values of the mainstream in order to establish their credentials as part of that society. This is true of poor white Americans in America for voting for right-wing leaders, and it’s true of the Mizrahim in Israel.

After telling the story of the bombs in Baghdad, I move on to the Lavon Affair, an episode in 1954 when a ring of Jewish spies and saboteurs in Cairo planted bombs in public places with the aim of creating bad blood between the Nasser regime and the West. Pinhas Lavon, the minister of defense, denied that he gave the order to activate the ring, and he was forced to resign. The leader of the ring was Max Bineth, the same intelligence officer who had orchestrated the bombs in Baghdad, after which he moved to Cairo. The operation was aborted. They were caught red-handed, and the whole ring was tried and imprisoned, including Max Bineth, who committed suicide in prison. And no one could deny that this was an Israeli-run operation. The local Jews paid for this with their freedoms, with their lives. They lost their homeland. They suffered a great deal in the service of Israel.

I talk about the Lavon Affair to make the point that what happened in Iraq was not a one-off thing. It was a pattern of Zionist behavior, of false-flag operations to turn Arab Jews against their own countries, and this had far-reaching consequences in Egypt. We know this from the book by Joel Beinin on the Jews of Egypt.

The whole attitude of Egyptians toward the Jewish minority changed. After the Lavon Affair, Jews were considered a threat to Egyptian security, as outsiders, as a sinister force at the service of the Zionist state.

YE: One of the heroes of your book is your mother, Saida (Mas’uda) who died in 2021 when she was 96 years old in Ramat Gan in Israel. In many of the accounts on Arab-Jewish women, the stereotypical perception is that the women are a passive factor in the family. But here, we see that your mother is, in many ways, the leader. You move to Israel through her British citizenship. She’s taking control of things. Your mother’s impact on your memoirs is one thing that I would love to hear more about. The second is about the debate on the history of Israel-Palestine between the personal memories, the oral accounts, and the evidence that you have in the archives. Your research on the bombing starts with an oral account that you heard at home from your mom. How do you work with this oral narration? What is the process as a historian and as a writer in that sense?

Our move to Israel was not an ideological one… We were conscripted into the Zionist project.

AS: My mom is both the main source for the early part of the book and the hero of the story. And for the whole time that I was working on my memoirs, I used to interview her regularly and take down detailed notes. There is nothing she liked better than talking about the good old days in Iraq. And she was herself quite a remarkable woman. First, her education. She went to the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Baghdad, which was a network of Jewish schools throughout the Ottoman Empire.

And in that school, they taught four languages, French, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. But the medium of teaching all the subjects was French. And when my mother was in her 90s, if anyone dared suggest that she was succumbing to dementia, she would declaim Archimedes’ principle in French. And I say this because Ashkenazi Jews tend to look down on Mizrahi as backward.

My mother also talked to me about what it was to live in Iraq, to be patriotic, to feel a sense of belonging in Iraq. She recalled that King Faisal the First visited her school, accompanied by the chief rabbi. My mother used to talk a great deal about the wonderful Muslim friends that we had in Baghdad. And one day, I said to her, “Did we have any Zionist friends in Baghdad?” And she looked at me and she said, “No. Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing. It’s nothing with us.” So her attitude was typical. We were Arab Jews. We lived in Iraq. We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Jewish. Our move to Israel was not an ideological one. It wasn’t one of choice. It was one of necessity. We were conscripted into the Zionist project.

JP: Can I connect that to the title of your book, Three Worlds? Had you not gone to the UK, had you stayed in Israel, do you think your work could have been the way it is? There’s a second side of it too, which is that Britain is not just any incidental Western country to which you arrived. It’s also the colonizing country of the area. How much does that colonial status affect your experience of being British now and being in your third world?

AS: British colonialism is a very important factor in this story, because Britain invented Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Britain played the imperial game of divide and rule between the different minorities, and it privileged the Jews and the Christians over the Muslims, which created resentment on the part of the Muslims.

And there is a famous pogrom against the Jews in Baghdad in 1941, and Zionists say, “This is typical of the pattern. Antisemitism led to this pogrom.” And I say, “No, it was an isolated event.” And British colonialism was largely responsible.

The colonial factor is all-important, and this reminds me that Yuval once wrote that the logic of the Ottoman Empire was pluralism. The logic of the British Empire in the Middle East was nationalism. Nationalism is a very divisive force.

Would I have written what I’ve written and become what I’ve become had I not left Israel? The answer is a categorical no.

If I had stayed in Israel, I would have been a very, very different individual. I was indoctrinated at school and in the army. The only version I knew of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Zionist version. They taught us a great deal about the history of the Jews in Europe, but they never taught us anything about the history of the Jews in the Middle East. One of the things that I hope to achieve in my book is to rewrite our history as I understand it, and not as part of the Zionist master narrative.

The American Jewish historian Salo Baron once coined the expression “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” That is to say, Jewish history is a never-ending chain of hatred, prejudice, bias, persecution, and bloodshed, culminating in the Holocaust. I’m prepared for argument’s sake to say that the lachrymose version of Jewish history broadly fits the history of the Jews of Europe, although I would dispute this if I had the time. But I insist that the lachrymose version of Jewish history doesn’t fit the history of the Jews in the Arab lands.

It’s only after I left Israel, only after I lived in Britain, only after the June 1967 war that I began to develop a more critical view of Israel. When I served in the army in the mid-1960s, I served loyally and proudly, because I thought that in my time, the IDF was true to its name. It was the Israel Defense Forces. After the Six-Day War, Israel trebled its territory, and the IDF became the brutal police force of a brutal colonial power. And that’s when I started parting ways with Israel. I had been deeply ashamed of speaking Arabic and of my being an Iraqi boy. Deeply ashamed. I had a sense of inferiority that governed my relationship with Israeli society. When I became a historian, I realized that having lived in an Arab country was an advantage, because I could relate to Arabs not just as the enemy, but as people, as human beings.

YE: In many ways, as an Arab Jew and Iraqi Jew, you tell a collective story in your book. I can relate to it. Both of my parents were born and raised in Iraq. The opening scene of the book shows you as a young kid, a few years after you moved to Israel, playing with your friends in the summer and then your father approaches and addresses you in Arabic. The way that you express the feeling of shame is very powerful.

We spoke about the figure of your mom. The figure of your dad is not really present in the autobiography, but he represents the Iraqi orientation of the Iraqi Jews, the Iraqi background that you wanted to distance yourself from in the beginning of your life in Israel, and then you come back to it, the Arab-Jewish option. I’m very interested to hear more about that.

AS: My father is a tragic figure. My mother was resilient and resourceful, and she was a survivor. She triumphed against the odds, whereas my father was destroyed by the move from Iraq to Israel. He was a very wealthy merchant with a very high social class. He had a business importing building materials from Europe, and we had a very safe, comfortable lifestyle with servants.

He was a very proud man and a very well-respected man, but he did not survive the move to Israel. He lost most of his assets, and he didn’t speak Hebrew, and he was a broken man in Israel. He was unemployed. It’s only when I was writing about my father that I cried, not when I was writing about my mother.

And my father is just an illustration of what it could mean for Arab Jews to end up in the promised land. And aliyah and immigration to Israel—aliyah literally means ascent. But in the case of my father and the rest of my family, the move from Iraq to Israel was not aliyah, was not ascent. It was very steep Yeridah, descent from upper-middle-class status in Baghdad to the margins of Israeli society.

YE: We are having this conversation when, in Israel-Palestine, there is a horrific war, violence, and death in Gaza and in Lebanon. It seems that this conflict is getting worse and worse since the book was published. Can it be helpful for us to reimagine a different future for Israel-Palestine?

AS: I think so. And to put the ghastly war in Gaza and the genocide in Gaza in historical perspective, I would say that Zionism and the State of Israel is a settler-colonial project, and the logic of settler colonialism is the displacement or the elimination of the natives. And Noam Chomsky once observed that settler colonialism is the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism.

Palestinians, for the last century, have been on the receiving end of Zionist settler colonialism on the one hand and Western imperialism, first under Britain, then under America, on the other hand. The current war in Gaza is the climax of Zionist settler colonialism. It’s another example of what in my book I described as cruel Zionism. And it’s not a war just between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, with Israel being backed to the hilt by imperialist America.

The war in Gaza is the culmination of a process of settler colonialism, which involved ethnic cleansing. There was a Nakba in 1948 when three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees. Palestine was ethnically cleansed, and there is today a danger hovering over the Middle East of a second Nakba, which may yet be of greater proportions than the Nakba of 1948. This is certainly the Israeli objective, to depopulate Gaza, to get rid of 2.1 million Palestinians. Hasn’t happened yet because of Egyptian opposition, but it’s still the aim. And at the same time, when attention is turned to the conflict in Gaza, Israel has intensified and accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Now, can the past teach us anything about the future? I answer this question in the epilogue to my book, and I say that today, any kind of peaceful solution is not conceivable. I used to support a two-state solution to this conflict, but Israel, with settlements, has destroyed and killed the possibility of a two-state solution. So I now support one state with equal rights for all its citizens. And my own background, my own experience of living in an Arab society helps me to think differently about the future, because Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not something remote. It’s something very concrete, something that we touched. It was the everyday life that we experienced. A peaceful solution to this conflict is yet possible.

JP: Well, I think we should end on that bright note. It may be only a hypothetical brightness, but I think the resources of the past for imagining the future is a good note.

At Recall This Book we like to wrap things up with a section called Recallable Books, where each of us names an older book that those who enjoyed this conversation might enjoy.

AS: The book I would very, very warmly recommend is On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements by Ella Shohat. Ella Shohat is of Iraqi descent, an Israeli who is now a professor at New York University. She’s a leading cultural critic, and her book is a book of essays whose pivotal concept is that of the Arab Jew.

She explains in detail what it means. And for her, as for me, the hyphen unites. It’s not a hyphen that divides Arabs from Jews, as Yuval said earlier. Ella is a foremost critic of Zionism, and she draws parallels between the experience of the Palestinians and the experience of Iraqi Jews. The Palestinians were displaced in 1948. We were also displaced. And she makes the point that it was the same Zionist colonial institution, the same Zionist mindset, the same methods that brought about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, that also brought Jews from the Arab world to replace them.

YE: I second Avi’s suggestion. Shohat’s groundbreaking work from the 1980s onward on the category of the Arab Jews has influenced every scholar writing about it since then. I will mention the book by Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews. There is a very important chapter about the property of the Iraqi Jews that also Avi mentioned in his book.

In the case of the Iraqi Jews, because of the absence of historical works on this kind of history, historical novels became a very important source. I would recommend an Iraqi Jewish writer named Shimon Ballas whose wonderful novel Outcast was translated into English. And also Sami Michael, another Iraqi Jewish writer of his generation.

JP: I’m going to go a different direction entirely. Avi, when you were talking about the generation gap with your mother and father, I was actually thinking about that familiar American story of immigration by way of erasure of the earlier culture, which in America is so often just depicted as purely valorized; what it means to look nostalgically back at an outmoded culture, and then move into the great modern world, which is usually in Manhattan.

So I was thinking about Alfred Kazin’s wonderful trilogy, A Walker in the City from 1951, and then Starting Out in the Thirties from 1965, and then New York Jew from 1978, each of which explore that question of the spark of potential difference from the earlier generation, from his aunt, his mother, his grandmother. He really is struggling with that way in which one could doubly belong—or one could only succeed by basically leaving Brooklyn and going up to the New York Public Library and finding a new identity there.

You helped me think about the ways in which we paper over the roughness of that American story. Kazin is an example of someone who lets you see the costs as well as the advantages of the assimilation narrative. 

This article was commissioned by John Plotz.