A Memoir Chronicles How Israel Failed to Become the Promised Land for All Jews

“Qu’est-ce qu ‘une nation? (what is a nation?),” French scholar Ernest Renan had famously asked in 1882. A nation was not, he suggested, a racial, linguistic, religious or geographical construct; instead, it was ‘a spiritual principle’ – one that was forged through “forgetting …[or] historical error.” In other words, a nation is one that has agreed to forget certain things in its past. Avi Shlaim’s memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, turns the spotlight back on some of the things that the Jewish nation, centred on the state of Israel, prefers to forget or suppress. It is a moving history of not just one of the world’s pre-eminent historians and observers of the Middle East, but also of a lost world in which Arabs and Jews had a shared past and a shared presence, one in which there was nothing preordained in the hostility that defines their current existence. In the words of the author, “in 1947 – 49, it was not only the land of Palestine that was partitioned, but also the past. The common past of Jews and Muslims in Iraq was superseded by the new reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Unsurprisingly, this is a very political book. Reading it today as the fires of conflict rage yet again in Israel and Palestine, the enormity of what was lost in the way in which the state of Israel was born and shaped by its first leaders is thrown into stark relief by the rising body count in the region. Then again, this is a memoir of loss.

Shlaim calls it a ‘revisionist tract, a transgressive document.’ The transgression lies in identifying proudly as an Arab-Jew whose family had been integrated into the life and culture of the Middle East; caught in the cross-fire of Zionism and Arab nationalism, Shlaim’s family were compelled to move to the fledgling state of Israel, a move that is lamented, not lauded. The very hyphen in his identity, which celebrates his family’s roots in Iraq, is anathema to the concept of Israel as a lonely outpost of Jewish sanctuary in a sea of Arab hostility. The revisionism comes from questioning the founding of Israel as a uniformly good thing for all Jews, because in addition to the ‘monumental injustice’ done to the Palestinians in the late 1940s, the founding of Israel produced another set of victims: the Jews of Arab lands, such as Shlaim’s family, who were alienated by the Zionist project from the land of their birth, from their culture, their languages, and eventually, from their history.  

Shlaim was born into upper middle-class Iraqi-Jewish family in 1945 – the only son of a prosperous businessman, whose family, and whose wife’s family traced their roots back to Iraq for generations. (Shlaimi’s maternal great-grandfather moved to India to make his fortune, working for the Sassoons in Bombay, before eventually moving back to Baghdad.) They were, quite simply, ‘Iraqis whose religion happened to be Jewish.’ The Shlaims were fully integrated into Iraqi society, speaking Arabic, mixing with Muslims and Jews, and thinking of themselves as native to that multicultural land – an Iraq where ‘the main criterion for differentiating between Jews and Arabs … was religion, and only as an identifying characteristic and not a divisive one.’  

That changed with the founding of Israel. Israel gave Judaism a territorial base. While this was a sanctuary for European Jews still coming to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust, for the Jews of the Near East, the founding of a homeland for all Jews undermined their roots in Babylon that could be traced back to the sixth century BCE. Jews had been a protected, yet well-integrated minority under the Ottoman Empire. At the start of the first world war, Jews constituted one third of Baghdad’s population, a city that was often regarded as Jewish. Within years of the end of the second world war, Baghdad’s Jewish population was all but gone. They were victims of a political struggle between two competing ‘secular’ ideologies of Arab nationalism and Zionism – one, that made them feel less welcome in the land of their birth, and the other that insisted that they could only be safe in the land of their religion. And thus the Shlaim family lost the land of their birth.

The second chronicle of loss begins with Shlaim’s move to Israel at the age of five. A combination of general attacks on Jews (some of which the historian in him has traced back to the Zionist underground – an attempt to push Jews towards the newly created Israel) and a specific sense of insecurity caused by criminals targeting his family’s wealth, had caused his mother to conclude that Iraq was unsafe for the family. The move, however, extracted a heavy toll. They left behind their comfortable home and lifestyle, their language, their culture, their history, their past, and even their names. Shlaim’s mother and older sister yielded to the pressure to adopt more Hebrew names; Avi’s name morphed from Abi (for Abraham) to Avi (Avraham).

In some of the most moving parts of this story, Shlaim explores what the move meant for his father, Yusef Shlaim, who arrived in Israel after his wife and children, having stayed behind to try to settle his affairs. Yusef was broken by the relocation. Until the age of 50, he had been a successful Iraqi Jew, steeped in the ways and customs of the land of his birth. The move to Israel stripped him of it all. His standing in society, his wealth, his self-worth, all of it disappeared in the land of Zion where Arabic culture was actively suppressed. At its most basic, the move stripped him of his language, for Yusef was never able to communicate fluently in Hebrew. Arabic was looked down upon, and in one searing episode, Avi describes how, as a little boy, he squirmed in embarrassment when his father came across him playing with his friends and spoke to him in Arabic. The language of his forefathers had become a source of shame in the ‘promised land’.  

Yusef’s story encapsulates the plight of so many Iraqis forced to leave their homes, only to find themselves treated like second class citizens in the promised land. They became the olim, the immigrants, pushed down the pecking order that favoured the Ashkenazi or European Jews. Those of the Middle East and North Africa – the Sephardi Jews – were considered culturally and socially inferior and were expected to integrate into a conception of Israel as an outpost of European enlightenment in a sea of primitive Arabic culture. The point is not just the material loss – though of course that was considerable. The more painful loss was that of history, of language, of self. In order for Israel to be a Jewish haven in hostile Arab neighbourhood, the links between Jews and Arabs had to be completely disavowed. The move to Israel erased a whole culture and history of being. Yusef was not able to reinvent himself and he died a silent shadow of his prosperous, generous self. Avi’s book is a lament for people like his father who lost literally everything in the move to Zion, for whom Zion became the land of exile.   

From this point of view, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew is a reckoning with a heritage and a past. In addition to acknowledging the injustice done to the Palestinians by the naqba or catastrophe of 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from the land of their ancestors (events that occur outside the purview of this memoir), this book looks at the injustice done to Arab-Jews who were pushed out of the lands of their birth by the politics of the region. As with the Palestinians, who were denied the right of return by the new Jewish state, the injustice done to the Arab-Jews was then compounded by the devaluing and suppressing of their identities in Israel. They were brought in to Israel to fill the ‘empty spaces’ created by the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestine’, even if they ‘had no desire whatsoever to relocate to Israel.’ Then, to maintain the idea of Israel as an outpost of Jewish sanctuary, the links of the Arab-Jews to the land of their forefathers had to be denied and suppressed. The Jews of the Arab lands could have been a bridge to their Arab neighbours once the state of Israel was established in Palestine. Instead, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, ‘built Israel as a fortress state with a siege mentality that attributed genocidal intentions to its neighbours.’ The price for that decision is still being paid today.

There is a third home in this memoir of ‘Three Worlds’, and that is London, which is where Avi Shlaim moved from Israel to complete his secondary education. He never moved back. Britain provided the foil for Israel in a way, because the social distinctions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi did not matter so much. He was now freer to shape his identity as he chose. Eventually, and more importantly, distance allowed Avi to bring a certain degree of objectivity to his study of Israel. This gradually resulted in his disillusionment with the state of Israel as it is now and the Zionist project that deprived him of his homeland. As he explains:

“The present impasse in Israel-Palestine resulted, at least partly, from the central assumption of Zionist discourse, namely, that Jews and Arabs are exclusive and antagonistic ethnic categories. The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for European Jews. It aspired to be in the Middle East but not of the Middle East. It sought not the melding of cultures but the replacement of the local culture by a European one. By its very nature, the Zionist movement deepened the divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and the Middle East, between Judaism and Islam, between Hebrew and Arabic. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel have actively worked to erase our common past, our intertwined histories and our centuries-old heritage of pluralism, religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism and co-existence. Above all, Zionism has discouraged us from seeing each other as fellow human beings.”

And that, in essence is why this book is a must-read. Avi reminds us that beneath even the most intractable of conflicts are human beings – people with histories, cultures and stories. Once we allow ourselves to understand those histories and acknowledge the essential humanity of each other, we might start to find a way out of even the most impossibly antagonistic of relationships. It is, quite simply, an excellent read. 

Priyanjali Malik walked into her first tutorial with Avi Shlaim some twenty-five years ago. He guided her through her MPhil, provided advice on life and relationships and taught her how to become a scholar somewhere along the way. He even approved of the chap that she wanted to marry.