What is the source of Shlaim's bias and this resentment against Israel? It seems pretty straightforward:

Avi Shlaim's father was Yusef Shlaim, a prosperous businessman in Baghdad. Prior to the family's relocation to Israel in 1950, they lived an affluent, upper-middle-class lifestyle. In Iraq, Yusef was a highly successful merchant who moved in distinguished social circles and counted government ministers as friends. He was 23 years older than his wife, Saida. In 1950, during a wave of bombings targeting the Jewish population in Baghdad, the family fled to Israel. The transition was devastating for Yusef. He struggled to learn Hebrew and faced heavy marginalization in Israel. Unable to rebuild his career, he never worked again, his wealth was lost, and he died in 1970. Avi Shlaim detailed his father's struggles and the family's uprooting in his memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew.

After the 1948 war, over 850,000 Jews were forced out of the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa by threat and force. They were forced to leave their businesses and belongings behind and were given no financial reparations. Only those who were wealthy enough or had family in the West could migrate to places other than Israel. Apparently Avi believes the Shlaims were so important that Mossad sent terrorists to Iraq to ensure Avi would be forced out of a life as a rich Jewish boy in Iraq to a miserable life in Israel where he was given an inferiority complex by those nasty, arrogant Ashkenazi boys at school. Life was hard for the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews in Israel in the 1950s but it was never easy for any displaced persons moving to another country. Avi blames the Israelis and not the Iraqis for his father's humiliations and family break-up but at least he can now strut the academic world stage as that most respected and popular of people to the Left: A Jew who hates Israel.

Books about the 1950s Mizrahi and Sephardic exodus from Muslim countries:

  • Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight by Lyn Julius
  • The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands edited by Malka Hillel Shulewitz
  • Jews in Arab Countries: The Great Uprooting by Georges Bensoussan
  • The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado
  • Impossible Exodus by Orit Bashkin

Spectator Australia

A Family Uprooted

Avi Shlaim claims to have uncovered undeniable proof that Zionist agents were responsible for targeting the Jewish community, forcing them to flee Iraq and settle in Israel

Avi Shlaim. [Getty Images]

Justin Marozzi
17 June 2023

Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew Avi Shlaim Oneworld, pp.366, 25

Avi Shlaim's family led the good life in Baghdad. Prosperous and distinguished members of Iraq's Jewish minority, a community which could trace its presence in Babylon back more than 2,500 years, they had a large house with servants and nannies, went to the best schools, rubbed shoulders with the great and the good and sashayed elegantly from one glittering party to the next. Shlaim's father was a successful businessman who counted ministers as friends. His much younger mother was a socially ambitious beauty who attracted admirers, from Egypt's King Farouk to a Mossad recruiter. For this privileged section of Iraqi society, it was a rich, cosmopolitan and generally harmonious milieu. And for the young Shlaim, born in Baghdad in 1945, these were halcyon days.

They were not to last. In 1950, during a series of bombings targeting the Jewish population in the Iraqi capital, he and his family fled their ancient homeland to begin new lives in the fledgling state of Israel. His father, by then in his fifties, could not speak Hebrew and was completely undone by the move. After a couple of failed attempts to start a business, he never worked again. Shlaim's vivacious mother was forced to take up the slack, exchanging the gilded life of a society hostess in Baghdad for a mundane job as a telephonist in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv, where they lived in much diminished circumstances. The couple drifted apart and divorced, and Shlaim's father died in 1970.

Disinterring his turbulent childhood more than 70 years later, Shlaim, a retired Oxford professor and distinguished historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict, comes to understand that his earliest relationship with Israel was defined by an inferiority complex. The Sephardim, Jews from Arab lands, were looked down upon by the Ashkenazim, their European counterparts. He was tongue-tied and taciturn at school and only regained his confidence, after an unhappy period in Israel, when resettled as a teenager in Britain.

At the heart of this riveting and profoundly controversial book is Shlaim's investigation into the Baghdad bombings against Jewish targets in 1950 and 1951. Between those years around 110,000 Jews of a population of approximately 135,000 emigrated from Iraq to Israel. Although Israel has consistently denied any involvement in these attacks, suspicion has hung over the clandestine activities of Zionist agents tasked with persuading the Jewish community to flee Iraq and settle in Israel. Shlaim's bombshell is to uncover what he terms 'undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks', which helped terminate the millennial presence of Jews in Babylon. It is quite a charge - and will always be hotly disputed.

This is a beautifully written book which artfully blends the personal with the political. The recollections of family life in both its glory and its anguished tribulations are vividly recreated. Shlaim's is a powerful and humane voice which reminds us that the Palestinians were not the only victims of the creation of Israel in 1948. He argues that the Zionist project dealt a mortal blow to the position of Jews in Arab lands, turning them from accepted compatriots into a suspected fifth column allied to the new Jewish state. He resolutely clings to his identity as both Arab and Jew, hence the title of this memoir.

After national service and his arrival as an undergraduate in Cambridge in 1966, Shlaim brings his story to a close with an extraordinary epilogue in which he launches a full-frontal assault on Zionism and the modern state of Israel. Even after everything that has come before this, its sheer ferocity stuns.

This is a lacerating J'Accuse that will leave some readers reeling. He argues that the Eurocentric Zionist movement and Israel together have intensified divisions between Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, Hebrew and Arabic and Judaism and Islam. It has actively worked to erase an ancient heritage of 'pluralism, religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism and coexistence. Above all, Zionism has discouraged us from seeing each other as fellow human beings.' Israel, originally created by a 'settler-colonial movement' which perpetrated the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine', has become 'a fortress state with a siege mentality that attributed genocidal intentions to its neighbours'. This is bitterly contested territory. Shlaim confesses that the majority of Israelis, including his family, are outraged by the designation of Israel as an 'apartheid state', yet this is precisely what he considers it.

As for the most effective way forward, it is difficult to mount a credible argument against his conclusion that the so-called 'two-state' solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a busted flush. After years of the relentless and illegal expansion of Israeli settlements, the clearest way to demonstrate this is to pose a simple question. Where exactly would the Palestinian state be?

Shlaim's preferred resolution of the conflict, once dismissed as an extreme fringe pursuit but now considered with increasing seriousness, including by Palestinians but extremely few Israelis, is the one-state solution, with 'equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion'. That would equate to the end of the Jewish state of Israel. Why should that even be contemplated? Shlaim answers with a final thrust of the knife: 'Apartheid in the 21st century is simply not sustainable.'