The Markaz Review:

Selma Dabbagh

In writing his most personal book to date, British-Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim has taken the most political of positions. Shlaim, an Emeritus Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, has written various works of Middle Eastern history, including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. Three Worlds is the memoir of one member of an ancient civilization, the Iraqi Jews, whose community was ripped apart in the years following World War II. The author has since lived as a member of a minority, both in Israel and then in England.

The world of Shlaim’s childhood in Baghdad was rich both materially and culturally. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history,” he writes, referencing the Christian hysteria against Jews that resulted in the Inquisition, the Pogroms and finally, the Holocaust. Iraq’s Jews were subjected to expulsion, he asserts, but not for the reasons claimed by the standard historical narratives. “My family did not move from Iraq to Israel because of a clash of cultures or religious intolerance,” Shlaim observes. “Our universe did not collapse because we could not get on with our Muslim neighbours. The driver for our displacement was political, not religious or cultural.” This political driver, he shows, was both external, underhand and deliberately divisive. This was a planned population transfer, which was not desired by, nor of benefit to, the population itself. Arab Jews, he argues cogently in Three Worlds, were the victims of a conflict that was neither of their design or in response to their collective desires, but that led to the annihilation of their distinct ancient culture.

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