“This tour-de-force of meticulous evidence-gathering and historical research, combined with elegant and evocative writing, is a page-turner which will live long in the minds of anyone who reads it.”
So said the chairman of this year’s judging panel for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Sharmilla Beezmohun, praising the winning entry Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jewby Avi Shlaim.
Avi Shlaim is an emeritus Oxbridge professor, historian and author. Three Worldsis a personal memoir, set in the three worlds of his childhood and teenage years: Iraq, Israel and Britain. The book is indeed elegantly written. It details the displacement of Shlaim’s Jewish family from Iraq to Israel when Shlaim was five. The third world is England, where Shlaim completed his education and where he has lived ever since.
The central argument in Shlaim’s memoir is that “Cruel Zionism” was behind bombs aimed at Jewish or foreign targets: these “played some part” in causing the exodus. In other words, Zionism was just as guilty as Arab nationalism in uprooting Iraq’s 2,600-year-old Jewish community.
Just how “meticulous” was his evidence gathering and historical research?
Shlaim describes the rising antisemitism in Iraq around the time of Israel’s establishment. Thereafter, Shlaim veers off the path of historical accuracy.
The Iraqi government passed a law in March 1950 legalising emigration, on condition that Jews renounced their Iraqi citizenship. Jews had been sacked from their jobs and arbitrarily arrested as would-be spies. They were hostages to the first Arab-Israeli war. Shaken by the execution of Iraq’s wealthiest and best-connected non-Zionist Jew, Shafiq Ades,95 percent of the 140,000-member community registered to leave by airlift to Israel. The coup de grâcecame a year later when the Iraqi Parliament passed a law freezing Jewish assets and property. This left the departing refugees destitute.
Other reviewers have already exposed the inconsistencies behind Shlaim’s thesis: he has been accused of falsifyingthe timeline of the bombings to make it appear that the first incident preceded the surge of Jews registering to leave. Evidence for Zionist involvement in the only fatal bombing in January 1951 hinges on a dubious “police report” and one informant’s version, given to Shlaim 67 years after the fact, alleging that the Zionists had bribed the Muslim perpetrator.
Two Zionist activists were hanged for planting two of the five bombs, which occurred in May and June 1951 and caused no casualties. But most historians agree that these had no bearing on the mass exodus, as the deadline to register for emigration had already expired in March 1951.
Yet to make his controversial thesis fit, Shlaim maintains that the registration deadline was extended to July 1951. This is false.
Shlaim gives the impression that registration was a matter of choice — an optional exit strategy. But historian Esther Meir- Glitzenstein affirms that registration was “irrevocable” — a decision not to be taken lightly.
In Shlaim’s memoir, the role of the Zionists is amplified, while the persecution of the Jews by the Iraqi stateis downplayed. Thus the 1941 Farhud— an unprecedented massacre of hundreds of Jews, which most historians claim sounded the death knell for the Jews of Iraq — is glossed over.
As a teenager, Shlaim’s mother was shielded from the worst effects of the Farhud: she took refuge in the US embassy. Shlaim is at pains to insist that plenty of Arabs saved Jews during the massacre, itself an aberration. “Apart from one infamous pogrom against the Jews,” he writes, “the overall picture … was one of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful coexistence and fruitful interraction.”
What did this peaceful coexistence consist of?
So (allegedly) content were the Jews of Iraq that Shlaim tells us that Jewish leaders assured the deputy British High Commissioner Sir Arnold Wilson, soon after the British defeat of the Ottomans in World War One, “that Iraq was the garden of Eden, they had no desire to leave for Palestine, it was poor and Jerusalem was a ‘bad town’.”
In truth, the Jews had a sense of foreboding of what might befall them when the Arabs of Iraq became independent. Omitted from Shlaim’s account is the fact that anxious Jewish leaders met the British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, on three occasions in 1918 to plead for them to be given British nationality.
As for coexistence, the reader is startled to learn that the author’s paternal grandfather Abraham was murdered by robbers. (Such episodes were not unusual.)
Shlaim cites several attempts by a shadowy group called ”the gang of the night and the wind” to extort money from his wealthy family. His mother says this was the catalyst for her decision to leave Iraq with her three children.
The Shlaim family enjoyed a pampered life of luxury in a beautiful house. But his parents had to use wasta(connections, and if necessary bribes) with Arab friends in high places to secure physical protection. This is not exactly peaceful coexistence, but a desperate attempt to gain security in an unpredictable environment.
The Shlaims were not exactly typical of the Jews of Iraq, His mother had a British passport, gained as a result of her grandfather having worked in British India. Shlaim’s mother did not register to leave with the mass airlift, but made an official exit, with her children, to Cyprus and on to Israel.
Even in the Jewish state, they were relatively privileged. Unlike most Jews, they managed to salvage the money from the sale of their Baghdad house, which would enable them to build a bungalow in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. Unlike the majority of Iraqi Jews, the Shlaims never spent time in a ma’abaraor tent camp and were spared the terrible conditions there. It was thanks to his mother employing wastain Israel that the young Avi Shlaim was admitted to the Dvir Gymnasium school, although he had mediocre grades. His friends, he admits, were Ashkenazim, Jews from central and eastern Europe. His mother benefitted from wastawith the Ashkenazi mayor of Ramat Gan, Mayor Krinitzky.
In Britain, good-hearted and inspirational Ashkenazim helped to encourage Avi Shlaim, who started his school career inauspiciously, to aspire to the glittering prize of an Oxford university education.
Over his lifetime, Shlaim has become increasingly strident in his criticism of the state of Israel. At first he was a staunch nationalist, then he was a Zionist advocating a two-state solution. Today he has espoused the extremist solution of a ”one, democratic state” in place of the state of Israel.
Shlaim inveighs against Ashkenazim who he says made him feel like an outsider. But the apartheid label is belied by Shlaim’s personal experience.
The terms “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing” and “settler colonialism” are sprinkled like confetti throughout Three Worlds. But they are unsubstantiated and propagandistic.
So what are we to make of this schizophrenic book? We can only surmise that Shlaim is using Zionism as a scapegoat for his exiled family’s trials and tribulations.
It is as if Israel is to blame for his family’s uprooting, their decline into financial insecurity, the break-up of his parents’ marriage and his father’s failure to find a job.
In fact Israel saved the Jews of Iraq — including Communists and other anti-Zionists — from an uncertain future of oppression and violence.
Having reached the peak of respectability and adulation, Shlaim is using his privileged position to play fast and loose with the facts. Conduct unbecoming for a former professor of International Relations?
Lynn Julius is the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight (Vallentine Mitchell)
Reposted with author's permission from TheArticle.