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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2024, p. 67
Middle East Books Review
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew
By Avi Shlaim, Oneworld Publications, 2023, hardcover, 324 pp. MEB $29.95
Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld
THIS MEMOIR BY Avi Shlaim, one of Israel’s “new historians” (a group of scholars who offer critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel), tells a story with which few are familiar. In July 1950, Shlaim, aged five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing their beloved Iraq for the new state of Israel.
Shlaim was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad in 1945. He notes, “We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Jewish…Baghdad was known as ‘the city of peace’ and Iraq was a land of pluralism and coexistence. We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. We did not feel any affinity with the Zionist movement, and we experienced no inner impulse to abandon our homeland and to go and live in Israel.”
However, anti-Jewish sentiment began to rise across the region following Israel’s creation in 1948. The most significant charge in Three Worlds is that Israel and Zionist leaders capitalized on this hostility by plotting acts of violence to intimidate Arab Jews into relocating to Israel. The most significant incident in Iraq occurred on Jan. 14, 1951, when a hand grenade was thrown into the forecourt of Baghdad’s Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, killing four Jews and injuring 20 others.
Shlaim claims to have come across “potentially credible evidence that the Mossad l’Aliyah Bet (the Yishuv’s unit that handled illegal immigration to Palestine) and the Zionist underground in Iraq were behind the Baghdad bombings.” He declares, “The person who was responsible for three of the bombs was Yusef Ibrahim Basri…a lawyer by profession, a socialist and an ardent Jewish nationalist…His purpose was not to kill, but to frighten hesitant Jews and to prod them to register to cancel their Iraqi citizenship.”
Shlaim laments this effort to forcibly uproot Jews who lived peacefully in Iraq for generations. “Our migration to Zion was one of necessity, not an ideological choice,” he writes. “It is no exaggeration to say we were conscripted into the Zionist project. Moreover, migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah, or ascent. In our case the move from Iraq to Israel was a Yeridah, a descent down the social and economic ladder.”
Shlaim’s mother died in Israel at the age of 96 in 2021. He recalls, “She often talked about the many close Muslim family friends who used to come to our house in Baghdad. One day, when she was over ninety, I asked her whether we had any Zionist friends. She gave me a look that implied this was an odd question, and then said emphatically, ‘No! Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing. It had nothing to do with us!’ This, in essence, had been my elders’ view of Zionism before we were catapulted into Israel.”
Iraq has a long history of religious tolerance, Shlaim points out. “The Jewish connection to Babylon goes back to the time of Abraham the Patriarch…Jews lived in Babylon since 586 BC…Babylon became the spiritual center of the Jewish diaspora…It was there that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled…The Jews were thus firmly settled in Babylon long before the rise of Islam.”
Zionism, Shlaim argues, had two major victims: “Palestinians are the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half of their number became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims…the Jews of the Arab lands…My memoir is about the second category of the victims of the Zionist movement, as reflected in the history of my family.”
Once his family emigrated to Israel, Shlaim, as a schoolboy, felt the contempt in which Israelis held Jews from Arab countries. Iraqi Jews experienced disrespect for their culture and history and the denigration of their language. The unstated aim of schools was to undermine their Arab-Jewish identity and to turn them into loyal citizens of the new Israeli nation, Shlaim says.
Shlaim left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school. He returned in 1964 to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and then moved back to England to read history at Jesus College, Cambridge. He married the great granddaughter of David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, and became a fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford in 1987.
For the future, Shlaim advocates one democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with equal rights for all citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. “For Israeli Jews,” he writes, “one state would have the great merit of preventing them from going further down the road of apartheid South Africa.”
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
