Art by Federica Pescini
By 1951 the Iraqi-Jewish community, which had been in the region for over two thousand years, was faced with an existential choice. Following the bombing of synagogues in Baghdad, over 150,000 Iraqi Jews left their homes for a new life in Israel. At only five years old, Avi Shlaim was one of those who left never to return.
Writing nearly seventy years later, Shlaim, now an emeritus Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, recalls events from his early childhood with striking clarity. Engaged in a daring escape by plane to Cyprus, involving a bribe to a British consulate officer to gain exit visas, the crossing of borders from Iraq into Israel remains a painful and difficult transformation. “Tearing up those roots caused profound grief,” he writes.
When I ask what prompted the writing of his memoirs, released last year as Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, he tells me that, “although I’m an unimportant person, I lived in interesting times. I lived through a very eventful period in Jewish history, a period that saw the emergence of the Second World War, the holocaust, and the emergence of the state of Israel.” For Shlaim, the book isn’t simply about recounting his own experience, but a way to rethink the Middle East from the perspective of the often-forgotten history of the Arab-Jewish community of Iraq. He notes that when the book was released it caused a stir in the Arab world since many people had almost no idea “that large Jewish communities lived in harmony in Arab countries”.
In Three Worlds, Shlaim reiterates that the historical existence of the Iraqi-Jewish community proves “religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful coexistence and fruitful interaction” could be the norm, not the exception, for Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. Inter-war Baghdad was littered with mosques, churches, and synagogues, where a deeply interwoven Jewish community coexisted in an easy cosmopolitanism with their Muslim neighbours, who spoke Arabic and considered themselves Iraqis. Born into an upper-class family, he fondly remembers a time when his parent’s villa was open to guests, relatives, nannies, and tutors; a paradise made up of Arabic music on the radio and picnics by the river Tigris.
“Jews were one minority among many. We didn’t stand out,” Shlaim tells me of this early period in Iraq. One of the hangovers of the Ottoman Empire was a “long tradition of coexistence and cosmopolitanism”, and Iraq contained one of the longest, most successful, and well-integrated Jewish communities in the Middle East.
If the lost world of Baghdad is an ever-distant dream, the return to the promised land is a dramatic shock. Subjected to prejudice and discrimination for his Iraqi roots, Shlaim finds himself an outsider in Israel. Ashamed of speaking Arabic in public, he feels the transformation to becoming an Israeli as tinged with contradiction.
A member of the prominent ‘New Historians’ movement in the 1980s, alongside Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris, the revisionists sought to challenge pre-existing national mythmaking around the founding of Israel in 1948. For Shlaim, the evocation of his own past equally becomes a way to counteract the narrative that the emigration of Iraqi Jews was a second al-Nakba, in which Israeli historians have pointed to the uprooting of Palestinians as equal to the suffering of Iraqi Jews uprooted to return to Israel.
Instead, Shlaim argues that the emigration was not necessarily exclusively born from enmity. And he completely rejects that the Farhud, a 1941 pogrom in Baghdad following the British reoccupation of Iraq, made the emigration of the 1950s inevitable. Rather, he places blame on both Arab nationalism and Zionism, which had “transformed our lives beyond recognition”. He writes that rather than a saviour story of being welcomed back to the promised land, becoming an Israeli was above all a ‘painful, violent, and traumatic transformation’.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the growing influence of radical forms of nationalism splintered the hope for coexistence to prevail. Shlaim’s retelling of the carving up of the Middle East by Britain and France, followed by the aftermath of global conflict, saw nationalism poison the pre-existing political blocs in the region. As he reminds me, nationalism “stops us relating to one another as human beings. It's only us and them. Us and the enemy,” ultimately, he argues that these divisions define “what the history of Israel is about.”
“My views about what Israel is doing today in Gaza, is embedded in my understanding of the history of this conflict” he reiterates. When speaking about his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World published in 2000 he declares that he can summarise the book in one sentence despite its length: “Since its birth Israel has always been ready to resort to military force, and reluctant, remarkably reluctant, to engage in genuine engagement with the Palestinians to resolve the conflict between them”. In his recounting the current war in Gaza appears to be a continuation of this historical trend, in which “Israel is using brute force once again, to deal with what is essentially a political problem, to which there is no military solution”.
In one of the most controversial sections of the book, Shlaim provides evidence for the role of the Zionist underground in some of the Baghdad bombings between 1950 and 1952. The bombing of Jewish sites was a major factor in why a large majority of the Jewish community left Iraq for Israel in the early 1950s. Returning to the question in the memoirs, Shlaim finds credible documentary and oral history evidence around the case of Joseph Basri, a member of the Zionist underground who was responsible for three of the bombings. For him, the tale suggests a “real inditement on the history of Israel and its treatment of the Jews of the Arab lands.”
We speak about the current war in Gaza and the potential for peace. Drawing on the Northern Ireland example, Shlaim mentions that the “conflict ended with the Good Friday agreement. Why was that agreement possible? Because both parties, not only wanted, but needed a peace settlement.” Shlaim tells me the impossibility now is Israel’s inability to accept a Palestinian state. “I believe that apartheid is not sustainable in the 21st century. So far Israel has had a free pass to commit war crimes,” he warns, “Israel will not enjoy this immunity forever.”
But public opinion has been important in shifting the way the conflict is spoken about, mentioning pro-Palestinian encampments and protests in Oxford, Shlaim reiterates that, “this is a small example, but it illustrates a bigger phenomenon of the world turning against Israel to say enough is enough.” Yet the longer-term consequences are harder to evaluate, he tells me: “apartheid regimes end in Justice – as in South Africa- or more commonly in violence, a lot more bloodshed is likely before Israel changes.”
Looking to what he himself hopes might happen is different, Shlaim turns back to his own story. “For my family and me in Baghdad, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea. It wasn’t a distant dream. It was the everyday reality, it was normal.” He goes on, “I still believe coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians is possible.”
He mentions how the Israeli left has a slogan in Hebrew: from the river to the sea, democracy for everybody.
“In Hebrew, it rhymes and that is what I hope for in the long term, and this vision for a totally different Middle East is grounded in my own experience as a little boy in Baghdad.”
CHARLIE TAYLOR is a writer and current graduate student at the University of Oxford.