The Arab Jew Experience Exposes the Myths of Middle Eastern Antisemitism | The Chris Hedges Report

It was Israel that brought the divide and plight of the Jews in the Middle East.

This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.

A significant justification for Israel’s existence relies on the narrative that, because of the alleged inherent and rabid antisemitism of Arabs and Islam, the Jews of the Middle East never had a home. Without Israel, it is said, these Jews would be left on the fringes of Middle Eastern societies, marginalized for an irrational prejudice against their religion and ethnicity by Muslims. 

Historian and author Avi Shlaim details in his book, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew,” through personal experience and historical analysis the lies that this narrative is constructed upon.

“There was no history of antisemitism in the Arab world. Antisemitism is a European disease,” Shlaim tells Chris Hedges. “In the 1930s, antisemitism was exported from Europe to Iraq in particular, and it's striking that there was no antisemitic literature in Arabic. So antisemitic literature had to be translated from European languages into Arabic…” 

Shlaim was born in Iraq, where a thriving, educated and economically diverse society existed for Jews during his childhood. He describes how “It took Europe much longer than it took the Arab world to accept the Jews as equal citizens,” and how “[Jews] were very much part of the fabric of Iraqi society. We [were] not a foreign body. There were thriving Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, throughout North Africa, but the Jewish community in Iraq was the most successful, the most prosperous, and also the best integrated of all the Jewish communities.” 

It was Israel, according to Shlaim, that brought the divide and plight of the Jews in the Middle East. Shlaim mourns a time where his family experienced peaceful coexistence: “Muslim [and] Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea. It wasn't a distant dream. It was the everyday reality.”

Shlaim’s accounts also utilize his skills as a historian, diving into the incontrovertible evidence he discovered that reveals false flag atrocities committed by the Israelis against Iraqi Jews themselves. These attacks fomented a fear of antisemitism amongst Arab Jews, correlating with a significant spike in Iraqi Jewish emigration, and ultimately, coercively reinforced the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

“[T]his false flag operation,” Shlaim said, referring to the 1950 and 1951 Israeli bombings of Iraqi Jews, “is a terrible indictment of the State of Israel, because Israel was created to provide a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. Israel was not established in order to destabilize and frighten and create insecurity for the Jews of the diaspora.”

“The real upheaval,” Shlaim recounts, “ happened when Israel was created in 1948 and as my mother said to me, when Israel was created, everything was turned upside down.”

Credits

Host:

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos and Max Jones

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

---

---

Transcript

Chris Hedges: At the age of five in 1950, Avi Shlaim, former Oxford professor in international relations and one of the preeminent historians of the Middle East, was forced to leave Iraq where his family’s roots stretching back generations. They fled to the new state of Israel. The once thriving Jewish community in Baghdad, of which he and his family were a part, numbered some 130,000 people before the creation of the Zionist state. Today it has all but vanished. In his book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew he evokes this lost world, one that was highly educated, cultured, multilingual and lived in harmony with Sunnis, Shias and Christians in the newly formed nation of Iraq following the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I. His narrative is at odds with the official Zionist narrative, which argues that anti-Semitism is hard wired into Islam and that the Jews in the Arab world before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 were a persecuted minority that needed to be rescued and transported to the new Jewish state. “The years 1950-51 marked a cataclysm for Iraqi Jews," Professor Shlaim writes. “In the space of just over a year, nearly the entire community left behind their ancient homeland. My family was among them. Our comfortable lifestyle collapsed around a change I could not even dimly comprehend as a child. Ever since, I have been trying to make sense of what happened and why.” This exodus, he writes, became a rout after five bomb attacks on Jewish targets in Baghdad between 1950 and 1951. Who carried out these terrorist attacks, in which Jews were injured and killed, has been debated for 75 years, with two Israeli official commissions of inquiry. Professor Shlaim’s research, based on interviews with those involved and Israeli documents, concludes that “three of the five bombings were the work of the Zionist underground,” part of an effort to frighten Jews into leaving for Israel. Once in Israel, Professor Shlaim and his family, because they were of Arab descent, suffered discrimination from the European Jews who dominated Israeli political and cultural life.

He writes: “By delving into the history of my family in Iraq I gained a better understanding of the nature and global impact of Zionism… Zionism was a settler-colonial movement… Looking back it seems to me utterly indisputable that the creation of Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians, more than half the total, became refugees…

"What the story of my family brought home to me, however, was that there was another category of victims of the Zionist project: the Jews of the Arab lands. Moreover, there was a link between the ways that the Zionist movement treated the Palestinian Arabs and its treatment of the Arab-Jews. Both groups were a means to an end: the construction of an exclusive Jewish nation-state in the heart of the Middle East…the same colonial institutions that displaced the Palestinians were tasked with absorbing the Jewish migrants from the Arab lands. And the same arrogant, Eurocentric, Orientalist mindset greeted the Jewish newcomers from the East.” Joining me to discuss his book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jews is Professor Avi Shlaim.

Avi Shlaim: So as you pointed out, my purpose in writing this book was to reanimate, to recreate a unique Jewish civilization of the Near East, which has been blown away in the 20th century by the cold winds of nationalism. And my book is an attempt to interweave the personal story and the family story with a much bigger story of the Jewish community in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century. And as you pointed out, my account exactly contradicts the Zionist narrative, which says that those endemic perennial antisemitism throughout the Arab and the Islamic world, and it was this deeply ingrained antisemitism that forced the Jews to leave the Arab world and to come to the newly established state of Israel. And in my book, I try and give an honest account of what life was like in Iraq before our move to Israel. And one of the main points that emerged from my account is that there was a long tradition of harmony, a long tradition of religious tolerance between the different minorities. And in Iraq, there are many minorities. There were Christians, there were Catholics, Chaldeans, Turkmen, Yazidis and Jews. And the Jews didn't stand out in Iraq. 

The Jews were one minority among many, and there was a long tradition of coexistence between the different minorities. So Iraq did not have a Jewish problem, in inverted commas, Europe had a Jewish problem. In Europe, the Jews were the Other. Europe had a Jewish problem. Adolf Hitler had what he thought was a solution to the Jewish problem. Iraq did not have a Jewish problem. Iraq had many minorities, and Iraq was a pluralist society with coexistence. The Zionist account dwells on the persecution and misery of the Jews in Iraq. The experience of my family and the Jewish community was very, very different. It was one of coexistence, and for my family and me, Muslim, Jewish, coexistence was not an abstract idea. It wasn't a distant dream. It was the everyday reality. The real upheaval happened when Israel was created in 1948 and as my mother said to me, when Israel was created, everything was turned upside down.

Chris Hedges: One of the fascinating points in your book is that there was, in the 1930s, the rise of an antisemitic party. But again, that was a European import, that this was fueled by German fascism. That was a fascinating point, that even the most virulent forms of antisemitism in Iraq were a European import.

Avi Shlaim: There was no history of antisemitism in the Arab world. Antisemitism is a European disease. Antisemitism was born in Europe. You can trace it back to the church in medieval times, which persecuted Jews because they didn't accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God. In the Middle East, in the Arab world, there wasn't a parallel tradition. In the 1930s, antisemitism was exported from Europe to Iraq in particular, and it's striking that there was no antisemitic literature in Arabic. So antisemitic literature had to be translated from European languages into Arabic, and one example is Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." The situation of the Jews in Iraq was very, very different to that of the Jews in Europe. In Iraq, the Jews did not live in ghettos. In Iraq, the Jews practiced all the different professions. It took Europe much longer than it took the Arab world to accept the Jews as equal citizens, and we, my family and I, in the Jewish community, we had much more in common linguistically and culturally with our Arab compatriots than we did with our European co-religionists. So we were very much part of the fabric of Iraqi society. We are not a foreign body. There were thriving Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, throughout North Africa, but the Jewish community in Iraq was the most successful, the most prosperous, and also the best integrated of all the Jewish communities.

Chris Hedges: Your family was quite prosperous. Your father was quite a successful businessman. So you grew up in privilege in Baghdad. 

Avi Shlaim: Indeed, we were an upper middle class society. We were very privileged. My father was a very successful merchant. We lived in a palatial house. We had many servants. My mother was a lady of leisure, and it was a secure, comfortable, almost sybaritic lifestyle. Very, very comfortable lifestyle. And we were indeed privileged, and I don't claim that we were typical of the Jews in Iraq. The Jews in Iraq belonged to all different classes, and there was also a large number of very poor Jews in Iraq, and there was a large middle class. So I write about my own experience, and I make it clear that I do not generalize about the rest of the Jewish community in Iraq.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about Zionism as an ideology before we talk about the creation of the State of Israel. It did not have much support among the Jews in Iraq. You write, Zionism emphasized the historical connection of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland in the Middle East, but it spawned a state whose cultural and geopolitical orientation identified it almost exclusively with the West. Israel saw itself and was regarded by its enemies as an extension of European colonialism in the Middle East as being in the Middle East, but not of it in this Eurocentric state. It was impossible for people, like you write about your grandmother, to feel at home, but that was typical of most of the Iraqi Jews. They did not identify as Zionists.

Avi Shlaim: No, Zionism was a European movement by European Jews, for European Jews. It did not really relate to the Jews of the East, and indeed, the early Zionist leaders tended to look down on Arab Jews, or the Jews of the East. They tended to have an Orientalist view of Arabs as being a backward and primitive people, and the Jews of the Arab world were seen as not much better, slightly better, but not much better, as being rather backward and uneducated. And the Jewish, the Zionist leadership never paid much attention to the Jews of the Middle East until the Holocaust. The Holocaust removed the main reservoir of people for the Jewish state to be. And in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Zionist leaders had to look for Jews from wherever they could find them, from all corners of the earth to bring them to the newly born state of Israel, and that included the Jews of the Arab lands.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about that, but before I do you write about Samuel Huntington's very specious theory of the clash of civilizations, and how it implicitly rules out the possibility of a Jewish-Arab identity. And this kind of clash of civilizations, you say, has been a major influence on the approach of some Zionist historians to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Can you just talk about that point a little bit before we get into what happened in Iraq?

Avi Shlaim: Yes. So after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel Huntington, Harvard professor, propagated this notion of clash of civilizations, and in it, he argued that conflict, after the fall of the Soviet empire, was no longer between nation states, but between civilizations, between cultures. And it seems to me that some Americans always need to have an enemy. During the Cold War, there was a clear enemy, the Soviet Union, and everything revolved around the conflict between East and West. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Americans needed a new enemy, and Samuel Huntington conjured up one, which is radical Islam. So now the conflict became not between nation states, but between the West and the rest, between the West and radical Islam. And interestingly, the original name for what became the global war on terror was the war against global, sorry, the war against radical Islam. This notion of clash of civilizations is really simplistic and superficial, and it will, I would go further, I would say it's totally worthless, and it most certainly doesn't apply to the history that I lived through. My family and the Jewish community left Iraq, not because of any cultural or religious reasons or clash with the rest of Iraqi society. My family, the drivers of our displacement, was political, not ideological, not cultural. 

So clash of civilizations has no relevance here. And yet this notion was picked up by some right wing Israeli writers like Benny Morris, for example, who wrote a good book on 1948, the first Arab-Israeli war. And in the introduction, he says that this was not a conventional geopolitical conflict. In a broader sense, it was a conflict between Judeo-Christian civilization on Islam. So I think this, again, is a complete misrepresentation of the reality. This was a very traditional geopolitical conflict between Jews and Arabs over a piece of land. So to sum up, I think that clash of civilizations doesn't help us to understand the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict

Chris Hedges: And the consequences, you used the figure of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries. So you're right and I'm wrong, I said 260. The forced exodus of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries after 1948, you write, amounted to a catastrophe, a Jewish Nakba, that refers to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 with 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed, at least on par with, if not more devastating in its consequences than the Palestinian Nakba. So why do you write, if not more devastating in its consequences?

Avi Shlaim: Here is where I differ from the Zionist narrative. The Zionist narrative says in 1948 the Arabs attacked the infant state of Israel. And in the course of the war, three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees. They weren't pushed out. They left off their own free will or on orders from above. And at the same time, 850,000 Jews were driven out of the Arab world, and ended up in Israel, and they were forced out by antisemitism, that was the driver of the displacement. So what you have is a double exodus. It's the theory of the double exodus, that in 1948 there was a Palestinian exodus from Palestine and a Jewish exodus from the Arab world to Israel. So in effect, there was a population exchange, and Israel doesn't owe the Arabs or the Palestinians anything. This is a very popular theory in the Israeli right, and it's one that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is very fond of and repeats at every conceivable occasion. This is the view that Israel is completely innocent. Israel was attacked. Israel is not responsible in any way for the Palestinian refugee problem. It's the Arabs who wronged the Jews, and Israel offered a safe haven to the Jews fleeing from persecution. So that's the view that is very popular in Israel, and one that Netanyahu purveys all the time, and as we speak, he's addressing a special session of the both houses of Congress, and I suspect that he will be putting forward this Zionist view of the history of the conflict.

Chris Hedges: Let's talk a little bit about the process of pushing Jews in the Middle East into or forcing them to flee from Iraq, and you did quite a bit of research, there were five bombings as I mentioned in their introduction, into finding out who was responsible for those bombings which turned the kind of trickle of Jewish refugees from Iraq into a stampede. But talk about your research, it's something that, in the book you say, has kind of obsessed you as a historian throughout much of your career.

Avi Shlaim: In 1950, there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq. By the end of 1952, only about 10,000 were left, and 125,000 Iraqi Jews ended up in Israel. They arrived in Israel with one suitcase and 50 dinars. They had lost everything, and in 1950-51 five bombs exploded in Jewish premises in Baghdad, and there were persistent rumors in Israel. I knew this from my family and my relatives, that Israel had a hand in the bombs to force them to leave, and this fueled Arab-Iraqi Jewish resentment against the State of Israel, and I became obsessed with this question of who threw the bombs, not when I became a historian, but when I was a child. When I became a historian in 1982 when I spent a sabbatical year in the Israel state archives in Jerusalem, I ordered a file called Iraq 1950 and I was told this file was closed. I asked the state archivist, why is it closed, because more than 30 years have elapsed, and he said to me, I'll check. And the next day, he said to me, because in this file there are some Mossad documents. And I thought, Aha, there are Mossad documents, that's why they are trying to hide the truth. And I said to him, why don't you remove the Mossad documents and leave the Foreign Ministry documents? And he said, I'll check. The following day he came back to me, and he said, I'm sorry, the whole file is closed and I cannot release any of the file, and I thought to myself, it's possible that there is a smoking gun in this file, which is why they don't want to release it. 

But I'm a historian, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. So I suspended judgment until I started work on my autobiography, and then I came across two sources of evidence which implicate Israel in the bombings, in three out of the five bombs, one source was Yaakov Karkoukli, an elderly Iraqi friend of my mother, who was an activist in the Zionist underground, and he told me in great detail about their activities, about the bribes they paid, about the documents they forged, about the action to accelerate, to enable, first the illegal migration from Iraq, and then after 1950 the legal migration. Because in 1950 the Iraqi passed a law that said, any Iraqi Jew wants to leave has a year to register and they can leave the country. And so he was one source, and he said to me that he had a colleague named Yusef Basri who was responsible for three out of the five bones, and he told me that his controller, Basri's controller, was an Israeli intelligence officer called Max Bineth, who was based in Tehran, because in those days, the Shah of Iran had covert relations with Israel. So Max Bineth was the controller of Basri, who was responsible for the three bombs. That's one source of evidence, but we all know that there are pitfalls in oral evidence. The other piece of evidence is a Iraq police report, one page that Karkoukli gave me, which names names, which names Basri and his assistant, Shalom Salih Shalom. And it reports what they said in the interrogation after they were captured. So I now have both oral history and hard evidence which led, and I think that together, they make incontrovertible evidence that Israel had a hand in the bombs that were intended to frighten the Jews and precipitate the exodus from Iraq to Israel.

Chris Hedges: And Bineth ends up in Cairo, also apparently overseeing terrorist activities against Western targets during the regime of Nasser and commit suicide in a jail cell. So this tactic of terrorism, Zionist sponsored terrorism, was not limited to Iraq.

Avi Shlaim: This is a really crucial point, that the bombings in the streets of Baghdad in 1950-51 were not a one off operation, it was a false flag operation, but it was part of a pattern of Zionist false flag operations in the Arab world. And the other significant false flag operation is the one you just mentioned. It's in Israel, it's called the mishap. And the mishap, or all the Lavon affair. Pinhas Lavon was the Israeli defense minister in 1954 when a ring of Jewish Egyptian spies and saboteurs were caught red handed when a bomb in a cinema exploded prematurely, creating smoke, which led up to the rounding up of the whole ring. And the purpose of this operation was to create bad blood between the newly established, newly installed Nasser regime and the West to say to the West that the Nasser regime was unreliable. Britain had just signed an agreement to withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone, and this was intended to force Britain to remain in the Suez Canal Zone. So the leader of this ring was an old acquaintance, Max Bineth. He was caught and he committed suicide in an Egyptian prison. 

He committed suicide after he heard that the Iraqi Government had requested his extradition to Iraq because of the things that he did in 1950-51. So this is the conclusion that I draw, that false flag operations are not run off in Iraq, but they are part of the Zionist strategy of dealing with the Arab world, and I'll make one other point. This is a terrible thing to do, what Israel did in both instances, it's to send an Israeli intelligence officer to recruit decent Iraqi Jews and to turn them against their country, to turn them into spies, and worst of all, to turn them into terrorists. So this is Israel sponsoring terrorism by Jews against other Jews in Arab countries. It's a terrible indictment of Israel.

Chris Hedges: Well, we should also be clear that the Israeli Mossad, or underground, shipped all sorts of weapons and explosives into Iraq and hid them in synagogues.

Avi Shlaim: They did and after Basri and his assistant, Shalom Salih Shalom, were caught, Shalom was the one who handled the [inaudible], so he took the Iraqi police to the synagogue, where they had weapons and the transmitter and to all the hiding points in all the Jewish houses. And it amounted to a very substantial lot of weapons, hand grenades so the Zionist movement was responsible for all this, and you could justify it by saying that they were training local Jews for self defense; that you cannot possibly justify using these weapons, these hand grenades, the TNT for terrorist operations to frighten the Jews. My Zionist critics say, some deny altogether. They say that I invented this story, that Israel had no hand whatsoever in these bombings. 

Others say, yes, they may have had a hand, but the exodus happened not because of the bombs, but because of antisemitism, because of official persecution of the Jews. This is what drove the Jews out. Now it's not part of my argument that the bombs were the critical factor in the exodus. I accept that official persecution was the main reason for the exodus, but the bombs were a factor. They have to be taken into account. And if I knew for certain that not a single Iraqi Jew left Iraq to Israel because of the bombs, I would still say this operation, this false flag operation, is a terrible indictment of the State of Israel, because Israel was created to provide a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. Israel was not established in order to destabilize and frighten and create insecurity for the Jews of the diaspora.

Chris Hedges: Although, am I correct that, after the bombings, the numbers of Iraqi Jews who decided to flee to Israel increased exponentially?

Avi Shlaim: Yes, in March 1950 when the law was passed allowing the Jews to leave, only a few thousand chose this option. The majority preferred to stay, and then the number of Jews who registered to leave kept increasing throughout that year, and the bombs, you can correlate the bombs with the spike in the number of Jews who left, but I emphasize it's not part of my argument that the bombs were the main reason for the Jews leaving Iraq. The process, the exodus, was a complex process, and there are many factors, and this is one factor that I have highlighted, and for which I provided incontrovertible evidence.

Chris Hedges: And we should be clear that after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, many Arab governments did begin to discriminate and persecute their Jewish minorities, branding them whether they were Zionist supporters or not, as kind of, you know, fifth column within their own country,

Avi Shlaim: Undoubtedly, indisputably, this is so. But the reason for the change also has something to do with Zionism. Zionism gave the Jews a territorial dimension for the first time in two and a half millennia, Zionism led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 it achieved Its principal goal. There was now a Jewish state, and for any Arab who didn't like Jews, this was an excuse to try and get rid of them. In Iraq, there was the [inaudible] party, which was a right wing nationalist party, which was anti semitic, anti-Jewish, and it called for confiscating the property of Iraqi Jews and for expelling them. They were right wing parties in other Arab countries. What had changed in 1948 is that there was a Jewish state, and anyone, any Arab, who didn't like Jews, could now turn to the Jews and say, "You don't belong here. You're not from here. You're foreigners. You're outsiders. You are the brothers of the Zionists who have displaced our Palestinian brothers." So it became easier for any antisemites now to turn onto the Jews and the Jews in Iraq who had been a positive element in Iraqi society, a very positive element, in nation building since the First World War, now were seen increasingly as a fifth column.

Chris Hedges: Just before we get into your experience once you migrate to Israel, you write, for Israel, the operation, we're talking about the operation of pushing the Jews to Israel, yielded, apart from its human cargo, hundreds of thousands of pounds in hard currency. This operation was also very profitable for the Zionists.

Avi Shlaim: It was profitable because the law that allowed Jews to leave the country allowed them to leave with only 50 dinars, and when they arrived in Israel, they arrived with the 125,000 of them. So multiply 125,000 by 50 dinars, this is in 1950-51 when Israel was very short of hard currency and this was a source, a major source, of hard currency, and also the Iraqi Jews were given the official rate of exchange, which was not a favorable rate. So yes, Israel did make quite a lot of gain, quite a lot in hard currency as a result of the arrival of the Iraqi Jews.

Chris Hedges: And we should also note your mother, who comes across as kind of a force of nature throughout the whole book, manages to smuggle out her diamonds, along with, I think, six oriental carpets. Your situation, you're in a hotel in Cyprus for a month. Your father is left behind, has to flee across the border, finally, at great risk, to Iran, doesn't join you for a year. Let's talk about what life was like for Arab Jews in the Zionist state. It was quite a bitter experience for you, although, when you become an adolescent, you're attracted to Herut, the very right wing Menachem Begin party. But let's talk about the effect that it had on you and your family, being in a state that was, you know, dominated by European Jews.

Avi Shlaim: As I said earlier, my family was very privileged. We were very wealthy, and also my mother had British citizenship because her father was an interpreter for the British Consulate in Baghdad. So in June, 1950, my mother, my grandmother and my two sisters and I left Baghdad on a regular flight to Nicosia in Cyprus, and from there we went by boat to Haifa and once we arrived in Israel, we didn't go, like the rest of Iraqi Jews, into transit camps. We went to live with my mother's uncle in Ramat Gan in a very large house. So I and my family didn't suffer as much as the great majority of ordinary Iraqi Jews, because when they arrived in Israel, they were sprayed with DDT. Just try to imagine the impact that this would have on a Jew who arrived in the Promised Land, and he's treated like an animal and sprayed with pesticide. And from the airport, these Jews were taken to transit camps to Ma'abarot. And the conditions in the Ma'abarot were very, very dire. There were tents, there were shacks. Sanitation was very poor, the food was inadequate and of very poor quality. But most of all, there was the cultural shock of arriving in a new country with a different language, and the managers of the Ma'abarot were all Ashkenazi Jews. They didn't have a clue about who these newcomers were. They had no idea of their status, their qualifications, their achievements in Iraq. They thought that these people, instead of complaining, should be grateful for everything that was done for them. So this was a very shaky start for the Iraqi Jews in Israel.

Chris Hedges: Well, you make the point in the book that oftentimes the Arab Jews, especially the women, were far better educated than the Ashkenazi or European Jews who looked down on them. You write, you're writing about the Zionist leadership, "They simply had no understanding of the customs, culture or aspirations of Iraqi Jews. They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given. The Olim came from nine different Arab countries, but for the transit camp managers, they were all the same." And then you write, the Israeli establishment was bent on suppressing the Arab culture and erasing the identity of oriel Jews by forcing them into a European Ashkenazi melting pot. David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, referred to the immigrants of the east as savage hordes, and Abba Eban, who I knew, stated that the goal must be to instill in them a Western spirit and not let them drag us into an unnatural Orient. This Orientalism was rampant, and you experienced this in school, although you end up finally at the University of Cambridge in England and are a noted scholar, that didn't color your early experiences, where there was open hostility to you as an Iraqi Jew.

Avi Shlaim: Indeed, and as a boy, I had a sense of inferiority because I was an Iraqi boy, because I was an Iraqi. Yitzhak Bar Moshe, a distant relative of mine, wrote many books, and one of them was about the departure from Iraq about this period, and he says we left Iraq as Jews, and we arrived in Israel as Iraqis. And this was true for me and my family. In Israel, we felt out of place. We felt that we didn't belong. My father never really mastered the Hebrew language and Aliyah, immigration to Israel is described as Aliyah, which literally means ascent, so you ascent to Israel. But in our experience, the move from Iraq to Israel was a steep Yerida, a steep descent from a high status in Iraq to the margins of Israeli society. So yes, there was this Orientalist attitude on the part of the Israeli leadership, and there was really no getting away from that. My sense of inferiority governed my relationship with Israeli society, and it's only many years later that I began to make sense of my life in Israel and why I did so badly at school, and one thing that I learned as a scholar and didn't understand as a school boy was that the Ashkenazi elite has also pursued a systematic process of de-Arabization of the Arab Jews. 

The whole educational system was geared to de-Arabization of the Jews from the Arab countries and turning them into new Israelis. But part of that was the erasing of our history. So Jewish history is the history of the Jews in Europe and the American-Jewish historian Salo Baron coined the phrase, the lachrymose phrase, the lachrymose version of Jewish history, that is to say, Jewish history is a never ending cycle of persecution, discrimination, violence and hostility, culminating in the Holocaust. This may apply, although I would dispute that it does, to the history of the Jews in Europe, but it most emphatically doesn't apply to our history in Iraq. So one of the things that I wanted to achieve in this book is to rewrite, or to write, our history in Iraq as I experienced it and as my family experienced it, rather than to allow the Zionist historian to subsume history, our history, under the lachrymose version of Jewish history.

Chris Hedges: Let's talk about your attraction to Herut, Menachem Begin who carried out terrorist activities in the lead up to the Israeli state, against the British and against the Palestinians, as well as your national service in the Israeli Defense Force, which both of those two experiences push you very close to embracing the Zionist narrative. But let's begin with Begin because he was certainly no friend of the Arab world. I mean, he had a great strain of racism within Herut and yet, as somebody within, and Mapai was the ruling Labor Party but it was European dominated, but talk about that attraction to the far right, and then your experiences in the IDF.

Avi Shlaim: So yes, let's begin with Begin, who was an extreme right wing nationalist, and he had nothing to offer oriental Jews on the socio-economic front, because he supported capitalism and his domestic agenda did not appeal, or should not have appealed to poor, impoverished oriental Jews. What he did have was nationalism, and also he was a spellbinding orator. And the way he addressed me and the crowds in the main square in Ramat Gan who came to hear him was, he said to us, we are brothers, we are equal. We are all patriotic Israelis. What we are up against is the Mapai elite, the labor elite. It's they who look down on you. I don't look down on you. So he played on our sense of alienation, and he exploited the arrogance of the Mapai elite, and that's how he reached us and oriental Jews, because we were outsiders, had a tendency to want to belong. We wanted to establish our nationalist credentials. That's why we were attracted to Menachem Begin and his brand of Zionism.

Chris Hedges: Very similar to Trump, many of dispossessed people feel that he expresses their grievances, even though, of course, it's kind of root to their own enslavement. And let's talk about the IDF, and you talk about the Six Day War as being kind of the height of your... you make a very good point, by the way, in the book about the difference between patriotism and nationalism and nationalism needs enemies, that's what defines nationalism. But let's talk about your experience in the IDF and its effect on you.

Avi Shlaim: I was inducted into the IDF when I was 18, and that was the height of my identification with Zionism and the State of Israel. There is extensive academic literature on nationalism, in particular, there is Benedict Anderson's book on imagined communities. But I felt nationalism in my bones, as a boy. I knew what it meant. The induction ceremony was on the Judaean Hills in the twilight, when there was a fusillade which illuminated the sky, and we all shouted in unison, "In blood and fire, Judea fell. In blood and fire, Judea will rise again." And I remember having a distinct sense that we were a small, peace loving country surrounded by Arab predators, who wanted to throw us into the sea. And I had a deep belief in the justice of our cause. And like all of my colleagues, we were really nationalist. We were prepared to defend and to die for our country. But that was the high point of my identification with the Zionist project. 

When the Six Day War broke out in June 1967, I was a history student at Cambridge, and my disenchantment with Israel began slowly from that period onwards, because the Six Day War was a turning point in the history of the Middle East, but it was also a turning point in my personal history, because I had served in the mid-1960s proudly and loyally in the IDF, because I thought, at that time, that it was true to its name, it was the Israel Defense Forces. But after the victory in 1967, Israel traveled its territory. It captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai, and Israel became a fully fledged colonial power, and the IDF was transformed from a regular army into the brutal police force of a brutal colonial empire. So that's the beginning of a long process of disenchantment with Israel and Zionism.

Chris Hedges: I want to close, you write towards the end of the book, Israel never saw itself as part of the Middle East, nor did it want to integrate into the regional environment. Oriental Jews, with their knowledge of Arabic and first hand experience of living in Arab countries, could have served as a bridge between Israel and its neighbors. The Ashkenazi establishment, however, had no interest in building such a bridge. Under the leadership of David Ben Gurion, it built Israel as a fortress state with a siege mentality that attributed genocidal intentions to its neighbors. It saw Israel as part of the West, and it used the special relationship with the United States not to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians, but to prolong and entrench its control over the occupied territories. And of course, now we have the genocide in Gaza.

Avi Shlaim: The founding fathers of Israel never thought of Israel as part of the Middle East, as Ze'ev Jabotinsky portrayed the Jewish state as holding the wall between Europe and Eastern barbarism. Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish state also regarded the Jewish state as part of Europe, culturally, spiritually and David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, once said, it's only as a result of a geographical accident that we find ourselves in the Middle East. Our values and our culture makes us part of the West. And Israel's geopolitical orientation has always been to be part of the West. Israel from Ben-Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has always resisted integration into the region, and Netanyahu is an extreme example of an Islamophobe, of someone who hates Arabs, as someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with the Arab world, who believes only in Israeli domination over the Palestinians and over the Arabs. And I, naively, used to hope that the Mizrahi, the Arab Jews, could serve as a bridge between Israel and its neighbors, but as I wrote in my book, Israel's Ashkenazi leadership was not interested in building bridges. 

It was only interested in Israeli hegemony and domination. So the Arab Jews never served as a bridge, but that is not to say that they are not capable of serving as a bridge. And in my book, in the epilogue, I say that my own experience of living among Arabs encourages me to believe that this polarization, this division that Israel has brought about, is not inevitable, that something that happened in the past that I hope would still... my experience enables me to think outside the box, to think of a better future for our region than the present, dismal state when Israel is conducting a war against the Palestinians and is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, I still believe that a better future is possible, and it should be a future that reverts to the past, to the cosmopolitanism, to the pluralism and to the coexistence between Muslims and Jews that used to exist before the State of Israel was established.

Chris Hedges: You write at the end of the book, "the outcome I have come to favor is one democratic state between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion. This is the democratic one state solution." You've had students on university campuses in the United States who have been arrested for using that term, the river to the sea. But you don't embrace, as I do not, the two state solution, and you hold out this one person, one vote, this democratic state.

Avi Shlaim: I used to support the two state solution, but Israel has killed it. Israel has killed the two state solution with settlements, ever expanding settlements, by the annexation of East Jerusalem by building the security wall on the West Bank that effectively annexes a large chunk of the West Bank to Israel. So what is left is Arab-Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank, surrounded by the Israeli settlements and military bases, that's not a basis for a viable state. It's become fashionable to say that the two state solution is dead. I would say that the two state solution was never born, because no Israeli government since 1967 has offered a formula for a two state solution that would be acceptable to the most moderate Palestinians. And secondly, no American administration has ever pushed Israel towards the two state solution. That's why I've moved towards adopting the one state solution as the only democratic solution. And our students in Oxford have used the slogan from the river to the sea. I've supported them all along, against the university authorities who called the police and disbanded them. 

The students gave me a t-shirt with the university logo that says, from the river to the sea. In America, you may be arrested for this slogan, but what it means to me is not the dismantlement of... What it means to me is equal rights for all those who live between the river and the sea, equal rights, that's essential, an essential element of democracy and also freedom for all from the river to the sea. This is the exact opposite of the present situation, when Israel has an apartheid regime over the whole of Mandatory Palestine and the Israeli government is increasingly overtly racist, and the Israeli government today rejects the one state solution, and it's a Jewish supremacist and an apartheid state, and this situation is completely unacceptable to me, that's why I uphold the noble vision of one state with equal rights for all its citizens.

Chris Hedges: Great. That was Professor Avi Shlaim on his remarkable book, "Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew." I want to thank the production team, Sophia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos] and Max [Jones]. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

---

---