Avi Shlaim: Israel made me feel inferior as an Arab Jew

Avi Shlaim, a prominent historian on Israel-Palestine and an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, reflects on his experience as an Arab Jew growing up in Baghdad and later in Israel. Born into an upper-class family in Baghdad, Shlaim recalls a period of peaceful coexistence and cosmopolitanism for the Iraqi-Jewish community, which had a history of over two thousand years in the region. He notes that Jews were one minority among many, living in harmony with their Muslim neighbors.

However, his family's move to Israel at the age of five marked a significant and difficult transformation. Shlaim felt subjected to prejudice and discrimination due to his Iraqi roots and Arab background, leading him to feel like a second-class Israeli and ashamed of speaking Arabic in public. This experience contrasts with the narrative that emigration from Iraq was solely a response to antisemitism.

Shlaim, a member of the 'New Historians' movement, challenges the idea that the emigration of Iraqi Jews was a second al-Nakba, comparable to the Palestinian exodus. He argues that the emigration was not exclusively born from enmity and rejects the notion that the 1941 Farhud pogrom made the 1950s emigration inevitable. Instead, he attributes the profound changes in their lives to both Arab nationalism and Zionism, describing his transition to being an Israeli as a 'painful, violent, and traumatic transformation'. His memoirs, 'Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew,' aim to shed light on the often-forgotten history of the Arab-Jewish community in Iraq and challenge prevailing narratives.