Some of the most incisive and informative books about the dispossession of the Arab population of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 have been written by Israeli revisionist historians. Among the most prominent is Avi Shlaim, who has just published a revealing memoir, titled Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.
Shlaim is known for two important books reexamining Arab-Israeli relations. The first is Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988), in which he examined how the Zionist movement and King Abdullah of Jordan reached an implicit agreement to divide Palestine between themselves. The book was later reissued in an abridged, revised version, titled The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921–1951.
Shlaim is perhaps better known for a second book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. In it, he argues that a founding principle of Israel, and the dominant rationale for its relations with the Arabs, was to build the state behind an “iron wall” of military superiority, which the Arabs “will be powerless to break down,” in the words of the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who first expressed this idea in a famous essay written in 1923.
In his memoir, Shlaim describes his early years in Baghdad as the son of Iraqi Jews (though, on his father’s side, the name Shlaim “was probably a German name that went back several generations”). He grew up in a household that spoke Arabic, was immersed in Arab culture, and had prospered in Iraq. To Shlaim, Iraq’s Jews were Arab, and if Palestinians were the Zionist movement’s primary victims, they were hardly alone, as the Jews of the Arab world were as well. “By endowing Judaism with a territorial dimension that it did not have previously, [Zionism] accentuated the difference between Muslims and Jews in Arab spaces. Whether they liked it or not, from now on Jews were identified with the Jewish state,” he writes.
Especially interesting in the memoir is the extent to which, after his family moved to Israel in 1950, Shlaim felt the disparity between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews, who had immigrated from the Arab world. There was condescension in the attitude of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite to those coming from the East, and Shlaim laments that the Arab identity among Arab Jews was “relegated to the past,” in favor of an “arrogant, Eurocentric Orientalist mindset” that treated the Mizrahi newcomers as second-class citizens. “I was particularly ashamed of speaking Arabic in public,” Shlaim recalls, “because Arabic in Israel was considered an ugly language, a primitive language, and, worst of all, the language of the enemy.”
Nor is Shlaim soft on Israel’s founding mythologies. He regards Zionism as “a settler-colonial movement that proceeded ruthlessly towards its goal of building a Jewish state in Palestine even if it involved, as it was bound to, expelling much of the native population.” Shlaim has no hesitation in describing this “monumental injustice” as a case of “ethnic cleansing.” These days, Israel’s most ardent supporters seek to impose a definition of anti-Semitism that encompasses, therefore delegitimizes, such hard-hitting statements on Israel, regardless of the fact that leading Jewish writers have expressed similar thoughts in their writings.
For example, the great French Marxist scholar of Islam, Maxime Rodinson, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, wrote a highly influential article in Les Temps Modernes in 1967, in which he observed, “Wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in Arab Palestine in the 20th century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and to the development (completely normal, sociologically speaking) of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis to a military confrontation between the two ethnic groups.”
Similarly, Shlaim’s fellow revisionist historian Benny Morris has publicly defended the Zionist forces’ decision to expel the Palestinians. In an interview with Ari Shavit in 2004, Morris, who wrote on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, agreed with Shavit’s description of David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency Executive in 1948, as a “transferist”—or what Shlaim would call an ethnic cleanser. “Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist,” Morris acknowledged. “He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst… Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.” A third revisionist Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, titled his book, published in 2007, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. So, while Shlaim’s views may anger Israel’s defenders, those who know the country’s history are increasingly employing the controversial term “ethnic cleansing” to describe what occurred.
What is striking about Shlaim’s memoir, however, has less to do with his opinions about Israel than with how he addresses the notion of identity. The path is hardly a linear one. While Shlaim resents the fact that the Ashkenazi elite looked down on Mizrahi Jews, he does admit that when he entered the Israeli military before the June 1967 war, he saw the army as “the melting pot to which Zionist ideology had always aspired but rarely achieved.” While he subsequently became a leading critic of Israel, there was also a time when he leaned politically to the right, before the post-1967 situation changed his mind and the Israeli military “was transformed into a brutal police force of a brutal colonial power.”
Shlaim displays considerable honesty in his memoir, which ironically obscures his motives. He is candid about the impact immigration to Israel had on his family, not least on his father, Yusef, the unobtrusive centerpiece of his story. Shlaim describes an incident in the mid-1950s, when Yusef approached him while Shlaim was sitting with friends. The father began addressing him in Arabic, but Shlaim was so embarrassed that he was not speaking in Hebrew, a language Yusef was struggling to learn, that he barely answered. “As a child I never considered how humiliating this incident must have been for him,” Shlaim writes with great regret.
In the third section of the book, describing the author’s time in the third of his “three worlds,” Shlaim recounts how, because of his poor performance at school, his strong-willed mother sent him to Britain to pursue his studies. He left Israel in September 1961 and never moved back for an extended period of time. In describing his departure, he writes, “I left the Promised Land without as much as a backward glance.” Why such tartness? “I experienced, for the first time in my life, a profound feeling of liberation. I was on my own now, free from the constraints of school and the pressures of an Ashkenazi-dominated society,” Shlaim explains.
However, readers are left wondering about one thing. To what extent is Shlaim’s resentment toward Israel a consequence of his growing consciousness of, and unhappiness with, a society built on the injustices done to the Palestinians? Or to what degree is it anchored in his own dysfunctional family’s Israeli experiences?
It’s not easy to answer these questions. Certainly, the fact that Shlaim’s family was forced to leave Iraq and come to Israel to join what was then a downtrodden Mizrahi community made him more sensitive to the Palestinians’ plight. However, that outcome was hardly immediate, and one wonders if what flipped the switch was the way Israel effectively broke the spirit of Shlaim’s father.
Yusef Shlaim is the tragic figure in this account. Much older than Shlaim’s determined mother Mas‘uda, or Saida, he had prospered in Iraq and had never been convinced about moving to Israel. Yusef’s marriage to Saida was arranged, and as a young woman she unsuccessfully resisted getting married so soon. When the family traveled to Israel, Yusef could not adapt and his few business ventures failed. He suffered a “spectacular fall” in his social standing, as his son describes it. Soon he was idly sitting at home, forcing Saida to find a job to feed the family. This put untold stress on his relationship with his wife, eventually leading to the parents’ divorce. It was to save Shlaim from this morbid atmosphere that Saida took the initiative to send the overindulged boy of the family to Britain.
There is a discerning passage in which Shlaim describes how a fellow Iraqi Jew he met at the University of Oxford, Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad, explained the long silences of Shlaim’s father. To her, Yusef had “arrived in a country of European Jews who had no idea of the richness of his civilization nor of his position and stature within it. If anything, they tended to regard him and his ilk as backward and uncivilized. What was the point of talking to these people? Even if he wanted to talk, he did not have a language in which to communicate with them.”
To anyone from the Middle East who interacts regularly with Westerners, this astute remark resonates strongly. Without generalizing, many Westerners tend to view Arab culture through the prism of the violence and distress afflicting Arab states, and their attitude is not so much one of sympathy as a vague form of contempt. Yet the subtlety inherent in the cultures of the region, the richness of what is left unsaid, the complex rituals of generosity and social interaction, the insights into half-tones and ambiguity, reveal a sophistication that Westerners frequently don’t have, and usually don’t see. That Yusef’s withdrawal was the result of such a profound misapprehension makes much sense. But one cannot help but wonder if it is also what helps to explain the attitudes of Yusef’s son.
