Avi Shlaim > Quotes

“bombings stopped suddenly in April 2004 as a result of a strategic choice by its leadership and a subsequent secret deal with Israel.33”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The real reason for leaving, according to my mother’s later account, was that life in Iraq had become too dangerous by 1950, for the Jews in general and for our family in particular. Persecution of the Jews was intensifying, and it assumed many different forms. The government, the judiciary and the public became overtly hostile. Restrictions were placed on Jewish trade and commerce. Jews”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“continue to vote in large numbers for the Likud. Without their support the Likud would not be able to remain in power. So why do they vote for a party whose policies are at odds with their interests? The usual explanation is that Oriental Jews brought with them to Israel a deep hatred and mistrust of the Arabs and therefore naturally gravitated towards the overtly nationalistic, Arab-scorning parties of the right. However, this is not entirely convincing. It is not supported by my own experience nor that of my relatives. It seems to me that hatred of the Arabs was deliberately cultivated in Israel by unprincipled politicians in order to gain power and to prolong their hold on it. Menachem Begin was one of the first Israeli politicians to resort to this ugly tactic, but he was not the only one. Nor was the manipulation of anti-Arab feelings a monopoly of the Israeli Right.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“The term “Zionism” was coined in 1885 by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, Zion being one of the biblical names for Jerusalem.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“economy of Gaza. UN staff who assist the Palestinians”
― Avi Shlaim, Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm

“helpful. He informed me that the man who received the bribe from the Zionist underground to organise the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue was Salem al-Quraishi, a captain in the Special Division of the Baghdad City Police Directorate. Al-Quraishi later participated in the raids on the synagogues and the schools in search of the hidden weapons. He was transferred from service in the Special Division to a regular police station. After the 14 July 1958 coup, he was arrested and sentenced by the revolutionary court to prison with hard labour. Karkoukli was inaccurate on the back story of the bribe and the bombing of the synagogue. In most other respects, however, what he told me tallies with the rest of the evidence that I have been able to gather from other sources.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Mesopotamia, recently renamed Iraq. Faisal’s ascent to the throne in 1921 had to be carefully stage-managed because he was an outsider with no local power base. To make matters worse, he was a Sunni in a country with a disenfranchised Shi’i majority – the Shi’is suspected that the British were sponsoring Faisal in order to further entrench Sunni rule.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“In my rendition, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was not a noble rescue mission by the fledgling Jewish state but the self-serving instrument for the transfer of the Jews from their homeland.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, the representative of the Colonial Office in Iraq, proposed an alternative to direct rule: exercising British influence indirectly through a dependent and therefore loyal Arab political elite – an ‘informal empire’. As well as being persuasive proponents of this, Lawrence and Bell were also great fans of Prince Faisal.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“community was placed under surveillance. Young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of further education. The police arrested, tortured, imposed arbitrary fines and extracted money from innocent Jews in what looked like a government-sanctioned campaign of harassment. On top of all of that came the series of bombs, described in the last chapter, that provoked real panic in the Jewish community and compounded the sense of insecurity. By the end of April 1950, over 25,000 Jews had registered to relinquish their citizenship and leave”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“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 way 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.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“The British for their part were not only ready but eager to renegotiate their treaty with Jordan, not least because of budgetary constraints. After the dismissal of Glubb, the election of Nabulsi and the Suez débâcle, the subsidy had become a costly white elephant. The dilemma for the British was how to cut their losses without undermining the Hashemite state that they themselves had created in the aftermath of the First World War. The answer was to offer their ward up for adoption, and the most desirable candidate for parenthood was the United States of America. By a happy coincidence this was also the adoptive parent that Hussein had chosen for himself.”
― Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan

“felt out of place on account of being a Sephardi, an Oriental, a Jew from the East, a Mizrahi. The term Mizrahi was not commonly used at the time; it took another couple of decades for it to become established as the main designation for all emigrants from the Arab world, including North Africa. The most widely used term at the time was yots’ei edot ha-mizrah, descendents of the Eastern communities, mizrah being the Hebrew word for the East. This was how Israeli society labelled me and, more importantly, this was how I saw myself.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Amnesty International reported that since the start of the second intifada Israel had destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in Gaza, throwing over 18,000 Palestinians onto the street. It damaged a further 15,000 houses, in addition to destroying hundreds of factories, workshops, greenhouses, wells, pumps, irrigation canals, and orchards. It uprooted 226,000 trees and”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine created empty spaces, and these spaces had to be filled by Jews from anywhere they could be found, including Jews from the Middle East, even those who had no desire whatsoever to relocate to Israel. 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.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“. But the most serious charge contained in the report is that Israel’s emissaries turned their local Jewish followers into terrorists. Yusef Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom were hanged in Baghdad in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Some writers have claimed that the Israeli government was so desperate for people that it indicated that it would welcome the Jews even without their property. One, Avraham Shama, claims that ‘sometime in the spring of 1950, the Iraqi authorities reached an agreement with Jewish Agency representatives to allow Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq on a one-way visa to Israel, provided that they give up their Iraqi citizenship and leave their assets to the Iraqi government.’25 Karkoukli”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Brigadier General Israel Lior, Eshkol’s aide-de-camp, suspected that the never-ending chain of action and reaction would end up in all-out war: In the north a pretty heavy war was conducted over the water sources. The war was directed by the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, together with the officer in charge of the northern command, David (“Dado”) Elazar. I had an uneasy inner feeling on this matter. All the time it seemed to me that Rabin suffers from what I call the “Syrian syndrome.” In my opinion, nearly all those who served along the front lines of the northern command … were affected by the Syrian syndrome. Service on this front, opposite the Syrian enemy, fuels feelings of exceptional hatred for the Syrian army and people. There is no comparison, its seems to me, between the Israeli’s attitude to the Jordanian or Egyptian army and his attitude to the Syrian army. … We loved to hate them.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“there was no full-scale war, there was a border war as a result of incursions into our territory from neighbouring countries by the Palestine Liberation Army, the military wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and military reprisals by the IDF. These were sometimes carried out against villages that were suspected of harbouring Palestinian fighters. They were invariably called mekhablim – saboteurs or terrorists – but, in retrospect, I think they deserved the name freedom fighters.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“I noted the major part played by the official policy of oppression and persecution in driving the Jews to migrate. But I also laid out the evidence I have unearthed about Israel’s involvement in the Baghdad bombs that hastened the departure of the Jews. I gave this as an example of ‘Cruel Zionism’, the terrorist tactics employed by Israel to promote Aliyah and of the harm it inflicted on the Jews of Iraq.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Although he did not use the biblical phrase, the role he envisaged for Asian and African Jews in Israeli society was ‘the hewers of wood and the drawers of water’. The effect of his policy was to hold back the Mizrahim by restricting their access to higher education and to the ‘white collar’ and well-paid occupations that went with it.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“The Palestinians called Abdullah a traitor. He sold them down the river, they said. Yet, if Abdullah had not sent his army into Palestine upon expiry of the British mandate, it is likely that the whole of Palestine would have been occupied by Israel and an even larger number of Palestinians turned into refugees. There is thus at least a case to be made for viewing Abdullah not as a traitor but as a saviour of the Palestinians.32 The Palestinian retort is that Abdullah preserved a part of Palestine from being swallowed up by Israel, only in order to swallow it up in Jordan. Some arguments never end.”
― Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan

“There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo–Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another. The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attaché in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in “sufficient volume” to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: “I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.”
― Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan

“measure responsible for the disaster that overwhelmed them.10 Israel’s leaders knew of these divisions and exploited them to the full following the official outbreak of hostilities, just as they had exploited them previously.11”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“of Jewish history’ that Zionism happily adopted.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“What I experienced on a small scale was what Iraqi Jews experienced all over Israel: disrespect for our Iraqi provenance; ignorance of our history; disdain for our culture; denigration of our language; and social engineering to make us fit into the new European-Zionist-Israeli mould. There was a dominant Ashkenazi nationalist narrative which contrasted our life as a humiliated minority in exile with the bright present of Jewish freedom and independence in the Promised Land. A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Bar Kokhba was held out as a national hero although the revolt he led was crushed, Judea was devastated and its population was killed, exiled or sold into slavery. The lesson we were expected to draw from the history of this revolt was that it is more honourable to go down fighting than not to fight at all.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew

“This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition. The intention behind Operation Susannah was to sour relations between Egypt and the West; its effect was to sour relations between the Egyptian people and the Jews who dwelt in their midst. The terrorist attacks seemed to confirm the suspicions of Egyptian Muslims that their Jewish compatriots owed allegiance to a foreign country and posed a threat to national security. As Stanford professor Joel Beinin put it, ‘The involvement of Egyptian Jews in acts of espionage and sabotage against Egypt organized and directed by Israeli military intelligence raised fundamental questions about their identities and loyalties.’31 The whole affair backfired disastrously on Israel. Pinhas Lavon was the minister of defence at the time and strenuously denied ever giving the order to military intelligence to activate the ring. He denounced the type of action in the affair that bore his name as stupid and inhuman and added that it had all started in Iraq.32 Lavon was forced to resign; ‘Cruel Zionism’, however, continued to characterise Israel’s conduct long after the ‘Lavon Affair’ had died down. The ‘Unfortunate Business’ may have started with the bombs that went off in central Baghdad back in 1950 but it probably had much deeper roots.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“the Jews, and led a full-scale revolt in 1936–39 against the British authorities and their Jewish protégés.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World