Avi Shlaim > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“killed and 1,885 were wounded. Within a very short time, the riots had become a full-scale uprising—the al-Aqsa intifada.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“In 1982, as minister of defense in Menachem Begin’s government, Sharon was the driving force behind the invasion of Lebanon, an act that left 17,825 dead and around 30,000 wounded and led to Israel’s eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon. The most infamous episode in Sharon’s war was the massacre committed by Christian militiamen in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were under Israeli control. At least 800 Palestinians were killed in horrific circumstances. The Kahan Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut stated in its report of February 1983 that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility “for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge” and “for not taking appropriate measures to avoid the bloodshed.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“. 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

“The first raid on the Egyptian hinterland was launched on 7 January 1970; the last one took place on 13 April. During those four months, Israel’s American-made supersonic Phantom fighter planes struck repeatedly at targets in the Nile delta and on the outskirts of Cairo. All in all, the Israelis flew 3,300 sorties and dropped an estimated 8,000 tons of ordnance on Egyptian territory. What was lacking was a coherent policy. Golda Meir denied that the raids were deliberately intended to topple Nasser but added that if they brought about a change of regime, she would not shed any tears over it.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, had become a compelling spokesman for a tough counterterrorist policy for the West. In 1986 Netanyahu published the proceedings of a conference held in Washington by Israel’s Jonathan Institute under the title Terrorism: How the West Can Win. By its scathing attacks on the PLO, Libya, and Syria, this book fostered the impression that Israel’s enemies were also America’s, that the Arabs who used violence against Israel were terrorists, that the countries that sponsored violence against Israel were terrorist states, and that brute force against them was not only legitimate but desirable. “If”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“large majority of his fellow parliamentarians.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“the official version, which says that Israel went to war only because it faced an imminent danger of attack from Egypt.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“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

“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

“The deportations boosted Rabin’s domestic popularity but did not stem the tide of violence. In March 1993 thirteen Israelis were murdered by knife-wielding fanatics. Most of these attacks were carried out by members of the military wing of Hamas, and some of them involved the use of firearms, especially against Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied territories. Rabin’s response was one of massive retaliation. On 30 March he ordered the closure of Israel’s pre-1967 border to workers from the occupied territories. Nearly 120,000 families were punished for the deeds of a handful of killers. The closure achieved its immediate aim of reducing the incidence of violence, but it also had a much deeper significance.”
― 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

“1967. After June 1967 she remained unremittingly hostile toward Palestinian nationalism. In fact, she refused to acknowledge that the Palestinians were a nation or that they had any right to national self-determination. As prime minister she was well known for her anachronistic and hard-line views about the Palestinian problem, and she achieved notoriety for her statement that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,” she said. “They did not exist.”39”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“known as the Land of Israel.” Kimmerling regarded Sharon as the most brutal, deceitful, and unrestrained of all Israeli generals and politicians and as one of the most frightening leaders of the third millennium.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“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

“killed four residents of Jabaliya, the largest of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. It was falsely rumored that the driver deliberately caused the accident to avenge the stabbing to death of his brother in Gaza two days earlier. The two men were unrelated. Nevertheless, the rumor inflamed Palestinian passions and set off disturbances in the Jabaliya camp and in the rest of the Gaza Strip. From Gaza the disturbances spread to the West Bank. Within days the occupied territories were engulfed in a wave of spontaneous, uncoordinated, and popular street demonstrations and commercial strikes on an unprecedented scale. Equally”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The document served to demonstrate just how wide the gulf between the Israeli and Jordanian positions was. Although the king had rejected the Israeli terms for a settlement, the secret meetings with him did not stop. They continued until the conclusion of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in October 1994, and after that there was no need for secrecy.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“lobby mounted a public relations campaign in support of Israel. Seventy-six senators signed a letter to the president calling for “defensible borders” for Israel and large-scale economic and military assistance. Ford presented Rabin with two options: a return to the Geneva conference to work out an overall settlement for the Middle East or another attempt at an interim agreement between Israel and Egypt. Rabin preferred the latter but sought payment in American currency for the concessions he knew Israel would have to make to Egypt.”
― 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

“Members of the left-wing Mapam party objected to annexation and still supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“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

“On 14 September, three weeks after his election, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in his party headquarters, most probably by agents of Syrian intelligence. The assassination knocked out the central prop from underneath Israel’s entire policy in Lebanon. With Gemayel’s violent removal from the scene, Sharon’s plan for a new political order in Lebanon—a plan predicated from the start on Bashir Gemayel personally—collapsed like a house of cards.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World