From Baghdad to Oxford

Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945. His prosperous family moved to the infant state of Israel when he was five. In his recent memoir Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, he recalls the impact of his background:

If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex … I unquestioningly accepted the social hierarchy that placed European Jews at the top of the pile and the Jews of the Arab and African lands at the bottom.

Having left Iraq, Shlaim’s family lost their social status as well as “our proud sense of identity as Iraqi Jews.” The new Israeli state sought to preserve “an Ashkenazi monopoly over the cultural as well as political centres of power.” Shlaim was ashamed of speaking Arabic, “the language of the enemy,” in public: “In my first year in Israel, I hardly spoke at all until I was able to speak Hebrew properly.”

Feeling “angry and alienated,” he gravitated toward the right wing of Israeli politics. His hero was the future prime minister Menachem Begin, “a clever populist who skillfully played on my resentment of the Ashkenazi establishment.”

In 1961, Shlaim moved to London as a student at the Jewish Free School. Although he found that “considerable glamour and kudos were attached to being an Israeli,” he failed to exploit this because he had “hardly developed any kind of identity as an Israeli citizen.” Nonetheless, between 1964 and 1966, he performed national service in the Israeli army.

For Shlaim, this marked “the high point of my identification with the State of Israel,” which “helped me to understand its powerful stranglehold on the Israeli psyche”. He subsequently entered Jesus College, Cambridge as a history student.

His patriotism revived during the 1967 Six-Day War, before a sense of disenchantment “evolved slowly and painfully”: “After the 1967 war, I argued, Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories.” Shlaim remained in Britain, graduating from Jesus College in 1969, subsequently lecturing at the universities of Reading and Oxford and becoming a prolific, widely read author.

The Iron Wall

His 1988 book on Jordan’s King Abdullah aroused controversy because of the word “collusion” in its title. This implied that negotiations between Abdullah, the Zionist movement, and the British colonial authorities were “consciously and deliberately intended to frustrate the will of the international community,” which favored the creation of an independent Arab state in part of historic Palestine.

In 1989 he prepared a curtailed paperback edition under a new title, The Politics of Partition. He deleted the word “collusion,” he tells us, “because it focused attention on the more conspiratorial side of the Abdullah-Israel nexus,” and he hoped that its omission might “go some way towards expiating my original sin.”

With 2000’s The Iron Wall, later revised and expanded in 2014, Shlaim published an indispensable overview of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict. He borrowed its title from two 1923 texts by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and ideological ancestor of the modern Likud party.

While Jabotinsky’s ideology was more maximalist in its territorial demands than official Zionism, Shlaim clarifies that Jabotinsky’s attitude towards the indigenous Arabs was essentially neutral rather than hostile. He accepted as a matter of course that natives would “resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” Any such settlement thus had to develop “behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”

For Shlaim, “Jabotinsky’s iron wall encompassed a theory of change in Jewish-Palestinian relations leading to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence.” Mainstream Zionists, in contrast, saw the iron wall as “an instrument for keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience.” By exposing the cynicism of Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, or Shimon Peres, Shlaim subverted the illusion that they represented a positive antithesis to the Revisionists.

The Gaza Genocide

In both editions of The Iron Wall, Shlaim described Israel in the late 1950s as having been “untainted by a brush of colonialism.” In his 2009 essay collection Israel and Palestine, he maintained that the only “fair and reasonable solution” was a two-state one. In Three Worlds, however, he characterizes Zionism as having been “an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset.” The outcome that Shlaim now favors is “one democratic state between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.”

The title of his latest work, Genocide in Gaza, demonstrates how unapologetic Shlaim has become since the King Abdullah controversy. In an interview with the Irish News last April, he refers to the new collection as his “Irish book,” because “Ireland is the natural friend of any anti-colonial struggle.”

The publisher is Belfast-based Irish Pages Press, which previously published Shlaim’s essay “Israel and the Arrogance of Power” in a volume titled Islam, Israel and the West. In “All That Remains,” a 2024 article from the new book, he suggests that “a negotiated political compromise, as in Northern Ireland, is the only way forward.” This is an outcome impeded by the United States, the same state that in Ireland acted as “honest broker.”

After a foreword in which UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese recommends the book “with reverent sorrow,” there are twelve essays of varying length, three of them written especially for this collection. These are interspersed with a portfolio of maps, a sequence of drawings by Peter Rhoades inspired by Israel’s 2008–09 attack on Gaza, and a sequence of photographs of Gaza children compiled by Feda Shtia.

The book’s coda is a speech by Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh to the International Court of Justice on behalf of South Africa as it charged Israel with violating the Genocide Convention. While these interpolations are welcome, the absence of an index — surely an indispensable feature of any such work of reference — is regrettable.

There is also some repetition between the various chapters. Shlaim acknowledges this at the start of the book: “I had the option of removing repetitions . . . [but] decided to reprint each article exactly as it appeared originally,” accepting advice from his publisher Chris Agee that this “would be more honest and more authentic.”

Histories of Betrayal

Yet the order in which the essays appear is not strictly chronological. Shlaim jumps in at the deep end with “Britain and the Nakba: A History of Betrayal” (2023), condemning his adopted country’s “duplicity, mendacity and chicanery” toward Palestine. He quotes jurist John Quigley’s rebuttal of the legality of Britain’s Palestine Mandate (1923–48) and decries a 2023 government policy paper that granted Israel total immunity for its crimes.

Shlaim follows this with “The Diplomacy of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (2023), an eighty-page report for the International Court of Justice. The report states that Israel’s Jewish population “usurped the land from the Arabs” and describes the 1947 partition resolution as “a major mistake.” Shlaim goes on to insist that the “Israeli Apartheid regime” of the present day can only be understood “in the historical context of Zionist settler-colonialism.” The third essay, 2024’s “Benjamin Netanyahu’s War against Palestinian Statehood,” also describes Israel as having “always been a settler-colonial state.”

However, the fourth chapter jumps back to 2009, when Shlaim’s perspective was rather different. His reflections on Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza at the beginning of that year, include a statement that he “has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders,” only rejecting “the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.” A newcomer to these debates might find this shift confusing and, given that Cast Lead crops up repeatedly in later chapters, perhaps this one could have been omitted.

Having started with a denunciation of Britain, Shlaim tackles the US role in his tenth essay, “Green Light to Genocide,” with Joe Biden as the major target. Shlaim accuses Biden of being “personally complicit, if not a full partner, in Israel’s genocidal war,” and quotes a telling admission from his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “We don’t talk about red lines when it comes to Israel.”

The baleful role of the European Union and its leading states such as Germany receives less attention. However, in the penultimate essay, 2021’s “The Two-State Solution: Illusion and Reality,” Shlaim states that both the United States and the European Union “know that apartheid is the reality on the ground” and that this reality is incompatible with the two-state solution that they formally endorse. They “continue to parrot their support” for the latter because “they are afraid to admit that the root of the problem is the racist and colonial nature of Israeli rule.”

One chapter, “Israel, Hamas and the Conflict in Gaza,” is a 2019 submission by Shlaim to the International Criminal Court. The historian cites the relatively obscure legal concept of “depraved indifference” to characterize Israel’s conduct toward the people of Gaza: “so wanton, so callous, so reckless, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.”

“Israel’s Road to Genocide” was cowritten for this book with the British-Israeli researcher Jamie Stern-Weiner. It includes a six-page catalog of “bloodthirsty statements by Israeli officials” that offers horrendous proof of the “genocidal intent” that Israel’s defenders have so often denied. Just a small sample: “Burn Gaza now nothing less!” — “one sentence for everyone there: death!” — “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves!” — “Erase, kill, destroy, annihilate.”

Living in Three Worlds

In the book’s concluding pages, the Palestinian-British novelist Selma Dabbagh pays tribute to Shlaim “as a person who has lived in three worlds — Iraqi, Israeli and British, with a Jewish religion and an Arab ethnicity.” She describes him as a humane, clear-sighted thinker, an estimation with which no unprejudiced reader can disagree.

The inconsistencies of argument one finds in this volume serve to emphasize the integrity of someone who has wrestled passionately with his own contradictions. In his eightieth year, Shlaim stands as a fearless advocate for what he describes as “the fight against Zionist fascism” and “the struggle for justice for the long-suffering Palestinian people.”