Avi Shlaim, ‘Historian’ of Israel

Avi Shlaim is a famously far-left Israeli academic who has spent almost his entire life teaching in England, where he has been “revising” Israeli history to bring the sins of the Israelis to the world’s attention. Along with Ilan Pappe, he’s the Palestinians’ favorite Israeli historian. Now he has published a study of why he thinks more than 125,000 Iraqi Jews left their homes in the early 1950s and moved to Israel. More on his revisionist history can be found here: “Don’t be taken in by Avi Shlaim’s view of Zionism,” by Joe Mintz, The JC, June 22, 2023:

The Jews and Arabs were friends really. It was only Zionism, a Eurocentric import, that poisoned the relationship between them.

Yes, in Shlaim’s view, Muslim Arabs and Jews always got along famously, until the Zionists came along and ruined it all. He doesn’t explain Maimonides’ remark about Muslim mistreatment of Jews: “God has entangled us with this people, the nation of Ishmael, who treat us so prejudicially and who legislate our harm and hatred…. No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us.” Nor does he explain the murder by Muslims of most of the Jews in Granada in 1066, and the crucifixion of the Jewish vizier, Joseph ibn Naghrela. Nor does he explain the Muslim massacre of the Jews of Hebron in 1929, twenty years before the establishment of Israel which, Avi Shlaim insists, is the only reason for Muslim hostility to Jews.

Apparently Shlaim has never bothered to read the Qur’an, for if he had, he would have found that for 1400 years Muslims have been taught to regard Jews as their greatest enemies. Robert Spencer has provided a useful compendium of those teachings: “The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.”

Shlaim wants us all to ignore those anti-Jewish passages in the Qur’an. I wrote above that he apparently is unfamiliar with those passages, but on second thought, I think he is familiar with them, but has decided to ignore them. For they undermine completely his claim that Jews and Muslims were always friends in the pre-Zionist days of their shared existence.

So says Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford, in his new book, recently reviewed in gushing terms in the Spectator. Of course, he should know, being the son of Iraqi Jewish parents who left for Israel in 1950. He’s also a well-known Corbyn supporter and one of the many hard-left academics who vociferously accused anti-Corbyn campaigners of weaponising antisemitism — the type of view that Sir Keir Starmer has spent the last few years trying to get rid of in the Labour Party.

Shlaim was five years old when his family left Iraq. So he cannot claim any special expertise about the treatment of Jews in Iraq. He doesn’t seem bothered by antisemitism; he was and remains a big supporter of the antisemitic Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who called members of Hamas and Hezbollah “my friends,” invited them to visit Parliament as his guests, and attended a ceremony honoring the Black September terrorists behind the Munich Olympics massacre who were buried at a cemetery in Tunis.

Shlaim focuses on the well-worn accusation that a series of bombings in 1950 and 1951 in Baghdad (which caused one fatality overall) were in fact a plot orchestrated by Israel to make the Jews leave. It’s a ludicrous proposition that has never had any proof behind it. It has echoes of Ken Loach and Ken Livingstone’s pernicious proposition that the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis. It’s the kind of thing antisemites love to come up with: it’s the Jews who are really to blame for their own fate, rather than the centuries of Arab persecution.

But in fact, the Middle Eastern leader who was really collaborating with the Nazis, and was even befriended by Hitler, was not any Zionist but, rather, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs.

The most famous purveyor of the charge that Zionists were working hand in glove with the Nazis, because the persecution of European Jewry would lead more Jews to flee to Mandatory Palestine is, of course, Mahmoud Abbas. This supposed collaboration was the subject of his doctoral thesis at Patrice Lumumba University in 1982. He turned it into a book: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.

Joe Mintz continues to sarcastically eviscerate poor Avi Shlaim:

The fact that for centuries they [the Jews] had status as second-class “dhimmi” who, if they looked at a Muslim the wrong way, could be murdered for it, had nothing to do with it. The 1941 Nazi-inspired Farhud antisemitic pogrom, when 180 Jews were murdered, was of no consequence. The arrests, confiscations and worse in the wake of 1948 had no impact. The Arabs loved the Jews and it was all the fault of Zionism.

Except it wasn’t. One hundred and twenty thousand Jews left Iraq for Israel between 1950 and 1952. As Shlaim points out, life in Israel for these refugees was deprived and difficult. Many who had arrived told their friends and relatives still in Baghdad that they should not come.

Though life in Israel in the early 1950s was very difficult, and especially for the Jews from Arab lands who arrived penniless, Iraqi Jews had no desire to return to Iraq, so horrific had conditions been for them in that country.

Those who stayed had in store for them the hangings of nine Jews in Baghdad in 1969 and other atrocities in revenge for the defeat of the Arab armies [in] 1967.

Those Jews who did remain in Iraq were not given better treatment for their misplaced vote of confidence In the Muslim state. The public hanging of nine innocent Jews in central Baghdad before a huge cheering crowd of bloodthirsty Muslims, for supposedly spying for Israel, sufficiently scared the last few thousand Jews to finally leave Iraq for the Jewish state. The 1967 victory of Israel in the Six-Day War had been seen as a humiliation, not just of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, but of all the Arabs, and they took out their rage, when the could, on their own Jews. Again, Shlaim has nothing to say about that 1969 hanging, and its role in driving the last Jews out of Iraq.

Shlaim has spent his entire professional life finding fault with Israel, the country that took his impoverished family in and gave them succor in 1950. He ignores the long record of Muslim mistreatment of Jews, from the early Muslims’ wars on Jewish tribes in Mecca, and Medina — think of the massacre of the Banu Qurayza — to Maimonides’ anguished exclamation that “No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us.” Shlaim ignores the dozens of passages in the Qur’an, and the many hundreds of ahadith, that inveigh against the Jews as the worst enemies of Islam and Muslims. He ignores the contents of the Cairo Geniza, which, as the famed Jewish scholar S. D. Goitein wrote, showed just how onerous were the disabilities imposed on the Jews as “dhimmis,” and especially the burden of the capitation tax known as the jizyah, that Jews (and Christians) had to pay to the Muslim state in order to be allowed to continue practicing their religion; it was, in other words, a form of extortion.

Shlaim seems to think that Iraqi Jews were not affected by the Farhud, that massacre of 180 Jews in Baghdad by Muslim mobs between June 1-2, 1941. But of course they were; how could they not be in the face of such horrors? Why then did they not all leave Iraq at that time? They couldn’t. Mandatory Palestine was sealed off by the British to Jewish immigrants. It was only after the state of Israel was declared, and the Jews had fought off the five Arab armies that had tried to snuff out the Jewish state’ young life, and an armistice declared in 1949, that Iraqi Jews could finally make aliyah to Israel, and that is what, beginning in 1950, 120,000 Iraqi Jews did.

Avi Shlaim will never allow himself to recognize the true state of affairs between Muslims and Jews during the last 1400 years. He’s been at his nonsense for too long. His mind is made up: we must blame the Zionists, who so poisoned the well of Muslim-Jewish harmony. He’s not a historian, but a fantasist of long standing. There is no point in trying to set him straight, but at least we can state the facts for those who might otherwise be tempted to believe his fables.