Pearls and Irritations

Summary: the distinguished historian Avi Shlaim argues that in its war with Gaza, Israel openly displays its true colours as a Eurocentric settler-colonialist and apartheid state.

Today’s newsletter is a transcript of our 6 December podcast with Avi Shlaim the historian and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In June his Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew was published by Oneworld and the book and the Gaza war were the interlinked subjects of our conversation. You can find the podcast here.

In your book, you begin chapter one with these sentences: “If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex. I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” When you were five, your family left Baghdad for the newly created state of Israel. To those who have not yet read Three Worlds, why the inferiority complex?

The key concept in the book is the concept of an Arab-Jew, that it is possible to be both Jewish, and Arab. At the same time, this is denied by Israelis today. They say it’s a contradiction in terms. It’s an ontological impossibility. If you’re a Jew, you cannot be an Arab and if you’re an Arab, you cannot be a Jew. So my book is a refutation of this Israeli belief because I was born in Baghdad in 1945. And in 1950, we left Baghdad for Israel and we were Arab Jews. We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Judaism. We spoke Arabic at home. Our culture was Arab culture. We had many Muslim friends. And there was a long tradition of Muslim-Jewish coexistence and even harmony. So for my family and me, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea or an ambition. It was the everyday reality. Iraq didn’t have a Jewish problem. Iraq had many minorities and the Jews were one minority, among others, and there was a long tradition of religious tolerance. In Iraq we were equal. We were equal to all the other minorities.

And how did that change when your family emigrated to Israel?

When we moved to Israel, we were outsiders in the sense that Israel was a European style society. The Zionist movement, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, was a movement by European Jews for European Jews. So the ethos of the newly-born State of Israel was a Eurocentric one. There was from the beginning, cleavage, tensions between Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Europe and oriental Jews, Jews from the Arab lands, who collectively are called Mizrahi. And as a boy, I felt this very acutely. I felt I was looked down upon by my new society. This is not to say that I encountered direct discrimination but rather that it was the prejudice, the disdain for oriental Jews in Israel that I felt: that everything Arab was considered primitive and backward, the Arabic language was considered an ugly, guttural language and I internalised these values. And the opening scene in my book is when my father comes to me in the street when I’m playing with my friends and he speaks to me in Arabic and I’m acutely embarrassed. And I wanted to say to him it’s okay to speak Arabic at home but in front of my friends, I would rather you spoke to me in Hebrew, except that he couldn’t speak Hebrew. But because I was an Iraqi boy, in a western style society dominated by Ashkenazim, I had a sense of inferiority. And this sense of inferiority defines my relationship with Israeli society. And I write about it very frankly, in my memoirs, because there is no point in writing an autobiography, if you’re not going to be frank.

Three Worlds was published before the latest Gaza war. But in the book, you charge Israel with being an apartheid state. Why do you take that position? And how do you respond to those who say that calling Israel an apartheid state is anti-Semitic.

I don’t charge Israel as an apartheid state. I simply observe the obvious reality which is that Israel is an apartheid state. For me, it’s not a matter for debate, or a matter of dispute. And in the last two years, four major human rights groups have issued detailed records, all of which conclude that Israel is an apartheid state, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid as defined by the 1998 statute that established the International Criminal Court.. The most interesting report of these four is by B’tselem the Israeli human rights organisation, because its previous reports were about Israeli human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. In this last report, it says that you can no longer distinguish between the Occupied Territories and Israel proper. Because from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there is one regime. It’s an apartheid regime. It’s a Jewish supremacist regime with second class citizens. That’s the Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel and third class citizens, if you can call them that, who are the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who have no political rights at all. So I think it’s obvious that Israel is an apartheid state. And to the people who say that to call Israel an apartheid state is anti-Semitic, I say about criticisms of the State of Israel this is not anti-Semitic. I make a very, very clear distinction between anti-Semitism on the one hand, which is hatred of the Jews and anti-Zionism on the other hand, which is criticism of the State of Israel. Israel, and its friends, and it has many friends, very strong friends throughout the world, has deliberately, I repeat, deliberately conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, in order to silence legitimate evidence-based criticisms of the State of Israel.

And in this country (UK), we have seen a very, very unfortunate phenomenon of the weaponizing of anti-Semitism to prevent free speech in order to protect Israel. The government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti- Semitism. It tries to impose this definition on universities and local authorities and it’s a very flawed definition because it doesn’t distinguish clearly enough between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. So there is nothing at all anti-Semitic in calling Israel an apartheid state.

In Three Worlds you write of the concept of the erasure of history, the erasure of culture that you experienced as an Arab-Jew growing up in Israel. That is what the Palestinians have experienced over decades and are experiencing now very violently in Gaza. Is that something that Arab-Jews share with Palestinians? And is that a common ground that could somehow be built on in what is an otherwise extraordinarily bleak and awful landscape?

There is a parallel between the history of the Palestinians and the history of Iraqi Jews. And that is that in 1948, the Palestinians became refugees. They were displaced. Some of them fled but the majority were expelled by Israel in an exercise of ethnic cleansing. And the Jewish community in Iraq did not, for the most part, choose to move to Israel but was forced to. So we too, were displaced. And a relative of mine, Itzhak Bar-Moshe, wrote a book on the exodus from Iraq (The Departure from Iraq), in which he said ‘we left Iraq as Jews and we arrived in Israel as Iraqis.’ So there are parallel histories. But unfortunately, this doesn’t give me any reason for hope, because many of the Mizrahi in Israel vote for the Likud and for right wing parties. The Jews of the Arab lands could have been used by Israel as a bridge with the Arab world. But the Ashkenazi elite in Israel has never wanted to use Mizrahi Jews as a bridge because they didn’t want a bridge to the Arab world. Israel is a European-style state in the heartland of the Middle East. Israel has never wanted to be part of the region, Israel has always seen itself as part of the West. And in the crisis of Gaza today, we see the same dynamic in place. The Arab world doesn’t recognise Israel as legitimate. They see Israel as a Western enclave within the Middle East. And the Western powers support Israel all the way in carrying out the death and destruction in Gaza, in destroying Gaza. Western leaders have still, two months after the outbreak of the war, not called for a ceasefire, only for a humanitarian pause. So there is huge Western hypocrisy in supporting what Israel is doing in Gaza, not calling a spade, a spade, and giving unconditional support and a free pass to continue with the butchery and with the destruction of Gaza. And I think this will be to the eternal shame of the Western powers that have not shown any humanity or any commitment to Palestinian rights. This conflict is between two national movements. The West supports Israel unconditionally and the West is not really interested in helping the Palestinians to realise their natural right to national self-determination.

Given that is the case do you think Israel will ever take a different direction?

I don’t believe that Israel can change its essence which is that of a settler-colonialist, Jewish supremacist state. The conflict is a political conflict. But Israel doesn’t have a political solution to the conflict in Gaza. Israel only uses brute military force. There is an Israeli saying: ‘If force doesn’t work, use more force.’ And Israeli generals have a phrase to ‘mow the lawn’ in Gaza. Every few years they move in and they bombard the Gaza Strip, by air, sea and land. They cause a huge amount of destruction, heavy casualties, damage to the civilian infrastructure. And then they go home but without dealing with the underlying political problem. So Israel is a colonial power. The Palestinians are fighting what is probably the last anti-colonial struggle in the world today and Israel is unlikely to change its nature. There is no impetus for change from inside Israel. There is no recognition that without peace with the Palestinians Israel will never have security, the cycle of violence will continue forever.

Will America change?

I’m equally pessimistic about America changing. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is unconditional. That means that Israel can do whatever it likes without paying a price. This is why Israel gets away literally with murder and has been for many years. And as we speak, Israel is getting away literally with murder. I don’t see the likelihood of internal change in Israel. On the contrary, Israel is becoming more and more oppressive, more and more extreme and more of a Jewish supremacist state. And I don’t see the likelihood of a change in the Western policy towards Israel. There is a disconnect between the people who are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian and the governments who are blindly and uncritically supportive of Israel, whatever it does.

Republished from Arab Digest on December 12, 2023

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