Three worlds Memoirs of an Arab-Jew

Shlaim, born to Jewish Iraqi parents, pairs the personal with the political as he recounts his family's turbulent role in a sobering national tragedy. Iraqi Jews, firmly established since ancient times, were a highly successful community, regarded as both fully Arab and fully Jewish. Only after WWI, the rise of Arab nationalism, and Britain's plan to build a Jewish homeland in the Arab world were Jews seen as tools used by a hated colonial power.Yet the vast majority of Iraqi Jews remained loyal to their home country. It took the "cruel Zionism" of Israeli collusion with a right-wing Iraqi government, including strategically "persuasive" bombings, to convince families like Shlaim's to emigrate. With their financial assets frozen, the Jews of Iraq found themselves imprisoned in squalid Israeli transit camps or forced onto bare-bones communal farms. Worst of all, Shlaim and his fellow Arab Jews suffered cultural erasure. Shlaim, now a passionate advocate for Palestinian liberation, declares that "Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the Jews of the East into strangers in their own land." An essential read.

In this detailed, resonant account, historian Shlaim (The Iron Wall) recalls the complexities of growing up as an Arab Jew in Iraq and Israel. Born in 1945 Baghdad, Shlaim grew up in an affluent Jewish family that had little interest in Zionism, until antisemitic violence following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War forced them to flee to the newly created state of Israel. The move destabilized Shlaim, who had to learn Hebrew (Arabic was considered a "primitive," "ugly" language) and find a place in an Ashkenazi-dominated society that often looked down on Arab Jews. He left for secondary school in England and returned to serve in the Israeli army, though the 1967 Six-Day War soured his perspective on Israel, as he began to view the country as a colonial power. Shlaim uses his narrative to illustrate the larger story of Arab Jews' exodus from Iraq, arguing that Israel's creation morphed the formerly protected minority into an "alien and usurping" presence in Arab spaces. While not all of Shlaim's claims are equally persuasive--his contention that "the Zionist underground" was behind multiple bombings in Iraq that forced Jews to flee, for example, relies heavily on a document of uncertain provenance--he makes a convincing case that the creation of Israel had sometimes dire consequences for Jews in Arab countries. Those interested in alternative Jewish attitudes toward Zionism will find this illuminating. (July)

Memoir by an Iraqi-born Israeli writer and historian that examines the possibilities of peace in the Middle East. There is nothing inevitable, writes Shlaim, about the "clash of civilizations" that rages between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. In the days of the Ottomans, "although Islam was the official religion of the empire, Islamic law was not imposed on the non-Muslim communities," who enjoyed full civil rights--very much different from the European lands where Jews "were seen above all as 'the other' and therefore constructed as a problem." When European Jews arrived in Israel after the Shoah, strangely, they exercised similar prejudices against Arab Jews, so much so that Shlaim and his siblings, on arriving in Israel in the mid-1950s, shunned speaking the Arabic of their parents for the Hebrew of their new land. The forced diaspora of 850,000 Arab Jews--the author calls it the "Jewish Nakba," placing it in parallel with the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands during the early years of Israeli statehood--was a predictable but also avoidable reaction on the part of Arab governments that rejected Zionism. As Shlaim tells it, his family history reflects the multinational and multicultural nature of the region, with some members servants of the British Empire, some merchants, some rabbis, and always "deep roots between the two rivers of Babylon," ones that, he adds, "we had no reason to want to tear them up." Many small events turned Shlaim away from Zionism, he writes, not least the conviction that after the Six-Day War, in which he served, "Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories." He argues that a return to a one-state model in which all are equal will resolve the tensions between Palestinians and Jews. Moreover, it "carries the additional attraction of renewing the relevance of the Arab-Jew." Sharply observed, and without stridency, in making a case for an ecumenical Israel. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.