The strength of the words of Avi Shlaim (Baghdad, 77 years old), a historian with dual nationality, Israeli and British, lies not in the volume of his voice or the speed of his speech. Speak slowly and quietly; measured and careful in the sentences he chooses, supported by large, well-groomed hands that he moves steadily. But the content of his statements falls apart in one of the most violent moments in the recent history of the country in which he grew up. Shlaim was born in the Iraqi capital to a wealthy Jewish family. That’s why he feels like a Jewish Arab. In the early 1950s the Shlaim emigrated to Israel. As a teenager, young Avi went to the UK to study; He would have to return to Israel to complete his military service. Until two years ago, Shlaim was a professor at Oxford, where he currently lives. His bibliography includes some of the best works on understanding the Middle East, including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and his most recent work, Three Worlds. : Memoirs of an Arab Jew.
This Jewish Arab, an unabashed critic of the Israeli governments, spoke to this newspaper on Thursday in one of the offices of the Faculty of Philology of the Complutense University during the congress “The Future of the Palestinian Question.” 75 years after the Nakba. It’s hard, especially with Zionism. Speaking about this, he remembers the following: “My mother always talked about the wonderful Muslim friends we had in Baghdad, and one day I asked her if we had any Zionist friends. And she said, “No, Zionism is for Ashkenazis, for European Jews.”
Questions. You grew up and lived in Israel and have Israeli citizenship. How are you following this escalation of violence?
Answer. These are very dark times. And on October 7, Hamas launched an attack on Israel. And it was a turning point because it was the first time that Hamas invaded Israeli territory and attacked Israel from within Israel itself. But the conflict did not begin on October 7th. The conflict began a century ago. And in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. But it was a one-sided retreat. It was not part of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority. And it was not a step toward a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis claim they have given the Palestinians the opportunity to turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Middle East. But they did nothing of the sort. They turned Gaza into an open-air prison. Media attention was focused on Hamas’ attack rather than Israel’s disproportionate response. I condemn both. I condemn the Hamas attack because it targeted civilians. And killing civilians is wrong, period. But the Israeli response was brutal, cruel and disproportionate. And revenge is not politics. And what Israel is doing is state-sponsored terrorism. Or state terrorism. It is on a much more serious scale than the attack on Israel.
I would like to emphasize that the conflict did not start on October 7th. People don’t ask why Hamas launched this attack. And the answer lies in the context. And the context is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967.
Q Why is it so difficult to talk about the context of the Israeli occupation now?
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R. The Israelis do not look to the past. They just look at what happened to them. It was a real trauma: Black Saturday [el 7 de octubre] It was the worst day in Israel’s history. They are traumatized. Before the attack there was a very serious protest movement against it [el primer ministro israelí, Benjamín] Netanyahu and his judicial reform plan, now everyone in Israel is united in this war against Hamas. But when hostilities end, anger will turn against Netanyahu. I think it won’t be politically viable. Then there is the Western response to this crisis. Its hallmarks are hypocrisy and double standards. And an example of Western hypocrisy was when Hamas won a free and fair election in January 2006. Israel refused to recognize the Hamas government. The European Union and the United States supported an economic war to weaken Hamas and force it to take power in Gaza by force. And after this happened in 2007, Israel imposed a blockade. It is illegal and illegitimate because it represents a form of collective punishment of civilians. Now Israel is taking a step beyond the blockade. It is a kind of medieval siege, preventing water, food, medicine and fuel from reaching Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
Western powers condemned Hamas and its barbarism, calling it a terrorist organization. But they do not pay attention to the Israeli reaction and do not criticize Israel. So they will be complicit in the Israeli attack on Gaza and the attack on civilians. Essentially, they are giving Israel the freedom to do its worst instead of demanding a ceasefire.
Q You are a historian. What part of history will the current conflict between Hamas and Israel take up?
R. The roots of the conflict go back at least to the Nakba in 1948 [considerada la “catástrofe” para los palestinos tras la declaración del Estado de Israel y la expulsión de sus tierras]. The Nakba is not an isolated event in 1948, when three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced and the name Palestine was erased from the map. It is a continuous process and not a one-time process. Israel has been building and expanding settlements since 1967; annexed East Jerusalem and carried out ethnic cleansing there. Today we could be on the brink of a second Nakba, a second major catastrophe involving the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Israeli generals have the phrase, “Mow the grass,” meaning they have no solution, only brute military force. Every few years they come with heavy weapons and cutting edge technology. They kill thousands of people and destroy tens of thousands of homes and infrastructure. They weaken Hamas’s military capabilities and then withdraw. That is no solution. By my count, this is the sixth major Israeli attack on the people of Gaza. And it is the most serious and consequential yet. It is the most destructive because Israel has attacked ambulances, hospitals, mosques, schools, warehouses…accompanied by an Israeli order to 1.1 million Gazans to move from north to south. This is a massive and forced transfer of civilians.
The Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, this Thursday during the interview. Alvaro Garcia
Q He describes himself as Arab and Jewish. What reaction would you get if you traveled to the region today and defended this identity?
R. I lived in Baghdad until I was five years old. I am an Arab Jew because I lived in an Arab country. And there is no better way to describe my first identity than that of an Arab Jew. And that is the experience of my family, mine and the Jewish community in Iraq. We are a minority among many. We weren’t the others, like in Europe. Iraq did not have a Jewish problem. This identity existed in the past, and today I am a living example of an Arab Jew. And I’m proud of both parts of my identity. I am proud of the Arab heritage and I am proud of the Jewish heritage. So I don’t apologize for that.
Is the concept of an Arab Jew still relevant today? The answer is no, not really, because in 1950, when we left Iraq, there were 135,000 Jews there. Today there are still three Jews in Iraq. But it is relevant because for me Jewish-Muslim coexistence is not an abstract concept. It’s not an ideal, it was an everyday reality. We lived it, we experienced it, we touched it, and remembering the experience of the Jewish community in Iraq and my family allows me to think about a better future for our region. To counter the Zionist claim that Muslim, Jewish and Arab-Israeli hostility is predetermined and that the two sides are doomed to live in constant conflict. The concept of an Arab Jew allows me to think about what the result should be: a democratic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of their religion and ethnicity.
Q Coexistence between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East was real back then. What changed everything?
R. The element that has changed their coexistence is nationalism. Nationalism is the root of the problem. After the end of the Cold War, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington put forward the thesis of a clash of civilizations. He said that international conflict was no longer between states but between civilizations. The Judeo-Christian civilization on the one hand and the Muslim civilization on the other. And that Islam completely rejects the Jews and the West. I think this is a very stupid and superficial idea. This conflict is about real things. It’s about two people in one country. And the driving force of this conflict is nationalism. The driving force behind our movement was political; It was nationalism.
There are also the Arabs who turned against the Jews not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. They said we didn’t belong there, that we were the brothers of the Zionists who drove out the Palestinians. So Arab nationalism was a factor, but the main factor, the most important, was Zionism, a Jewish state in Palestine that carried out the Nakba in 1948 and then tried to bring Jews from all corners of the country, including Israel, into Palestine Arab world, all the way to Israel. There was a systematic attempt to erase Arab identity, culture, folklore and language. I experienced this in Israel.
Q And 75 years after the Nakba, nothing seems to have changed.
R. Jewish antagonism toward Arabs has increased significantly in the last 20 years since Israel turned to the right. The current government, with Jewish power and religious Zionism at its heart, is the most right-wing, chauvinistic and blatantly racist in Israel’s history. As a result of the current war in Gaza, Israeli public opinion will move further to the right and become more hostile towards the Palestinians.
Q This sometimes leads to an oversimplification of comparing Jewish identity with the radicalism of Israeli governments.
R. It worries me very much because I make a very clear distinction between the State of Israel and the Jews. Israel is a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations. Jews are a community spread all over the world and speaking different languages. And Israel presents itself as a state of Jews. Netanyahu claims to speak on behalf of the world’s Jews, but he has no right to do so. We are witnessing a growing alienation between liberal Jews around the world and the State of Israel. The Jewish, Israeli, AIPAC lobby [Comité de Asuntos Públicos Estados Unidos-Israel, en sus siglas en inglés], remains the most powerful foreign policy lobby in the United States. But a growing number of American Jews are critical of Israel and have their own organization, J Street, made up of liberals who support equality and human rights. And they are very critical of the Israeli occupation and say, “Not in my name.” I’m not a religious Jew, but I know that the three pillars of Judaism are truth, justice and peace. And when I look at Israel today, I see none of these values in the government. Netanyahu is a big liar, an inveterate liar; There is no justice for the Palestinians and there is no interest in peace, only in the oppression and oppression of the Palestinians.
Israel and its friends deliberately mix anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. I define anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews because they are Jews. This has nothing to do with Israel. Anti-Zionism is something completely different, it is a criticism or objection to the ideology of Zionism, the official ideology of the State of Israel, in particular the policy towards the Palestinians, the occupation, apartheid and the brutal use of violence that we are experiencing today. in Gaza.
Q It may be a somewhat naive question at the moment, but is there a non-violent solution to this conflict?
R. There is a solution to this conflict. It was summarized in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. An Arab League summit took place in Beirut. It consists of offering Israel peace and normalization with the 22 members of the Arab League in return for an end to the occupation and an independent Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. This is the peaceful solution to the conflict. The Arab world agreed on this plan, but Israel ignored it because it is more interested in land than in peace, in hegemony more than in coexistence between equals. I would say that Israel has thwarted and ruined all international peace plans since 1967; undermined the Oslo Accords [1993] and has not met this demand by building more settlements. It has blocked all peaceful avenues for resolving the conflict. The result is what we are witnessing in Gaza today: brutal violence on a massive scale, with no political horizon and no light at the end of the tunnel.
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