Israel's Erasure Of The Arab Jew

 

At 78 years old Avi Shlaim is writing his own history to correct the record of what he calls “a deliberately distorted history in the service of Zionist propaganda.” His groundbreaking 2023 memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew, is a rejection of the idea of a Clash of Civilizations. Instead, pointing to a childhood where an Iraqi Jewish community was in coexistence and part of a cosmopolitan Iraq; an Iraq his family never wanted to leave. Shlaim meticulously traces his family history along and among the history of Israel's settler colonial project and what he pulls out is a rich history that doesn’t fit the dominant narrative promulgated by the state of Israel.