Avi Shlaim | |
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אבי שליים أفي شلايم | |
![]() Shlaim in 2015 | |
Born | |
Citizenship |
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Spouse | Gwyneth Daniel (m. 1973) |
Children | 1 |
Awards | British Academy Medal (2017) |
Academic background | |
Education |
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Thesis | The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949: A Study in Crisis Decision Making (1980) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Historian |
School or tradition | Israel's "New Historians" |
Institutions |
Avi Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent. He is one of Israel's "New Historians",a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel. [1] [2] [3]
Shlaim was born to wealthy Jewish parents in Baghdad in the Kingdom of Iraq. [4]
In the 1930s,the situation of the Jews in Iraq deteriorated,with the rise of nationalisms in Arab countries,and the concomitant growth of Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism. Persecution of Jews was exacerbated after the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948,and Israel's independence. In 1951,during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,Shlaim's family,along with most of Iraq's Jews,registered to emigrate to Israel and forfeit their Iraqi citizenship. The family lost all of their property and emigrated to Israel. [4]
Shlaim grew up in Ramat Gan. He left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school. [4] [5] He returned to Israel in 1964 to serve in the Israel Defense Forces,then moved back to England in 1966 to read history at Jesus College,Cambridge. He obtained his BA degree in 1969. [6] He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Reading. [7] He was a lecturer and reader in politics in the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987. [8]
He married the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George,who was the British prime minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1966,and holds dual British and Israeli nationality. [9]
Shlaim taught international relations at Reading University,specialising in European issues. His academic interest in the history of Israel began in 1982,when Israeli government archives about the 1948 Arab–Israeli War were opened,an interest that deepened when he became a fellow of St Antony's College,Oxford,in 1987. [4] He was Alastair Buchan Reader in international relations at Oxford from 1987 to 1996 and director of graduate studies in that subject in 1993–1995 and 1998–2001. He held a British Academy research readership in 1995–97 and a research professorship in 2003–2006. [8]
Shlaim served as an outside examiner on the doctoral thesis of Ilan Pappé. Shlaim's approach to the study of history is informed by his belief that "the historian's most fundamental task is not to chronicle but to evaluate... to subject the claims of all the protagonists to rigorous scrutiny and reject all those claims,however deeply cherished,that do not stand up." [10]
Shlaim is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper,and signed an open letter to that paper in January 2009 condemning Israel's role in the Gaza War. [11]
Writing in the Spectator,Shlaim called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict," describing his policies as an attempt to preclude a peaceful resolution to the conflict with Palestinians. Furthermore,he described Israeli foreign policy as one that supported stability of Arab regimes over nascent democratic movements during the Arab Spring. [12]
Shlaim is a member of the UK Labour Party. [13] In August 2015,he was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle 's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's association with alleged antisemites. [14]
In Three Worlds:Memoirs of an Arab-Jew,Shlaim unveils "undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks" which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951. The historian believed that most of the bombings against Jews in Iraq were the work of Mossad. He believed Mossad took these actions to quicken the transfer of 110,000 Jews in Iraq to the then-newly created state of Israel. [15] [16]
The Israeli historians Joseph Heller and Yehoshua Porath have claimed that Shlaim "misleads his readers with arguments that Israel had missed the opportunity for peace while the Arabs are strictly peace seekers". [17] [18]
According to Yoav Gelber,Shlaim's claim that there was a deliberate and pre-meditated anti-Palestinian "collusion" between the Jewish Agency and King Abdullah,is unequivocally refuted by the documentary evidence on the development of contacts between Israel and Jordan before,during and after the war. [19] Marc Lynch however wrote that "the voluminous evidence in [Gelber's] book does not allow so conclusive a verdict". [20]
Israeli historian Benny Morris,while praising Shlaim's historical works such as Collusion across the Jordan and The Iron Wall,has criticized Shlaim's contemporary commentary. In a negative review of Israel and Palestine,he described it as having an anti-Israel and pro-Arab bias,asserting that Shlaim distorted records to give a one-sided portrayal of history. [21] Morris also wrote a negative review of Three Worlds:Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. [22]
In 2006,Shlaim was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA),the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [8] [23]
On 27 September 2017,Shlaim was awarded the British Academy Medal "for lifetime achievement". [24]
Zionist political violence refers to acts of violence or terrorism committed by Zionists in support of establishing and maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine. These actions have been carried out by individuals, paramilitary groups, and the Israeli government, from the early 20th century to the present day, as part of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–1949 Palestine war and the Six-Day War. Most Palestinian refugees live in or near 68 Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2019 more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees were registered with the United Nations.
Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein was the ruler of Jordan from 11 April 1921 until his assassination in 1951. He was the Emir of Transjordan, a British protectorate, until 25 May 1946, after which he was king of an independent Jordan. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the royal family of Jordan since 1921, Abdullah was a 38th-generation direct descendant of Muhammad.
Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and unarmed soldiers.
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian. He was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel. Morris was initially associated with the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians", a term he coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan. Scholars have perceived an ideological shift in Morris's work and a departure from the critical scholarship of his New Historian colleagues starting around 2000 during the Second Intifada.
Plan Dalet was a Zionist military plan executed in the civil war phase of the 1948 Palestine war for the conquest of territory in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. The plan was requested by the Jewish Agency leader and later first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, and developed by the Haganah and finalized on March 10, 1948. Historians describe Plan Dalet, in which Zionist forces shifted to an offensive strategy, as the beginning of a new phase in the 1948 Palestine war.
The 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine was the first phase of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. It broke out after the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine.
Yoav Gelber is a professor of history at the University of Haifa, and was formerly a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
During the 1948 Palestine war in which the State of Israel was established, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs or 85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. The causes for this mass displacement is a matter of great controversy among historians, journalists, and commentators.
Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari was a Nazareth-born Palestinian who studied law in Jerusalem, graduating in 1939. Al-Hawari served in the British Mandate administration as chief interpreter in the district court of Jaffa and chairman of the Association of Government second-division officers. He was transferred to Haifa where he resigned his government position in 1942. On his resignation, he returned to practicing law in Jaffa. Al-Hawari started his career as a devoted follower of Amin al-Husseini but broke with the influential Husseini family in the early 1940s. Muhammad Nimr Al-Hawari, during the termination of the British mandate, formed and commanded al-Najjada, a paramilitary armed movement. Al-Hawari was in command of the militia in the defence of Jaffa until he fled in the mass exodus of Palestinians in late December 1947. Al-Hawari fled from Jaffa to Ramallah in December 1947. Al-Hawari together with ‘Aziz Shihada a lawyer from Ramallah opened an office in the West Bank for refugee affairs. Hawari returned to Palestine and years later became judge in the District Court of Nazareth.
Ezra Danin was the head of the Arab section of the SHAI, the intelligence arm of the Haganah, Israeli politician and an orange grower. Danin specialized in Arab affairs.
The 1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle, was the expulsion of 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israeli troops captured the towns in July that year. The military action occurred within the context of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The operation included the events of the Lydda Massacre and the Lydda Death March. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine, were subsequently transformed into predominantly Jewish areas in the new State of Israel, known as Lod and Ramla.
Naharayim, historically the Jisr Majami area, is the area where the Yarmouk River flows into the Jordan River. It was the site of the "First Jordan Hydro-Electric Power House", constructed between 1927–33, and located near an ancient Roman bridge known as Jisr Majami. The site was named by the Palestine Electric Company which assigned "proper names" to the "different quarters of our Jordan Works", one of these being the "works as a whole including the labour camp" to be called "Naharaim", and another being the site of the "Power House and the adjoining staff quarters, offices" to be called Tel Or. Most of the plant was situated in the Emirate of Transjordan and stretched from the northern canal near the Ashdot Ya'akov in Northern Mandatory Palestine to the Jisr el-Majami in the south.
In the 1948 Palestine war more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine's Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of Israel, by its military. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba. Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning. Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a book authored by New Historian Ilan Pappé and published in 2006 by Oneworld Publications. The book is about the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, which Pappe argues was the result of ethnic cleansing.
The Army of the Holy War or Holy War Army was a Palestinian Arab irregular force in the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and Hasan Salama. The force has been described as Husayni's "personal" army. The Arab League set up the Arab Salvation Army as a counter to the Army of the Holy War while, in practice, the Arab governments prevented thousands of volunteers from joining either force.
The Arab Liberation Army, also translated as Arab Salvation Army or Arab Rescue Army (ARA), was an army of volunteers from Arab countries led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji. It fought on the Arab side in the 1948 Palestine war and was set up by the Arab League as a counter to the Arab High Committee's Holy War Army, but in fact, the League and Arab governments prevented thousands from joining either force.
The New Historians are a loosely defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of Israeli history, including Israel's role in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and Arab willingness to discuss peace. The term was coined in 1988 by Benny Morris, one of the leading New Historians. According to Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, the New Historians have sought to advance the peace process in the region.
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.
Shlaim's conjecture of a deliberate and pre-meditated anti-Palestinian "collusion" does not stand up to a critical examination. The documentary evidence on the development of contacts between Israel and Jordan before, during and after the war unequivocally refutes Shlaim's conclusions. If there was any collusion against the Palestinians in 1948, it was not concocted by Israel and Abdullah but rather, by Britain and Transjordan. The outcomes reveal that the British acquiescence to a Transjordanian takeover of Arab Palestine was merely a choice by default rather than a plot.