Avi Shlaim

Avraham "Avi" Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli-British historian, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and fellow of the British Academy. He is one of Israel's New Historians,[1] a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.[2]

Avi Shlaim
Born (1945-10-31) 31 October 1945
Baghdad, Iraq
NationalityIsraeli
CitizenshipIsraeli-British
Alma materJesus College, Cambridge
London School of Economics
University of Reading
Known forOne of Israel's "New Historians"
Scientific career
Institutions

Biography

Shlaim was born to wealthy Jewish parents in Baghdad, Iraq. The family lived in a mansion with ten servants. His father was an importer of building materials with ties to the Iraqi leadership, including then-prime minister Nuri al-Said.[3]

The Iraqi Jews' situation became problematic with the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the resulting persecution of the Jewish population by the Iraqi government. In 1951, during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Shlaim's family, along with most Iraqi Jews, registered to emigrate to Israel and forfeit their Iraqi citizenship. A subsequent law ruled that all those who left forfeited all rights, including property rights. The Shlaim family lost all their property. His father crossed the border illegally on a mule, while Shlaim, his mother and sisters flew to Cyprus and from there were airlifted to Israel. The family reunited in Israel.[3]

Shlaim grew up in Ramat Gan. He left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school.[3][4] 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.[5] He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Reading.[6] He was a Lecturer and Reader in Politics in the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987.[7]

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.[8]

Career
Shlaim addressing the Oxford Theology Society

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.[3] 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.[7]

Shlaim served as an outside examiner on the doctoral thesis of Ilan Pappé, another notable New Historian. Shlaim's approach to the study of history is informed by his belief that, "[t]he job of the historian is to judge".[3]

He 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.[9]

Writing in the Spectator, Shlaim dubbed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as 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.[10]

Shlaim is a member of the UK Labour Party.[11] In August 2015, he was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's association with alleged antisemites.[12]

Criticism

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".[13][14]

In a 2012 article in the academic journal Shofar, Shai Afsai criticised Shlaim for repeating a story "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man", for which Afsai could not trace an original source, in his 2001 book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.[15]

Fellow New historian Benny Morris has harshly criticized Shlaim for what he claims is Shlaim's anti-Israel and pro-Arab bias. Morris accused Shlaim of consistently portraying Palestinian Arabs as the victims and their cause as righteous while vilifying the Zionist cause and Israel, and of distorting and omitting crucial information to give a one-sided portrayal of history. He referred to Shlaim's work as "derisionist history" and characterized it as full of "careless and inflammatory hyperbole" against Israel while being "mealy-mouthed, hesitant, disingenuous, and laudatory" toward the Arabs.[16]

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.[17] Marc Lynch however wrote that "the voluminous evidence in [Gelber's] book does not allow so conclusive a verdict".[18]

Honours

In 2006, Shlaim was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[7][19]

On 27 September 2017, Shlaim was awarded the British Academy Medal "for lifetime achievement".[20]

Published works
  • Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (winner of the 1988 Political Studies Association's W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize)
  • The Politics of Partition (1990 and 1998)
  • War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995)
  • The Cold War and the Middle East (co-editor, 1997)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001)
  • Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (London: Allen Lane, 2007)
  • Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London: Verso Books, 2009)

See also

References
  1. Ethan Bronner (14 November 1999). "Israel: The Revised Edition: Two historians offer re-examinations of the Zionist–Arab conflict". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 March 2014. Review of The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim and Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, with links to the first chapters of each.
  2. Morris, Benny. "The New Historiography" in Morris, Benny. (ed) Making Israel. 1987, pp. 11–28.
  3. Rapaport, Meron (11 August 2005). "No peaceful solution". Haaretz Friday Supplement.
  4. Shlaim, Avi (7 January 2009). "How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  5. Profile: Avi Shlaim University of Oxford
  6. Governing Body Fellows
  7. Professor Avi Shlaim Archived 27 May 2007 at the Wayback Machine, University of Oxford.
  8. Avi Shlaim: "And for the last forty years, I have lived in Britain, and I teach at Oxford" in "It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There" — World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenur. Shlaim's interview; democracynow.org, 9 May 2007, accessed 23 March 2014.
  9. "Growing outrage at the killings in Gaza". The Guardian. 16 January 2009. Retrieved 23 March 2014.. Letter to the editor signed by over 300 academics, writers, and others.
  10. Shlaim, Avi. "An Israeli spring? Rejecting the prospect of greater democracy in the Arab world could put the Jewish state at risk." Spectator 25 Feb. 2012
  11. "Censorship battle and an antisemitic charge cause anger". The Guardian. 15 October 2017. Retrieved 1 July 2018.
  12. Dysch, Marcus (18 August 2015). "Anti-Israel activists attack JC for challenging Jeremy Corbyn". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 7 April 2017.
  13. Joseph Heller; Yehoshua Porat (18 August 2005). "The wonders of the new history". Haaretz. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  14. Joseph Heller (2000). The Birth of Israel, 1945–1949: Ben-Gurion and His Critics. University Press of Florida. p. 306. ISBN 0813017327.
  15. "'The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man': Historical Fabrication and an Anti-Zionist Myth", Shai Afsai, Shofar, Vol. 30, No. 3; 2012, pp. 35–61
  16. https://newrepublic.com/article/71480/derisionist-history
  17. Yoav Gelber (July 2009). "The Israeli-Arab War of 1948 : The Collusion That Never Was". jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 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.
  18. Marc Lynch (2005). "Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue, 1948-1953: Cooperation, Conspiracy, or Collusion? by Yoav Gelber". Middle East Journal. 59 (2): 329–330. JSTOR 4330143.
  19. "Professor Avi Shlaim". The British Academy. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
  20. "From Wikipedia to Roman coins: British Academy recognises excellence in the humanities and social sciences". The British Academy. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
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