THREE WORLDS

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.