Avi Shlaim

Origins and early life

Avi Shlaim was born on 31 October 1945 in Baghdad, into a prosperous Iraqi Jewish family of the community that had lived in Mesopotamia since the Babylonian exile — a family he himself calls Arab-Jews. In 1950, when he was five, the family was uprooted with the hundred and thirty thousand Jews of Iraq who left for Israel in the exodus of 1950-51, and he grew up in Ramat Gan, served in the Israeli army, and went on to Cambridge and to Oxford, where he is emeritus professor of international relations at St Antony's College.

Work and career

He became one of the 'New Historians' — the Israeli scholars who, from the late 1980s, reread the archives of 1948 against the founding narrative — and his book The Iron Wall (2000), a history of Israel's relations with the Arab world, is among the most read and most contested works on the subject. This fiche records that his sharply critical positions on Israeli policy make him a controversial figure, and states it as fact rather than judgment.

In 2023 he returned to his beginnings with Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, a book of the year in the British press, telling the story of a Jewish childhood in Baghdad, the exile, and the life between Iraq, Israel and Britain.