Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Eugene Rogan, and as Director of the Middle East Centre,
it is my tremendous pleasure to welcome you to the, wait for it, 45th George Antonius Memorial Lecture.
Since the first Antonius given in 1976 by the great Islamic historian George Makdisi,
this lecture has served as the culminating event for the Middle East Centre's academic year.
An opportunity to gather the broader Middle East Centre family.
I'm delighted to see so many of our current students here.
And so many of their predecessors our alumni, veterans of many past Antonius lectures.
We're honoured to have so many of the Centre's amazing Advisory Board members who are here for a meeting before today's lecture.
We are so grateful to you for the support and the vote of confidence that you show us.
It's great to welcome colleagues from across St Antony's College, not just from the Middle East Centre and across the great University of Oxford.
Wonderful to welcome so many colleagues who contribute to our collective work in promoting knowledge and understanding of the Middle East in the University.
And welcome to the community of the City of Oxford.
And to those of you who will come from further afield, from London and from its suburbs, which as far as I can tell, extend as far as Paris.[Audience laughter]
Over the years, we have heard from some of the greatest scholars, thinkers and great artists from across our region and from across the world.
Magdi Wahba and Mahmud Manzalaoui,
Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Edward Said, Anthony Parsons and Ghassan Tueini, Zaha Hadid and Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.
There's 45 names to go through. I'll stop there.[Audience laughter] We have with us tonight several past Antonius speakers.
I'm so glad to welcome Marilyn Booth and Joseph Sassoon, who gave their lectures in 2009 for Marilyn and 2013 for Joseph.
We've had some illustrious cancellations over the years.
Jeremy Bowen was called away in 2011 to cover that region-wide conflagration better known as the Arab Uprising.
And we lost the opportunity here from [name not recognised] whose 2020 lecture was overtaken by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tonight's Antonius is particularly special. For it's being given by one of the Emeritus Fellows of the Middle East Centre.
There is a long tradition of Centre Fellows coming back to give the Antonius, started by our founding Fellow,
Albert Hourani who was actually the second Antonius lecturer. He spoke in 1977, a couple of years before he retired.
Mustafa Badawi gave gave my first Antonius when I was a new faculty member here in 1992.
Since then, we have seen Roger Owen return from Harvard to give the 1998 Lecture.
And Derek Hopwood, the 2001 Antonius.
But it's been over two decades since we had the honour of welcoming one of the Centre's own to the podium to give the Antonius.
Of all my colleagues past and present, I particularly like chairing Avi
Shlaim. I'm never entirely in control of the proceedings and I've never sure quite what will happen next.
I hope you're catching the frisson. [Audience laughter]
Avi Shlaim moved to Oxford from Reading to take up the Alistair Buchanan readership
in 1987,
when he was on the cusp of gaining global recognition as one of the handful of Israeli new historians following the publication of his monumental study,
"Collusion Across the Jordan". It would be no exaggeration to say that "Collusion" propelled Professor Shlaim from relative obscurity.
I'd like a show of hands for those of you who might have read his earlier work, such as "The EEC,
for those of you too young to remember that the European Economic Community, now "The EEC and the Mediterranean Countries" in 1976.
"British Foreign Secretaries since 1945",
or "The United States and the Berlin Blockade", which came out in 1978, well you can see even at that point with a book a year, he was already prolific.
But propelled from relative obscurity to become one of the most prominent British public intellectuals at work on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since the publication of "Collusion", Professor Shlaim has published a string of influential books ranging from works of synthesis,
like his 1995 "War and Peace in the Middle East", edited works like "The War for Palestine, Rewriting the History of 1948" and "The 1967 Arab-Israeli War",
and the research based works that have truly established his enduring contribution,
"The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World" first issued in 2000 and later expanded and reissued in 2014,
and "The Lion of Jordan King Hussein's Life in War and Peace", which came out in 2007.
Tonight, we celebrate the publication of a new book by Avi Shlaim. Part autobiography,
part family history, part essay on the contested identity of the Arab Jew.
As it says on the front cover, "Three Worlds" is the best book that I've read all year. [Audience laughter]
And like you I am impatient to hear from Professor Shlaim, Fellow of the British Academy,
to tell us more. His title tonight: "Zionism,
and the Jews of Iraq, A personal Perspective". Would you please join me in giving a great George Anthonius welcome to Avi Shlaim. [Audience clapping]
Thank you, Professor Rogan for this very courteous introduction.
The last time I spoke at the Middle East Centre and you introduced me, you were much more curt, you said "The speaker today is Professor Shlaim,
so put on your seat belts and prepare for the ride". [Audience laughter]
It's true. Today you are not going to need any seat belts.
Now today is a very special occasion for two reasons.
One is already mentioned by Eugene: It's the annual and prestigious George Antonius Lecture.
It's a great honour and a privilege to be invited by the Fellows of the Middle East Centre to give this year's
George Antonius Lecture.
I'm a great admirer of George Antonius. His 1938 book, "The Arab Awakenings" generated an ongoing debate over the origins of Arab nationalism,
the significance of the Arab Revolt of 1916, the British machinations during and after World War One.
For me. the book was an eye opener about Britain's record as the holder of the mandate for Palestine.
All my own archival research only confirmed and reinforced George Antonius's critique of British policy in Palestine.
My work could be read as footnotes to "The Arab Awakening".
For me, the history of the British mandate in Palestine is the history of how Britain stole Palestine from the Palestinians and gave it to the Zionists.
Maybe you do need your seat belts afterall. [Audience laughter] Anyway I'm grateful for the opportunity to pay homage to a great champion of justice for the Palestinians.
Secondly, this is a family occasion. My own immediate family and the
broader Middle East Centre family. My wife
Gwyn, who is sitting in the front row is both my harshest critic and the most constructive and supportive of partners.
She helped me in countless ways during the four or five years that it took me to complete this modest memoir.
I'm also grateful to our daughter Tamar,
who is a publisher by profession for her thoughtful suggestions, for her practical help, for the long conversations we had during the writing of this book.
It was her idea to produce a podcast that helped both of us to understand better our Iraqi-Jewish-Israeli-British identity.
As I write in the book, my father after we moved to Israel, was completely silent. Tamar's father never stops talking. [Audience laughter]
Our story, to borrow a pretentious phrase,
from my friend, Ella Shohat
the cultural critic is the story of, quote, "changing the mystic landscapes and the emotional cartography of displacement"
"changing the mystic landscapes and the emotional cartography of displacement".
An episode involving Tamar illustrates the changing linguistic landscapes of our lands.
One day I went to collect Tamar from kindergarten and I overheard her say to a little girl
kan yaman kan [Arabic], which means "Once upon a time" in Arabic, and the little girl said to her "That's fascinating". [Audience laughter]
Second there is the wider Middle East Centre family. First and foremost there is Eugene Rogan, my benign boss, my colleague and my friend.
We started reading and commenting on each other's work
when he was writing "The Arabs, A History", which has since then become a classic
and I was working on my biography of King Hussein of Jordan.
Eugene and I share a birthday, the 31st of October.
We are both Halloween babies. [Audience laughter] And I am 15 years older than Eugene
but he is much wiser than I am, and he has given me a lot of really good advice along the years.
Not least in connection with this particular book. Then there are others in the Middle East Centre. There is the Middle East Centre librarian MariaLuisa
Langella, a very remarkable woman.
She's Italian, she knows Hebrew and Arabic.
Then she wrote a Ph.D. thesis in French, on the literature of Iraqi Jews.
She and the other librarian, Haifa Jajjawi, my fellow Iraqi dealt with my many requests promptly, efficiently and with good cheer. So did
Caroline Davis and so did Debbie Usher, the Archivist.
Professor Neil Ketchley, professor of politics at the Middle East Centre designed the maps.
My deep appreciation goes to the whole of the team in Oneworld.
an excellent publishing house. And to Novin Doostdar
and Juliet Mabey, the dynamic duo who own and run this excellent publishing house.
My very special thanks go to
my editor Sam Carter. Sam, is Rida here? She is. Sam Carter the editor and and his assistant Rida Vaquas. They edited the manuscript from start to finish.
Not once, not twice but three times. They improved me imeasurably in content and style.
But they had different priorities. Sam was only interested in the central character and he wanted a short, concise text.
And he said that any episode which isn't relevant directly to the central character should be left out. And if I had followed his advice
the book would be about a quarter of its length [Audience laughter]. And Rida was not very interested in the central character.
But she was most interested and well-informed about the political backdrop.
So she was always asking me to elaborate on obscure things like the Iraqi Communist Party [Audience laughter] and I was very happy to oblige.
You'll be relieved to know that this is the end,
this concludes what I like to call the end of the jumble sale, the speech at the end of the jumble sale.
This is when the headmaster thanks all those involved in organising the jumble sale. [Audience laughter]
I now want to say a few words about the book itself.
The three worlds of the title are Baghdad, where I lived up to the age of five.
Ramat Gan in Israel, where I lived from the age where I went to school from the age of 5 to 15 and London,
where I went to school from the age of 16 to 18.
The book only goes up to the age of 18, but we then epilogue.
And Gwyn, who read the manuscript chapter by chapter as I was writing
it told me one day when she read Chapter Five, "I'm on chapter five and you haven't been born yet". [Audience laughter]
I hesitated before embarking on this project.
I was, I didn't know how to write about myself, it was easy to write about other people, about King Hussein for example.
But one day I read a wonderful book by Orit Bashkin, an the Israeli historian in Chicago.
The book is called "New Babylonians: A History of the Jews in Modern Iraq".
It's a very informative and a very empathetic to the Jews of Iraq,
and it gave me the idea of not just telling my story, but putting my story in the wider context of family history,
and putting the family history in the wider context of the Jewish community in Iraq and going even further
afield to reflect about Iraqi history and British colonialism in Iraq after the First World War.
Another source of inspiration was Ella Shohat, an Iraqi Israeli who is now an imminent
professor at NYU. She published a book, a collection of essays under the title "On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements.
The book is about the pivotal concept of the Arab Jew.
She also drew parallels between the experience of the Palestinians of displacement from Palestine and the displacement of the Jews from Iraq.
The notion of an Arab-Jew is very controversial in Israel.
Israelis don't like the term. You can be French-Jew, an Italian-Jew,
a Romanian-Jew, any kind of Jew. You can even be German-Jew despite the association with the Holocaust.
But if you say I'm an Arab-Jew, people immediately react against it.
They say that's a contradiction in terms, that's an impossibility,
it's an ontological impossibility, either you are Jewish, in which case you cannot be an Arab or you are an Arab, in which case you cannot be a Jew.
But I beg to differ. I know of no better description of my initial identity than that of an Arab-Jew.
This brings me to the notion of identity.
My academic discipline in this university is international relations.
International relations doesn't deal with individual identity.
And I very naively used to think we are given one identity
and off we go. That's all there is to it. But when I started writing this book, I realised that identity is a much more complex and fluid
phenomenon and moreoever we don't become on our own, our identity.
Other forces outside in society shape our identity.
And in my case, and are not necessarily benign,
in my case it was Zionism which tried to erase my Arab identity and provenance, and it turns on me
a new identity as a new Israeli, which I never ever felt comfortable.
I used to be ashamed of being an Iraqi.
In fact, I had an inferiority complex which refined my entire relationship with Israeli society. Today
I'm very proud to be an Iraqi,
I am very proud of my Iraqi and Arab origins.
As a student of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I also see the advantage of having lived in an Arab society, in an Arab country.
It's a name only to transcend national stereotypes.
It enabled me to see Arabs not just as the enemy, but as a people, as a sensitive, a sensitive and proud people.
For my family, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea.
We experienced it. We touched it. My mother Mas'uda Obadiah or Saida for short
is the main source of the information for our life in Iraq and the hero of the memoir.
Over the four or five years that I took to write this book
I kept interviewing her relentlessly and taking detailed notes, and I incorporated a lot of the things that she told me into the narrative.
She used to wax lyrical about the wonderful
Muslim friends that we had in Baghdad. One day I said to her
"Did you have any Zionist friends?" And she looked at me as if it was a very strange question.
She said to me, "No, Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing,
it's nothing to do with us". The whole point of this book is to use my family history to illustrate a much bigger
story, the story of the Jewish community in Baghdad in the first half of the 20th century,
the exodus, or rather the uprooting
of this community after the 1948 war.
Individual experience over the exodus varied, but for the community as a whole, the experience was like that of a tree being pulled up by the roots.
The book seeks to recover and to animate the vibrant Jewish civilisation of the Near East,
a civilisation that was blown away by, in the 20th century, by the cold winds of nationalism.
I try to achieve this by telling a family story rather than by through academic research.
We were an upper middle class family.
My father, Yusef, was a very successful merchant with a high social status.
My mother Saida went to the Alliance School, Alliance Isralite Universelle. After the age of 17
when she was forced to marry my father, who was a lot older than her.
She received a very good education. The teaching language,
the medium of teaching was French, but they also taught in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
My mother died two years ago, aged 96, in Ramadan.
If anyone dared suggest that she was dementing she would declaim Archimedes Law in French. [Audience laughter]
She remembered a visit by King Faisal I to her school accompanied by the Chief Rabbi.
Faisal I embraced the Jews in his efforts to build a new nation,
one Iraqi nation, and the Jews made a contribution, made a contribution at every level in the building of modern Iraq.
Both of my parents had deep roots in Iraq and they loved the country.
We were well integrated into Iraqi society.
Of all the Jewish communities in the Middle East, the Iraqi one was the most prosperous,
the most successful, and the best integrated into the local society.
The book revolves around the contented life
that we led in Baghdad alongside Muslims and Christians,
the anguish and pain of displacement, the problems of adjusting to a new life in the Promised Land,
my poor performance at school in Israel, in my parents decision to send me to school in England, in the three mostly unhappy
years that I spent in school in London, which for me was a second exile in the changing linguistic landscape.
In Baghdad we were Arab Jews,
we spoke Arabic and only Arabic at home. Our social customs and lifestyle were Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely middle eastern,
my parents' music was a very attractive blend of Jewish and Arabic music.
We were Iraqis because religion happened to be Judaism.
We were a minority. One minority among many, one minority likely as it is like the Chaldean Catholics, Assyrians, Armenians, Circassians, Turkomans and so on.
Iraq was a land of pluralism, of religious tolerance and coexistence.
Baghdad was known as the City of Peace. It was also sometimes called the Jewish city.
During the First World War, a third of the population of Iraq was Jewish, and during the Jewish high holidays, the shops and the markets closed.
We have much more in common linguistically and culturally
with our Iraqi compatriots than we had with our European co-religionists.
We did not feel the slightest affinity with
Zionism or Israel. Our migration to Zion was
one of necessity not one of choice or ideological reference.
We were forcibly conscripted into the Zionist project.
Aliyah is a term that is used for migration to Israel.
and it means "assent". In our case it was not Aliyah, the move to Israel involved Yerida, which is "descent".
Not only did we lose our wealth, our property, our pocessions, but also our strong sense of identity
as proud Iraqi Jews belong to a journey to the margins of Israeli society.
Both of my grandmothers came with us to Israel. For them, it was deeply traumatic, the move
and they spoke with great nostalgia about the old country.
They spoke about Iraqi as jana mal allah, the Garden of Eden.
Psalm 137 talks about the Jewish exile in Babylon two-and-a-half millenia ago and it goes "By the rivers of Babylon
there we sat and there we wept as we remembered Zion.
For my grandmothers, it was the other way around, by the rivers of Zion there we sat and there we wept when we remembered Babylon.
My family's story is thus the corrective to the Zionist master narrative of the history of the Middle East.
This narrative posits endemic and pervasive Muslim and Arab anti-Semitism.
Migration to Israel is attributed to the persecution and prejudice that the Jews are said to have encountered in their country of origin.
One example of this Zionist narrative is Martin Gilbert the Jewish British historian and biographer of Churchill.
His last book was called "In the House of", "In Ishmael's House, A History of the Jews in Muslim Lands".
The book is ambitious. It covers 1400 years from the rise of Islam to the present, until the [inaudible].
But it is little more than a catalogue of Muslim hatred, hostility and violence against Jews. The lens of the book is purposely
eurocentric. Anti-Semitism is said to be the fundamental underlying force which shaped Muslim-Jewish relations.
By filing one horror story after another
Gilbert painted a completely misleading picture.
It was psychologically hardwired to see anti-Semitism everywhere.
The result is a distorted, is a distortion of the history of Muslim-Jewish relations
to serve a Zionist political agenda. To recap
the Zionist narrative, the Jews, Arabs and Jews is congenitally incapable of working together in peace and doomed to permanent discord
and conflict. Zionism is based entirely on the experience of the Jews of Fhrer. It's a movement by European Jews for European Jews.
It's outlook is completely eurocentric. In Europe the Jews were "the other".
The other and therefore Europe had
the "Jewish Question" in inverted commas. Anti-Semitism was a European maladie
and from there it spread to the Middle East. Interestingly, there was no anti-Semitic literature in Arabic,
so anti-Semitic literature had to be translated from European languages [inaudible word], including Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Iraq did not have "the Jewish Question". In Iraq the Jews did not live in ghettos, nor
did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history.
It was not without reason that Mark Mazower, called his history of Europe in the 20th century,
"Dark Continent". It took
Europe much longer than the Arab world, to accept the Jews as equal co-citizens.
In Iraq, to be sure there were stresses and strains but the overall picture was one of cosmopolitanism, peaceful coexistence and fruitful interaction.
The American Jewish historian, Salo Baron coined the phrase "the lachrymose version of Jewish history".
This is Jewish history as a never ending cycle of hatred, hostility, persecution, culminating in the Holocaust.
I am prepared for arguments sake to accept that the lachrymose version of Jewish history applies to Europe.
But I strongly deny that this version of Jewish history applies, or is relevant to the history of the Arab world, of Arab Jews.
There is one episode which is always quoted in support of the Zionist narrative, in support of the claim
of pervasive anti-Semitism, and that is the farhud, the pogrom against the Jews in Iraq,
on the 1st and 2nd of June 1941 when 165 Jews were killed, there were attacks on Jewish houses, Jewish women were raped.
There was a lot of looting of Jewish shops. This was a horrendous pogrom.
But it wasn't representative or typical. It was a one-off pogrom because of very special circumstances.
And I believe that the person largely responsible for the farhud
were not anti-Semites but it was the British ambassador Sir Kinahan Cornwallis.
And I give the reasons for this view in the book.
And my parents hated Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, but they couldn't pronounce his name. [Audience laughter]
So they called him kalb ibn al-kalb [Audience laughter]. About a month before the farhud, Rashid Ali
Rashi Ali Al-Gaylani led the nationalist revolt against the British and expelled the British from the country.
And he was prime minister for a month. During that period, during that month there was no anti-Semitism, there was no persecution of the Jews.
Yesterday there was a book launch for this book in London, and I met a very old Jew.
David Sassoon. He said to me, he was in the farhud and he said there was no persecution of the Jews, and that Rashid Ali was anti-British.
He wasn't pro-Nazi. And my mother confirmed this.
She was 16 years old when she took, she and her brothers took refuge in the American Embassy,
because the British Embassy was not safe. And she had a very leisurely month in the British, in the American Embassy.
But later on in Israel she was defined as a Holocaust survivor. This was reading back from the Holocaust to this pogrom.
And this pogram was treated, the farhud as part of the Nazi plan for the final solution.
So my mother was very pragmatic, used to receive 6000 shekels a year, that's about 1,000
and she had discount of 70% on her council tax and the Jewish custom has it that you don't sell the house of the dead for 11 months.
And when after, after my mother died my sisters and I had to pay the full wack, 100% of the council tax because we were not Holocaust survivors.
My mother told me stories about the farhud and I relate them because most of the accounts are by men, and it was good to have a female gender, a female account of the farhud.
One of the stories was about the Great War peasant, an Iraqi peasant who came for the loot and he
stole from a Jewish store a big radio and he took it to his shack where there was no electricity and he banged on the radio and didn't sing.
So he banged hard on it and he said, "Come on, sing. You sing for the Jews.
Why don't you sing for us". [Audience laughter] My family did not leave Iraq because of a clash of cultures or religious intolerance.
The driver for our displacement was political, not religious or cultural. We were
caught in the crossfire between two secular national movements. Arab nationalism and Jewish nationalism
or Zionism. There is a difference between nationalism and patriotism. For nationalism you need an enemy.
Nationalism is a divisive force. As Marilyn Monroe
wrote in her scrapbook, the trouble with, the trouble with nationalism is that it stops us thinking.
We also suffer the consequences of the systematic Zionist takeover of Palestine.
And the displacement of the Palestinians. In 1948, the Iraqi army participated in a war for Palestine.
After the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Middle East.
Zionism was one of the main reasons for this backlash.
Zionism gave the Jews the territorial base for the first time in two and a half millennia.
It made it possible, for the enemies of the Jews to identify them with the hated Zionist enemy,
the call for the expulsion. What had been a pillar of
Iraqi society was increasingly treated as a fifth column.
Historically, the Zionist movement was not interested in the Jews of the East. They were regarded as inferior
human material. But the Holocaust changed it by removing the main reservoir of people for the future
Jewish state. After the birth of Israel, that became the top priority. The population was only 600,000 Jews.
Six, 600,000 Jews. 6000 Jews had been killed in the war. That's 1% of the Jews, of the Jewish population.
For the first time, the Jews of the East became the vital element in the
Zionist project for building the Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism
was, the second most successful PR success story of the 20th century.
After the Beetles. [Audience laughter] Zionism was a diplomatically sophisticated movement, but ruthless and expansionist at the same time.
Its ultimate aim was an independent Jewish state
to have as much of the territory of Palestine as possible with as few Arabs as possible inside its walls.
The IHRA working definition for anti-Semitism says that it is anti-Semitic to describe the State of Israel as a racist project.
I don't know how else to describe the State of Israel. Zionism moved in stages to realise its ultimate aim.
Stage one was the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. Then stage two was bringing Jews from all four corners of the Earth to take their place.
Including the inferior Jews of the [inaudible word]. This brings me to chapter seven of my book.
Baghdad Bombshell. This is the most explosive chapter in the book and the one that is likely to draw most criticism and pushback from Zionist quarters.
The background is popular hostility to the Jews, an official persecution
with the aftermath of the war for Palestine. As a result of persecution
there was a trickle of illegal Jewish, there was illegal migration by Jews across the border to Iran, and from there to Israel.
In March 1950, the Iraqi government past a law, the Denaturalisation Law that said
any Jew who wants to leave the country has a year to register and then they can leave. A year
later another, a second law was passed by the government of Nuri Al-Said and this said that any Jew who had
legal Iraqi citizenship forfeited all his rights as a citizen and all the property of the Jews and bank accounts were frozen. In 1950 there were around 130,000 Jews in Iraq.
By the end of 1952, only about 10,000 remained. All the rest ended up in Israel.
Five bombs on Jewish sites helped to precipitate the mass exodus.
There were persistent rumours among Iraqis of
my family and relatives of all the Iraqis in Israel that Israel had a hand in these bombs that fuelled their resentment of
the State appeasment. I was very interested in this story. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. In 1981, 82
I spent one sabbatical year in Jerusalem and I spent the whole year in Israel State Archives.
And one day I ordered the two files that said Iraq 1950 and I was told they are closed. And so this was 1982 and
Israel has a third year rule copied from Britain. So I said to the Archivist, "It's fine to release these files".
So he said, "I'll check". And he came back to me and he said they can't be released because there are some Mossad documents in the files and I thought "Ah-ha" [Audience laughter]
And I said, "Well, why don't you remove the Mossad documents and leave the Foreign Ministry documents?"
He said, "I'll check" and the next day he came back and he said, "No, we can't open these files at all."
So I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I couldn't say that they were hiding something. I'm a historian,
so I had to find evidence, hard evidence and many, many years later, I came across this evidence.
I was visiting my mother in Ramadan, and I met a very elderly Jew called
Yaacov Karkoukli who had been in the Zionist underground.
And he told me about the things that they got up, the forging of documents, the paid off bribes and also he told me that one of his colleagues,
Yusef Basri, was responsible for three of the bombs, three out of the five. And he told me that
his controller was a Mossad officer called Max Binnet who was based in Tehran.
These were the days of the Shah where there was a close covert relationship between Iran and Israel.
So the controller gave Karkouk-, er gave Basri the mouse,
the information, the instructions and most importantly the TNT.
Basri was tried, convicted and hanged.
His last words were "Long live the State of Israel".
I said to Karkoukli, "Everything you tell me fits in with what I know, but I need evidence".
So Karkoukli reproduced a one page police report about the interrogation, about the fielties of the Zionist underground, which main [inaudible word]
But it was a plain piece of paper was no lettheard, with no date, with no name.
So I couldn't call it a smoking gun. But I took the investigation a bit further. There is an Iraqi journalist called
Shamil Abdul Qadir and he wrote a book in Arabic which hasn't been translated on the Zionist underground in Iraq and the
Emmigration of the Jews to Israel 1951.
And by very lucky coincidence Haifa Jajjawi the Librarian happened to be friends with Abdul Qadir
and she mediated between us and he confirmed that my police report is genuine and that it's part of a much larger,
larger file, 258 pages file on the interrogation of the Zionist underground's activities and bombs in Baghdad.
So I no longer have any doubt. Israel was involved in the bombing of Jewish sites in Baghdad which precipitated the exodus.
It is not part of my argument that this was the main reason for the exodus.
But it's one factor that needs to be taken into account.
I was going to go on and say this is not a one-off thing but
it's a pattern of false flag operation and another one was the Lavon Affair in 1954 in Cairo, the same Mossad officer, Max Binnet
was the, was in charge of the spy ring, which was rounded up, and he committed suicide in prison.
I now come to the Epilogue of the book. The Epilogue is mostly about my time in the IDF between 1964 and 66
which was the high point of my identification with the Zionist project.
I served loyally and proudly in the idea because in my time it was true to its name, it was the Israel Defence Force.
But after I left, a year after I left to become a History student of Cambridge
everything changed, and it's not because I had left the IDF [Audience laughter], but because of the June 1967 war.
The idea that my little army was transformed into the brutal police force of
the brutal colonial [inaudible word] was the beginning of my disenchantment with the State of Israel.
My memoir is a revisionist track, an alternative history, a challenge to the Zionist narrative about the Jews of the Arab lands.
Which also suggests that the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iraq has been distorted, a diservice to the Zionist agenda.
My experience, that of my family, the whole Jewish community in Iraq suggests that there is nothing inevitable or preordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism.
The old world of Iraq, the jana mal allah of my grandmothers
cannot be rebuilt but remembering the past
can help us envisage a better future.
Zionism has all but destroyed the identity of the Arab Jew but it has left enough of a remnant to warrant
a little optimism about the future. One thing is certain,
without reviving or reimagining the kind of religious tolerance and civilised dialogue between Jews and Arabs that prevail in Iraq before the emergence of
the State of Israel, will not go
we will not be able to go past the present ramparts.
Thank you, thank you for listening. [Audience applause]
Avi, you've shared with us not just insights into a new book.
But you've taken this opportunity to share insights into your own personal life and identity questions,
which made this lecture tonight a more intimate portrait of you
than we, your colleagues, your students, your friends have really had the chance to hear before.
And it's hard for us to imagine the younger you. [Audience laughter] That was not meant to be a punchline. The younger you was struggling
with these conflicting identities,
having to deal with multiple uprootings at the same time that you're dealing with all the challenges of adolescence, as it were.
That in a sense, each world as you were uprooted to move to the next, you'd always be remembered as the identity you left behind.
That in Israel you were an Iraqi, that in Britain you are an Israeli.
That in some way getting in was something that was just out of reach in each of the world that you found yourself going to.
It's very hard for us to imagine the failing schoolboy you were as you went through those difficult transitions,
I understand why that one would have a hard time adapting to many different school curriculums.
But the school boy that your Israeli masters were about to give up on saying that you had no academic
intellectual potential is so far from the image we have of you as the Oxford professor, the brilliant author, and the leading public intellectual of Britain.
So there are things that we learn in reading your book.
Which just don't fit with the friend and mentor that we have known in you and that, you are opening us up to a part of yourself which is not easy.
It is dealt with in great honesty. I don't feel that there's any whitewashing that goes on here.
And in the process, you tell us things about a history and society of the 20th century in Iraq,
in Israel and in Britain that really helped to inform our understanding and discussion.
I think your book very rightly takes its place alongside those who inspired you, by Orit Bashkin and by Ella Shohat.
This is a book that will make a lasting contribution to the discussion around the reappropriation of identity as being Jewish and Arab,
and so in that there is a lasting contribution here that I think will affect millions of readers.
And, you know, things that would surprise all of us as you look through the book.
You've got to see what a dish Avi was, I mean the picture of you with your grandmother in uniform will make anyone swoon, let alone the young Baghdadi prince aged
what? one, two, three sitting there dressed in a bow tie and his finery to just melt any grandmother's heart.
So there was definitely aspects of you there in the most positive sense that I wouldn't have recognised either in Avi. What a dish. [Audience laughter]
Now, I think that I probably raised your expectations unduly.
You will have found that in our exchanges tonight
that Professor Shlaim and I have not shown you any particular fireworks.
That's because those usually take place in the question and answer session, right?
And I could tell you stories about Avi chairing me, where he found
the questions were far more to his liking and began to answer on my behalf. [Audience laughter]
as I found myself asking the audience if there are any further questions that Professor Shlaim [Audience laughter] and other such high jinks that are not going to be part of tonight's version,
because as is the tradition with the Antonius rather than open the floor to your questions
we will all break through here to go and share a drink together and corner our speaker to
try and put the questions directly to him face to face over a glass of something bubbly.
Before we do so, there will be a few of you who managed to secure a copy of the book before they all sold out,
so what I'd like to ask of you, is that I'm going to just quickly show Avi to the table outside the lecture theatre, stay in your seats for just one second so I can get him safely
ensconced there, and then let you mawl him from the other side of the table.
Avi, I'll bring you back to sparkling wine to see you through the ordeal of signing all these books.
But before I take Avi Shlaim away I just think you will agree with me that he has set an ungodly challenge for our 46th
Antonius lecturer. Please give the warmest respect to Avi Shlaim. [Audience applause]
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.