Avi Shlaim

Avraham "Avi" Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Iraqi-born British/Israeli historian. He is emeritus professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy. Shlaim is considered 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]

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 Israel's War of Independence in 1948. In 1951 Shlaim's father was one of 100,000 Jews who registered to leave the country and surrender their citizenship. A subsequent law ruled that all those who left forfeited all rights, including property rights. The Shlaim family lost all their assets. His father crossed the border illegally on a mule, while Shlaim, his mother and sisters flew to Cyprus, reuniting in Israel.[3]

Shlaim left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school.[3][4] He returned to Israel in the mid-1960s to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, then moved back to England in 1966 to read history at Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained his MA and 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 England ever since, and holds dual British and Israeli nationality.[5]

He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics, and his PhD from the University of Reading.[6] He was a lecturer, then reader, in politics at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987.[7]

Career

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 the Alastair Buchan Reader in International Relations at Oxford from 1987 to 1996, and the Director of Graduate Studies in that subject in 1993–1995 and 1998–2001. In 1995–97, he held a British Academy Research Readership in 1995–97, a Research Professorship in 2003–2006. In 2006, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.[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.[8]

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. [9]

Criticism

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".[10][11]

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.[12]

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.[13] Marc Lynch however wrote that "the voluminous evidence in [Gelber's] book does not allow so conclusive a verdict".[14]

Published works

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. 1 2 3 4 5 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. ↑ 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.
  6. ↑ Governing Body Fellows
  7. 1 2 Professor Avi Shlaim, University of Oxford.
  8. ↑ "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.
  9. ↑ 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
  10. ↑ Joseph Heller; Yehoshua Porat (18 August 2005). "The wonders of the new history". Haaretz. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  11. ↑ Joseph Heller (2000). The Birth of Israel, 1945–1949: Ben-Gurion and His Critics. University Press of Florida. p. 306. ISBN 0813017327.
  12. ↑ "'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
  13. ↑ Yoav Gelber (July 2009). "The Israeli-Arab War of 1948 : The Collusion That Never Was". http://www.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. External link in |website= (help)
  14. ↑ Marc Lynch (2005). "Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue, 1948-1953: Cooperation, Conspiracy, or Collusion? by Yoav Gelber". Middle East Journal 59 (2): 329–330.

External links

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