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A review by books_ergo_sum
Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim
reflective
4.0
“Palestinians are the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half of their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands.”
Avi Shlaim was born a as Jew in Iraq and moved to Israel as a child. And this memoir was about growing up as an oxymoron (according to Israeli society), aka an Arab Jew.
It was:
▪️ part residential school story (the pressure to erase his Arab language and culture at school and in public),
▪️ part refugee story (they were forced to flee with almost nothing),
▪️ part living as a racialized minority in a white supremacist country story.
The way that European Jews in Israel a) strongly believed in and b) politically entrenched race science about the mental and moral inferiority of “orientals” (Jews from “Asia and Africa” to quote Shlaim)… was just oof. And the way Israeli society viewed itself as both anti-Arab and a home for Jews made Shlaim’s entire existence as an Arab Jew just so freaking complicated.
Plus the way this contrasted with his family’s life in Iraq (where they were accepted, wealthy, privileged, cosmopolitan, had British passports, spoke English and French as well as Arabic). It was just a lot.
This book’s only flaw, for me, with was its tendency to lean into an academic, rather than narrative, tone. Avi Shlaim is an academic historian, so it did make sense. And there was a lot of history debunking myths about the role Israel played in making the Jews of the Arab countries refugees in the first place, which was interesting.
Avi Shlaim was born a as Jew in Iraq and moved to Israel as a child. And this memoir was about growing up as an oxymoron (according to Israeli society), aka an Arab Jew.
It was:
▪️ part residential school story (the pressure to erase his Arab language and culture at school and in public),
▪️ part refugee story (they were forced to flee with almost nothing),
▪️ part living as a racialized minority in a white supremacist country story.
The way that European Jews in Israel a) strongly believed in and b) politically entrenched race science about the mental and moral inferiority of “orientals” (Jews from “Asia and Africa” to quote Shlaim)… was just oof. And the way Israeli society viewed itself as both anti-Arab and a home for Jews made Shlaim’s entire existence as an Arab Jew just so freaking complicated.
Plus the way this contrasted with his family’s life in Iraq (where they were accepted, wealthy, privileged, cosmopolitan, had British passports, spoke English and French as well as Arabic). It was just a lot.
This book’s only flaw, for me, with was its tendency to lean into an academic, rather than narrative, tone. Avi Shlaim is an academic historian, so it did make sense. And there was a lot of history debunking myths about the role Israel played in making the Jews of the Arab countries refugees in the first place, which was interesting.