“By the time we arrived in Israel in the early 1950s, the Arabs were the enemy, and Arabic was considered the language of the enemy. I was hugely embarrassed when my father spoke to me in Arabic in the street in front of my friends because I internalized the values of my new society. Everything Arab was considered hostile, foreign, alien, and primitive. What I didn’t understand at the time is that we don’t choose our identity for ourselves. I had a clear identity when I arrived in Israel at age five: I was an Arab Jew. But our identities aren’t informed just by us or by forces that are benign, but sometimes by other forces that are not so benign, as in this case, Zionism. Zionism is about erasing my Arab Jewish identity and giving me a new identity as a new Israeli, with which I’ve never felt really comfortable with.
At school, I learned a lot about Jewish history in Europe and about the Holocaust, but I was never told anything about the history of the Jews in the Arab lands. The American Jewish historian Salo Baron coined the phrase the “lachrymose version of Jewish history.” That is to say, Jewish history is a never-ending chain of suffering, victimhood, persecution, discrimination, and violence culminating in the Holocaust. I’m prepared for argument’s sake to concede that the lachrymose version of Jewish history fits the history of the Jews in Europe, but I deny that it fits the history of the Jews in the Middle East.
What happened in Israel was that the Eurocentric version of history—the lachrymose version—was imposed on our history. Our history was erased, and we were regarded as victims of eternal Arab antisemitism.
It’s this master Zionist narrative that I challenge throughout my book.
Nationalism is a very powerful and negative, divisive force. Patriotism is different: it’s love of your country. But for nationalism, you have to have an enemy, and Israel always had enemies. And it was always nationalistic—never as nationalistic as it is today with the present government. I used to ask my students to assess the relative weight of socialism and nationalism in the making of modern Israel. The answer was that socialism was a force, but nationalism was a much more powerful force and always overrode or triumphed over socialism.
Zionism was never interested in the Jews of the Middle East, until the Holocaust. The Holocaust removed the main reservoir of population for the Jewish state to be. It was only after the Holocaust that the Zionist leaders began to look for Jews wherever they could find them, including the Middle East. They looked down on those Jews. They thought that they were human material of an inferior kind. But now, the overriding priority for the state of Israel after 1948 was immigration—increasing the population. That’s when they became seriously interested in the Jews of the Arab and Islamic world.”
And here is where Shlaim gets stuck and does not break with his past affinity to Zionism:
“I wouldn’t so much describe myself as an anti-Zionist as a post-Zionist, because by 1967, there was a viable, secure Jewish state, and Zionism was a success story. It’s achieved its aims. It’s the occupation that has changed everything and has undermined the foundations of Israeli democracy.”
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