Avi Shlaim

Avi Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Iraqi-born British/Israeli historian. He is a 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, a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.

Biography

Avraham (Avi) 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 Said. After a grenade was thrown into the central synagogue in Baghdad 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 cross the border illegally on a mule, while Shlaim, his mother and sisters flew to Cyprus, reuniting in Israel.

Shlaim left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school. He returned to Israel in the mid-60s 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.

He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics, and his PhD from the University of Reading. He was a Lecturer, then Reader, in politics at the University of Reading from 1970-87.

Career

Shlaim taught International Relations at Reading University, specializing 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. 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 2003-6. In 2006, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Shlaim served as an outside examiner on the doctoral thesis of Ilan Pappe, 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."

He is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, and signed an open letter to that paper in January 2009 condemning Israel's military intervention in Gaza.

Criticism

Josef Heller and Yehoshua Porath have stated that Shlaim "misleads his readers with arguments that Israel had missed the opportunity for peace whilst the Arabs are strictly peace seekers".

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.

Published works

• Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (winner of the 1988 Political Studies Association's W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize)
• The Politics of Partition (1990 and 1998)
• War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995)
• The Cold War and the Middle East (co-editor, 1997)
• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2001)
• Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007)
• Israel and Palestine (2009)

See also

• Benny Morris

External links

• Oxford home page
• Interview. The Nation, June 28, 2004.
• 2009 Interview on Israli-Palestinian conflict inc. video, audio and text transcript.
• Video of discussion between Avi Shlaim and Shlomo Sand. Chaired by Jacqueline Rose at the Frontline Club, London, November 12, 2009
• The Balfour Declaration And its Consequences. By Avi Shlaim, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, London, I. B. Tauris, 2005, pp. 251–270.