Avi Shlaim

Avi Shlaim FBA (Hebrew: אבי שליים, Arabic: أفي شلايم; born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent. He is one of Israel's "New Historians", a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.

Born in 1945, his family emigrated to Israel in 1951 during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. He later moved to England in 1966 and studied and taught international relations at the University of Reading. He began studying the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 1982 when 1948 Arab–Israeli War archives where unclassified by the Israeli government, he has an extensive bibliography and contributed to various Newspapers and publishers.

Shlaim’s scholarship has been praised by historians and commentators, including Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris and Anne Irfan, especially for his use of newly available sources and reinterpretation of Israeli history, Zionism and Palestine. Others like Yoav Gelber, Joseph Heller and Efraim Karsh say his conclusions reflect political bias that leads to flaws in his methodology and interpretation.

Shlaim was born in 1945 in Baghdad, Kingdom of Iraq, into a wealthy non-Zionist Jewish family that considered itself part of the Arab world, speaking only Arabic at home. They considered themselves Iraqi first, then Jews.

In the 1930s, the situation of the Jews in Iraq deteriorated, with the rise of nationalisms in Arab countries and concomitant growth of Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism. Persecution of Jews was exacerbated after the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 and Israel's independence. In 1951, during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Shlaim's family, along with most of Iraq's Jews, registered to emigrate to Israel and forfeit their Iraqi citizenship. The family lost all their property and emigrated to Israel.

Shlaim grew up in Ramat Gan. He left Israel for England at age 16 to study at a Jewish school. He returned to Israel in 1964 to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, serving for two years as a communications instructor, then moved back to England in 1966 to read history at Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained his BA degree in 1969. He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Reading. He was a lecturer and reader in politics in the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987.

He 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 the United Kingdom since 1966, and holds dual British and Israeli nationality.

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. He was Alastair Buchan Reader in international relations at Oxford from 1987 to 1996 and director of graduate studies in that subject in 1993–1995 and 1998–2001. He held a British Academy research readership in 1995–97 and a research professorship in 2003–2006.