Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 2 October 2026
Avi Shlaim – an Arab-Jew speaks
In my book Conquest or Leaven, I highlight Jewish Arabs as those from amongst whom one might find voices who shed a different light on the Middle East. At eighty, Avi Shlaim remains an erudite and outspoken voice from this community, a scholar and expert on Palestine/Israel. Born in Iraq, schooled in Israel, educated in England, Shlaim is a renown specialist on the history of the Middle East. He has written many studies, and among them: Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988), War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995), The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1999), Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007), and Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine (2025).
Recently, Shlaim has published his fascinating autobiography, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023). It is about this book that Shlaim converses with Mohammed Hashem of Middle East Eye. He remembers growing up in Baghdad, evoking a very different time in relations between Jews and Muslims, when Jews were integrated into the Arab world.
Shlaim says in this interview, “My life has been a journey from being a Zionist to a non-Zionist to an anti-Zionist, and in the last three years, during the war in Gaza, a fierce anti-Zionist and a very outspoken one.”
In the final part of the interview, Shlaim confesses that he was wrong about the Oslo Accords and the possibility of a two-state solution. He says that Israel used these accords to repackage the occupation. He says, “I have given up on a two-state solution and I now advocate the only democratic solution to this conflict which is one state, from the river to the sea, with equal rights for all people who live there.”
View the interview here: