The Three Worlds

Memoirs of an Arab Jew

Author's name: Avi Shlaim

Zionism is a European ideology in origin and scope, with its center and focal point exclusively the European Jewish community. Arab Jews, and non-European Jews in general, were not on its map or even on its priority list. Their subsequent influx to Palestine was purely instrumental, driven by the need for human capital. There was resentment and hesitation in the racist debates among Zionist and Ashkenazi elites regarding the consequences of influencing Eastern Jews, who were perceived as bringing backwardness and disease with them. The deepest wound in the collective memory of Iraqi Jews after their displacement remains the Israeli authorities' spraying of pesticides upon landing on the planes transporting them from Iraq.

Avi Shlaim, the author of this important book, was a five-year-old child when his family immigrated to Palestine. His name was not Avi then, but Avraham. Iraqi Jews, and Arabs and Eastern Jews in general, paid a heavy price after their displacement to Israel. In addition to losing their homeland, homes, and property, they had to adapt to a racist society governed by a hierarchy, at the top of which was European culture, which disdainfully treated their culture, customs, and rituals. The price of belonging and integration was a painful cultural alienation, which began with a change of names and required the loss or obliteration of memory, the silencing of its voices, and the assimilation of the values ​​of the new society. This assimilation could sometimes lead to self-loathing, feelings of shame, and the denial of a past that conflicted with the European Zionist narrative that structured the national myth and its denial. This stolen land was not a "promised paradise" for Arab and Eastern Jews, as it was for Europeans fleeing the Holocaust and a West that continued to hate and persecute them ferociously, exporting its racism to our countries and culture, upon which it now projects its deep-rooted racism.