Avi Shlaim

Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad on 31 October 1945 into a prosperous Jewish family; the family left Iraq for Israel amid the mass emigration of the country’s Jews in the early 1950s, and he grew up there, serving in the Israel Defence Forces before reading history at Jesus College, Cambridge, and taking a master’s degree in international relations at the London School of Economics. He taught politics at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987, then moved to the University of Oxford, where he is emeritus professor of international relations and an emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and received a British Academy Medal for lifetime achievement in 2017.

Shlaim came to prominence as one of Israel’s “New Historians”, the scholars who used declassified archives to revise the received account of 1948. His first book, Collusion Across the Jordan (1988), reconstructed the secret contacts between King Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionist movement before and during the 1948 war; it won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize. The Iron Wall (2000) argued that successive Israeli leaders had spurned real opportunities for peace with the Arab world — a thesis as influential as it was contested — and he later served as external examiner for Ilan Pappé’s doctoral thesis. In his memoir Three Worlds (2023) he reclaimed his own identity as an Arab Jew, recovering the erased world of Iraq’s Jewish community.

Key works

• Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988)
• The Politics of Partition (1990)
• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)
• Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007)
• Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009)
• Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023)

Sources

• Avi Shlaim — University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations
• Avi Shlaim — The Irish Pages Press