Three Worlds Quotes

“A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“community was placed under surveillance. Young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of further education. The police arrested, tortured, imposed arbitrary fines and extracted money from innocent Jews in what looked like a government-sanctioned campaign of harassment. On top of all of that came the series of bombs, described in the last chapter, that provoked real panic in the Jewish community and compounded the sense of insecurity. By the end of April 1950, over 25,000 Jews had registered to relinquish their citizenship and leave”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“The real reason for leaving, according to my mother’s later account, was that life in Iraq had become too dangerous by 1950, for the Jews in general and for our family in particular. Persecution of the Jews was intensifying, and it assumed many different forms. The government, the judiciary and the public became overtly hostile. Restrictions were placed on Jewish trade and commerce. Jews”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition. The intention behind Operation Susannah was to sour relations between Egypt and the West; its effect was to sour relations between the Egyptian people and the Jews who dwelt in their midst. The terrorist attacks seemed to confirm the suspicions of Egyptian Muslims that their Jewish compatriots owed allegiance to a foreign country and posed a threat to national security. As Stanford professor Joel Beinin put it, ‘The involvement of Egyptian Jews in acts of espionage and sabotage against Egypt organized and directed by Israeli military intelligence raised fundamental questions about their identities and loyalties.’31 The whole affair backfired disastrously on Israel. Pinhas Lavon was the minister of defence at the time and strenuously denied ever giving the order to military intelligence to activate the ring. He denounced the type of action in the affair that bore his name as stupid and inhuman and added that it had all started in Iraq.32 Lavon was forced to resign; ‘Cruel Zionism’, however, continued to characterise Israel’s conduct long after the ‘Lavon Affair’ had died down. The ‘Unfortunate Business’ may have started with the bombs that went off in central Baghdad back in 1950 but it probably had much deeper roots.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“. But the most serious charge contained in the report is that Israel’s emissaries turned their local Jewish followers into terrorists. Yusef Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom were hanged in Baghdad in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Some writers have claimed that the Israeli government was so desperate for people that it indicated that it would welcome the Jews even without their property. One, Avraham Shama, claims that ‘sometime in the spring of 1950, the Iraqi authorities reached an agreement with Jewish Agency representatives to allow Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq on a one-way visa to Israel, provided that they give up their Iraqi citizenship and leave their assets to the Iraqi government.’25 Karkoukli”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“helpful. He informed me that the man who received the bribe from the Zionist underground to organise the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue was Salem al-Quraishi, a captain in the Special Division of the Baghdad City Police Directorate. Al-Quraishi later participated in the raids on the synagogues and the schools in search of the hidden weapons. He was transferred from service in the Special Division to a regular police station. After the 14 July 1958 coup, he was arrested and sentenced by the revolutionary court to prison with hard labour. Karkoukli was inaccurate on the back story of the bribe and the bombing of the synagogue. In most other respects, however, what he told me tallies with the rest of the evidence that I have been able to gather from other sources.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“In 2013 an Iraqi journalist named Shamil Abdul Qadir published a book entitled History of the Zionist Movement in Iraq and its Role in the Emigration of the Jews in 1950–1951.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“In my rendition, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was not a noble rescue mission by the fledgling Jewish state but the self-serving instrument for the transfer of the Jews from their homeland.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“I noted the major part played by the official policy of oppression and persecution in driving the Jews to migrate. But I also laid out the evidence I have unearthed about Israel’s involvement in the Baghdad bombs that hastened the departure of the Jews. I gave this as an example of ‘Cruel Zionism’, the terrorist tactics employed by Israel to promote Aliyah and of the harm it inflicted on the Jews of Iraq.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine created empty spaces, and these spaces had to be filled by Jews from anywhere they could be found, including Jews from the Middle East, even those who had no desire whatsoever to relocate to Israel. The same colonial institutions that displaced the Palestinians were tasked with absorbing the Jewish migrants from the Arab lands. And the same arrogant, Eurocentric, Orientalist mindset greeted the Jewish newcomers from the East.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“the story of my family brought home to me, however, was that there was another category of victims of the Zionist project: the Jews of the Arab lands. Moreover, there was a link between the way that the Zionist movement treated the Palestinian Arabs and its treatment of the Arab-Jews. Both groups were a means to an end: the construction of an exclusive Jewish nation-state in the heart of the Middle East.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march. Either way, there could be no doubt that the Palestinians were and continue to be the victims of the ongoing Zionist project. What”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Although he did not use the biblical phrase, the role he envisaged for Asian and African Jews in Israeli society was ‘the hewers of wood and the drawers of water’. The effect of his policy was to hold back the Mizrahim by restricting their access to higher education and to the ‘white collar’ and well-paid occupations that went with it.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Mesopotamia, recently renamed Iraq. Faisal’s ascent to the throne in 1921 had to be carefully stage-managed because he was an outsider with no local power base. To make matters worse, he was a Sunni in a country with a disenfranchised Shi’i majority – the Shi’is suspected that the British were sponsoring Faisal in order to further entrench Sunni rule.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“France, however, was no less perfidious. The three-cornered dispute came to a head in July 1920 when French forces marched on Damascus, banished Faisal into exile, and took over the government of the country. This is how the modern state of Syria was created: with a republican regime, under French control, and on the ruins of the dream of a united and independent Arab kingdom led by the Hashemites.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, the representative of the Colonial Office in Iraq, proposed an alternative to direct rule: exercising British influence indirectly through a dependent and therefore loyal Arab political elite – an ‘informal empire’. As well as being persuasive proponents of this, Lawrence and Bell were also great fans of Prince Faisal.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“British Treasury. Colonel T. E. Lawrence pointed out to his government that ‘The Arabs rebelled against the Turks in the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects…but to win a show of their own.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

“Bar Kokhba was held out as a national hero although the revolt he led was crushed, Judea was devastated and its population was killed, exiled or sold into slavery. The lesson we were expected to draw from the history of this revolt was that it is more honourable to go down fighting than not to fight at all.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew

“The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for European Jews.”
― Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew