The Arab Jew Experience Exposes the Myths of Middle Eastern Antisemitism | The Chris Hedges Report

A significant justification for Israel’s existence relies on the narrative that, because of the inherent and rabid antisemitism of Arabs and Islam, the Jews of the Middle East never had a home. Without Israel, it is said, these Jews would be left on the fringes of Middle Eastern societies, marginalized for an irrational prejudice against their religion and ethnicity. 

Historian and author Avi Shlaim details in his book, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew,” through personal experience and historical analysis the lies that this narrative is constructed upon.

“There was no history of antisemitism in the Arab world. Antisemitism is a European disease,” he tells Chris Hedges. “In the 1930s, antisemitism was exported from Europe to Iraq in particular, and it's striking that there was no antisemitic literature in Arabic. So antisemitic literature had to be translated from European languages into Arabic…” 

Shlaim was born in Iraq, where a thriving, educated and economically diverse society existed for Jews. He describes how “It took Europe much longer than it took the Arab world to accept the Jews as equal citizens,” and how “[Jews] were very much part of the fabric of Iraqi society. We are not a foreign body. There were thriving Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, throughout North Africa, but the Jewish community in Iraq was the most successful, the most prosperous, and also the best integrated of all the Jewish communities.” 

It was Israel, according to Shlaim, that brought the divide and plight of the Jews in the Middle East. Shlaim mourns a time where his family experienced peaceful coexistence: “Muslim [and] Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea. It wasn't a distant dream. It was the everyday reality.”

Shlaim’s accounts also turn parts of his memoir into an investigative account, diving into incontrovertible evidence he discovered that reveals false flag atrocities committed by Israelis against Jews themselves in the name of reinforcing the Jewish state.

“[T]his false flag operation,” Shlaim said, referring to the 1950 and 1951 Israeli bombings of Iraqi Jews, “is a terrible indictment of the State of Israel, because Israel was created to provide a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. Israel was not established in order to destabilize and frighten and create insecurity for the Jews of the diaspora.”

“The real upheaval,” Shlaim recounts, “ happened when Israel was created in 1948 and as my mother said to me, when Israel was created, everything was turned upside down.”