The Israeli anti-Zionist historian and academic Aqi Shlaim - who was a guest on the "The Interview" program - acknowledged that the Jews lived in harmony with Arab societies and were not subjected to exile and displacement, and that anti-Semitism is a purely European phenomenon, contrary to what is promoted by the official Zionist narrative.

Shlaim - in the context of his talk about Jews who lived in Arab countries in previous historical periods - turned to the experience of his family, who immigrated from Iraq in the early fifties to live in Israel when he was 5 years old, as his family found it difficult to integrate, and he personally suffered from an inferiority complex. The issue of identity worried him, saying that Israel was created by European Jews and Ashkenazi Jews who had long looked down on Arab Jews as coming from a primitive culture.

The Israeli historian emphasized that the Jews lived with Muslims in Iraq and in the Arab countries without problems, and were an integral part of society, and were not considered immigrants or intruders, while in Europe the situation was different with the Jews as they represented the other, in addition to that anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon Purely contrary to what the official Zionist narrative promotes, that anti-Semitism was rooted in the Arab world, and that Islam called for and caused anti-Semitism.

He said that approximately 850,000 Jews left the Arab countries after 1948, but they were not refugees and were not subjected to exile and displacement, as happened to the Palestinians who were refugees after Israel expelled them from their homeland.

Pull out from the roots

He considered that the Jewish community in Iraq was uprooted, and that the mass immigration that occurred was the result of several reasons, most notably the spread of Arab nationalism and the growing sense of hostility to the Jews after the 1948 war, and the other important reason was the result of the pressure exerted by the Zionist movement on the Jews of Iraq to move to Israel. He said that the Zionist movement was a phenomenon of extreme cruelty. It carried out the process of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and then brought the Jews to replace the Palestinians whom they had expelled from their homeland.

He added that Zionism has always been an ideology of division, as it divided Arabs and Jews, and he completely rejects this artificial division.

The guest of the episode (1/8/2023) of the “The Interview” program revealed that the Iraqi government enacted in March 1950 a law stipulating that any Jew who wants to immigrate from Iraq has the right to do so by registering in an open register for a full year, Then they are allowed - that is, the Jews - to emigrate, but without the right to return, and to relinquish their rights as Iraqi citizens and drop their Iraqi nationality.

He said that after the 1948 war, Israel was panting after human resources, and therefore its priority was to bring Jews from Arab countries to Israel.

It is noteworthy that the historian and academic Shlaim belongs to the elite of the new Israeli historians who work to re-read the origins of Israel, and to confront the narratives that it promoted.

He assured the "Interview" program that his convictions had changed and he came to believe that Israel, after 1967, had become a brutal colonial power, and that the mission of its army was to protect the security of the occupation, while it was practicing an apartheid system as a result of the occupation.

He referred to the shift in the feelings of Jews in the world towards Israel, especially in the United States of America, where liberal Jews direct harsh criticism of Israel and its policies, and declare that it does not represent them, in addition to their adherence to the issue of the two-state solution, stressing that the AIPAC organization includes only 30% of American Jews.