In
your book, you begin
chapter one with these
sentences: “If I had to
identify one key factor
that shaped my early
relationship to Israeli
society, it would be an
inferiority complex. I was
an Iraqi boy in a land of
Europeans.” When you were
five, your family left
Baghdad for the newly
created state of Israel.
To those who have not yet
read Three Worlds, why the
inferiority complex?
The key concept in the book
is the concept of an
Arab-Jew, that it is
possible to be both Jewish,
and Arab. At the same time,
this is denied by Israelis
today. They say it's a
contradiction in terms. It's
an ontological
impossibility. If you're a
Jew, you cannot be an Arab
and if you're an Arab, you
cannot be a Jew. So my book
is a refutation of this
Israeli belief because I was
born in Baghdad in 1945. And
in 1950, we left Baghdad for
Israel and we were Arab
Jews. We were Iraqis whose
religion happened to be
Judaism. We spoke Arabic at
home. Our culture was Arab
culture. We had many Muslim
friends. And there was a
long tradition of
Muslim-Jewish coexistence
and even harmony. So for my
family and me, Muslim-Jewish
coexistence was not an
abstract idea or an
ambition. It was the
everyday reality. Iraq
didn't have a Jewish
problem. Iraq had many
minorities and the Jews were
one minority, among others,
and there was a long
tradition of religious
tolerance. In Iraq we were
equal. We were equal to all
the other minorities.
And how did that change
when your family emigrated
to Israel?
When we moved to Israel, we
were outsiders in the sense
that Israel was a European
style society. The Zionist
movement, which led to the
creation of the State of
Israel in 1948, was a
movement by European Jews
for European Jews. So the
ethos of the newly-born
State of Israel was a
Eurocentric one. There was
from the beginning,
cleavage, tensions between
Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of
Europe and oriental Jews,
Jews from the Arab lands,
who collectively are called
Mizrahi. And as a boy, I
felt this very acutely. I
felt I was looked down upon
by my new society. This is
not to say that I
encountered direct
discrimination but rather
that it was the prejudice,
the disdain for oriental
Jews in Israel that I felt:
that everything Arab was
considered primitive and
backward, the Arabic
language was considered an
ugly, guttural language and
I internalised these values.
And the opening scene in my
book is when my father comes
to me in the street when I'm
playing with my friends and
he speaks to me in Arabic
and I'm acutely embarrassed.
And I wanted to say to him
it's okay to speak Arabic at
home but in front of my
friends, I would rather you
spoke to me in Hebrew,
except that he couldn't
speak Hebrew. But because I
was an Iraqi boy, in a
western style society
dominated by Ashkenazim, I
had a sense of inferiority.
And this sense of
inferiority defines my
relationship with Israeli
society. And I write about
it very frankly, in my
memoirs, because there is no
point in writing an
autobiography, if you're not
going to be frank.
Three Worlds was
published before the
latest Gaza war. But in
the book, you charge
Israel with being an
apartheid state. Why do
you take that position?
And how do you respond to
those who say that calling
Israel an apartheid state
is anti-Semitic.
I don't charge Israel as an
apartheid state. I simply
observe the obvious reality
which is that Israel is
an apartheid state. For me,
it's not a matter for
debate, or a matter of
dispute. And in the last two
years, four major human
rights groups have issued
detailed records, all of
which conclude that Israel
is an apartheid state, that
Israel is guilty of the
crime of apartheid as
defined by the 1998 statute
that established the
International Criminal
Court.. The most interesting
report of these four is by
B'tselem the Israeli human
rights organisation, because
its previous reports were
about Israeli human rights
abuses in the Occupied
Territories. In this last
report, it says that you can
no longer distinguish
between the Occupied
Territories and Israel
proper. Because from the
Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea, there is
one regime. It's an
apartheid regime. It's a
Jewish supremacist regime
with second class citizens.
That's the Palestinian
citizens of the State of
Israel and third class
citizens, if you can call
them that, who are the
Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories, who have no
political rights at all. So
I think it's obvious that
Israel is an apartheid
state. And to the people who
say that to call Israel an
apartheid state is
anti-Semitic, I say about
criticisms of the State of
Israel this is not
anti-Semitic. I make a very,
very clear distinction
between anti-Semitism on the
one hand, which is hatred of
the Jews and anti-Zionism on
the other hand, which is
criticism of the State of
Israel. Israel, and its
friends, and it has many
friends, very strong friends
throughout the world, has
deliberately, I repeat,
deliberately conflated
anti-Zionism with
anti-Semitism, in order to
silence legitimate
evidence-based criticisms of
the State of Israel.
And in this country (UK),
we have seen a very, very
unfortunate phenomenon of
the weaponizing of
anti-Semitism to prevent
free speech in order to
protect Israel. The
government has adopted the
International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
definition of anti-
Semitism. It tries to impose
this definition on
universities and local
authorities and it's a very
flawed definition because it
doesn't distinguish clearly
enough between anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism. So there
is nothing at all
anti-Semitic in calling
Israel an apartheid state.
In Three Worlds you
write of the concept of
the erasure of history,
the erasure of culture
that you experienced as an
Arab-Jew growing up in
Israel. That is what the
Palestinians have
experienced over decades
and are experiencing now
very violently in Gaza. Is
that something that
Arab-Jews share with
Palestinians? And is that
a common ground that could
somehow be built on in
what is an otherwise
extraordinarily bleak and
awful landscape?
There is a parallel between
the history of the
Palestinians and the history
of Iraqi Jews. And that is
that in 1948, the
Palestinians became
refugees. They were
displaced. Some of them fled
but the majority were
expelled by Israel in an
exercise of ethnic
cleansing. And the Jewish
community in Iraq did not,
for the most part, choose to
move to Israel but was
forced to. So we too, were
displaced. And a relative of
mine, Itzhak Bar-Moshe,
wrote a book on the exodus
from Iraq ( The
Departure from Iraq),
in which he said ‘we left
Iraq as Jews and we arrived
in Israel as Iraqis.’ So
there are parallel
histories. But
unfortunately, this doesn't
give me any reason for hope,
because many of the Mizrahi
in Israel vote for the Likud
and for right wing parties.
The Jews of the Arab lands
could have been used by
Israel as a bridge with the
Arab world. But the
Ashkenazi elite in Israel
has never wanted to use
Mizrahi Jews as a bridge
because they didn't want a
bridge to the Arab world.
Israel is a European-style
state in the heartland of
the Middle East. Israel has
never wanted to be part of
the region, Israel has
always seen itself as part
of the West. And in the
crisis of Gaza today, we see
the same dynamic in place.
The Arab world doesn't
recognize Israel as
legitimate. They see Israel
as a Western enclave within
the Middle East. And the
Western powers support
Israel all the way in
carrying out the death and
destruction in Gaza, in
destroying Gaza. Western
leaders have still, two
months after the outbreak of
the war, not called for a
ceasefire, only for a
humanitarian pause. So there
is huge Western hypocrisy in
supporting what Israel is
doing in Gaza, not calling a
spade, a spade, and giving
unconditional support and a
free pass to continue with
the butchery and with the
destruction of Gaza. And I
think this will be to the
eternal shame of the Western
powers that have not shown
any humanity or any
commitment to Palestinian
rights. This conflict is
between two national
movements. The West supports
Israel unconditionally and
the West is not really
interested in helping the
Palestinians to realise
their natural right to
national self-determination.
Given that is the case
do you think Israel will
ever take a different
direction?
I don't believe that Israel
can change its essence which
is that of a
settler-colonialist, Jewish
supremacist state. The
conflict is a political
conflict. But Israel doesn't
have a political solution to
the conflict in Gaza. Israel
only uses brute military
force. There is an Israeli
saying: ‘If force doesn't
work, use more force.’ And
Israeli generals have a
phrase to ‘mow the lawn’ in
Gaza. Every few years they
move in and they bombard the
Gaza Strip, by air, sea and
land. They cause a huge
amount of destruction, heavy
casualties, damage to the
civilian infrastructure. And
then they go home but
without dealing with the
underlying political
problem. So Israel is a
colonial power. The
Palestinians are fighting
what is probably the last
anti-colonial struggle in
the world today and Israel
is unlikely to change its
nature. There is no impetus
for change from inside
Israel. There is no
recognition that without
peace with the Palestinians
Israel will never have
security, the cycle of
violence will continue
forever.
Will America change?
I'm equally pessimistic
about America changing. The
trouble with American
support for Israel is that
it is unconditional. That
means that Israel can do
whatever it likes without
paying a price. This is why
Israel gets away literally
with murder and has been for
many years. And as we speak,
Israel is getting away
literally with murder. I
don't see the likelihood of
internal change in Israel.
On the contrary, Israel is
becoming more and more
oppressive, more and more
extreme and more of a Jewish
supremacist state. And I
don't see the likelihood of
a change in the Western
policy towards Israel. There
is a disconnect between the
people who are
overwhelmingly
pro-Palestinian and the
governments who are blindly
and uncritically supportive
of Israel, whatever it does.