Avi Shlaim

Born in Baghdad in 1945 into a prosperous Jewish family with no Zionist leanings, Avi Shlaim moved with them to Israel in 1951 and later served two years in the Israeli army as a communications instructor. He read history at Jesus College, Cambridge, took an MSc at the London School of Economics and a doctorate at Reading, taught politics there until 1987, then moved to Oxford, where he became professor of international relations at St Antony's College. Shlaim belongs to the New Historians, the scholars who reworked the standard account of 1948 as the state archives opened. Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009) collects thirty years of his essays and reviews around three turning points, the founding of Israel, the 1967 war and the Oslo Accords, together with assessments of Yasir Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Edward Said and his fellow historian Benny Morris. His other books include Collusion Across the Jordan (1988), The Iron Wall (1999) and Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023), which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.