Avi Shlaim falsifies Iraqi Jewish history

In the early 1950s, nearly all of Iraq’s Jewish community fled the country following a decade in which they experienced a deadly antisemitic pogrom, a pro-Nazi government, and systematic anti-Jewish persecution. About 105,000 Iraqi Jews departed for Israel, at the cost of their citizenship and assets, after the Iraqi government legislated a one-year period in which Jews could register to leave. Another 15,000 emigrated illegally. By the end of 1952, only a few thousand Jews remained in Iraq.

In the first six pages of Three Worlds, Avi Shlaim’s recently released memoirs, the author heaps high praise on his primary subject. Avi Shlaim informs readers of Avi Shlaim’s uniquely “balanced” perspective; his “sophisticated understanding” of Arabs and Jews; his “nuanced” views “based on empathy” for all; and the “independent and reflective attitude” that allows him to “see beyond simple certainties.” The story before readers, we are assured, comes “from the vantage point of a scholar” and is “told by a professional historian.”

Over the next few hundred pages, the professional historian ignores, obscures, and outright falsifies facts to promote an untenable thesis.

The thesis? That Jews are to blame for the wholesale flight of the Jewish community from Iraq. Four explosions set off by Iraqi Zionists, Shlaim insists, succeeded at terrorizing fellow Jews into emigrating.

Why is it untenable? Above all, because it defies the basic relationship between cause and effect. In truth, an overwhelming majority of those who would register to leave had already done so by the time of the first bombing Shlaim pins on Jews. The remaining three allegedly Jewish explosions were even less consequential, as they occurred only after the year-long period in which Jews could register to leave—and so after all 105,000 Jews who would ultimately register had already done so.

At best, then, Shlaim’s argument is incoherent. This isn’t science fiction. The future didn’t cause the past.

Worse, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the author misled his audience in bad faith. After all, an Oxford historian writing about the bombings and exodus should be aware of the chronology. One whose bibliography cites Professor Moshe Gat’s indispensable research on the topic surely would be. But the book doesn’t grapple with, or even hint at, the inconvenient truth that undermines its bombshell thesis.

More alarmingly, Shlaim changes the date of one of the bombings, an egregious falsification of history that, conveniently, makes his argument seem more plausible.

A Central Point

Shlaim’s thesis about Jews, bombs, and exile isn’t just an aside in the memoirs. It is one of the book’s central points, repeated frequently and at regular intervals.

At his most generous, the author allows that Zionism wasn’t the sole cause of the flight. He writes, for example, that his family was “displaced from Iraq by the combined pressures of Arab and Jewish nationalism” (emphasis added throughout); that “Zionism was one of the primary causes” of the Arab world’s turn against its Jews; and that “the twin currents of Arab nationalism and Zionism made it impossible for Jews and Muslims to continue to coexist peacefully in the Arab world after the birth of Israel.” It’s a false premise, but at least it hints at the persecution that drove Jews from their homes.

Elsewhere, though, he dispenses with the equivalence, placing responsibility for the flight entirely on the shoulders of Zionism. He insists that the Balfour Declaration, a British document supportive of the Zionist cause, is guilty of no less than having “upended the life and fortunes of my family decades later.”

And then: “I turned my attention to other victims of the Zionist project – the Jews of the Arab lands.”

And again: “The great majority of the emigrants…were the victims of Zionist actions designed to intimidate them into abandoning their homeland.”

And especially: “The question of who was behind the bombs is of crucial importance for understanding the real origins of the exodus.”

In a key section of the book, the author describes a conversation with an elderly veteran of Iraq’s Jewish-Zionist underground who spoke of “violent methods [the state of Israel] had used to liquidate the Jewish Diaspora in Iraq,” without which the community would have remained largely intact.

The point wasn’t missed by readers. A review in The Spectator was given the subheading, “Avi Shlaim claims to have uncovered undeniable proof that Zionist agents were responsible for targeting the Jewish community, forcing them to flee Iraq and settle in Israel.” The title of Mondoweiss’s review promises a story about “How Zionism engineered the expulsion of Iraq’s Arab Jews.” More skeptically, a reviewer for History Today wrote that Shlaim “comes across as someone torn between his professional training as a historian and his desire to tar the Zionists with responsibility for these events.”

This tug-of-war between historian and mud-slinger is evident in the author’s speaking events, too. In one interview to promote his book, the professional historian briefly emerged, with Shlaim acknowledging that Iraqi persecution of Jews was “the main reason for the Jewish exodus from Iraq,” even as he maintained Jewish bombs were a secondary reason.

But at a 2019 academic conference, the propagandist took the podium. “So why did we leave Iraq if we were so happy there, so well-integrated?” Shlaim asked. “The short answer is that in 1950-51, five bombs exploded in Jewish buildings in Baghdad.”

He elaborated: “So the sequence of events was that in March 1950 the Iraqi government passed a law which said that any Iraqi Jew who wants to leave the country is free to do so, they have a year to register and to get a one-way visa, no return to Iraq. There were around 138,000 Jews in Iraq. Around 6,000 [sic] people exercised this option and registered to leave. Then there was a series of bombs.”

After suggesting all five bombs were thrown by Jews—one more than he argues in the book—Shlaim concluded: “It all adds up to Israeli involvement in the bombs that instigated the mass exodus to Israel.” As he does in much of his book, Shlaim plainly charges that Jews were responsible for the demise of Iraqi Jewry because Jewish bombs spurred the exodus.

The Chronology

The Iraqi denaturalization law, which allowed Jews to sign away their citizenship in exchange for the right to emigrate, came into effect on March 9, 1950. It expired one year later, on March 8, 1951.

Of the five bombings often mentioned in explorations of this period, only two occurred during the registration period. The three others came after its expiration. The sequence, dates, and locations of the explosions are as follows:

• Explosion 1: On April 8, 1950, an explosive device was thrown on Abu Nuwas Street near the al-Baida café, which was frequented by Jews.

• Explosion 2: On January 14, 1951, a grenade was thrown at the Masuda Shemtob synagogue.

• Explosion 3: On March 19, 1951, the United States Information Service building, which was frequented by Jews, was bombed.

• Explosion 4: On May 10, 1951, a bomb exploded at the office of the Jewish-owned Lawee automobile company.

• Explosion 5: On June 5, 1951, a bomb exploded near a building owned by Jewish businessman Stanely Shaashua.

It helps to visualize registration milestones alongside the dates of the explosions, as in the following graph (click to expand):  

The final piece of the puzzle is responsibility for the bombs.

At one point in the book, Shlaim suggests Israel and Iraqi Zionists were “behind the Baghdad bombings” in toto. He later begrudgingly admits, citing what he characterizes as “flimsy” evidence, that an antisemitic Arab nationalist group called Istiqlal was likely responsible for Explosion 1. He insists that, though an Arab with an anti-Jewish grudge tossed the second bomb, Jews were actually the hidden hand behind Explosion 2. And he places responsibility for Explosions 3, 4, and 5 on Yosef Basri, a member of the Zionist underground in Iraq.

In contrast with the “flimsy” evidence about Explosion 1, Shlaim insists he has “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement” in what he calls “the terrorist attacks that helped to terminate two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.”

Even if we were to accept Shlaim’s indictments, the graph shows that the Jewish community had disintegrated long before Explosion 2—the earliest of Shlaim’s Zionist bombs. By the time of this Jan 1951 incident, about 86,000 Jews—8 in 10 of those who would register, and well over half of the Jewish community—had already committed to leaving Iraq.

So much for the bizarre claim, unquestioningly conveyed in Shlaim’s book, that “less than a fifth” of Iraq’s Jews would have moved to Israel if not for Jewish bombs. As historian Nissim Kazzaz noted, “The registration movement was in full swing, and there was no need to throw bombs to create an atmosphere of terror in the hearts of the Jews so that they would rush to register.”

If any bomb had “instigated the mass exodus,” as Shlaim charges in one of his lectures, it could only have been Explosion 1—tossed by Istiqlal terrorists shortly after the opening of the registration window.

The timeline makes this clear. But Shlaim muddies the waters with a brazen chronological forgery.

Shuffled Dates

In Shlaim’s memoirs, the date of Explosion 3 is moved back one year, and so is reassigned as the first explosion. “On 19 March 1950,” writes Shlaim, “a bomb went off in the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, a center frequented by many Jews.” 

This isn’t a typo. He uses the same incorrect year throughout the book, and his discussions of sequence reinforce that he intentionally told readers the bombing occurred in 1950. 

Multiple works in Shlaim’s footnotes and bibliography correctly point to 1951 as the year of the bombing at the library (formally known as the U.S. Information Service building), including writings by professors Moshe Gat, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Hanan Hever, and Yehuda Shenhav.

On the other hand, at least one cited author claims the incident occurred in March 1950. That author, Naeim Giladi, isn’t a scholar, but rather an anti-Zionist activist and conspiracy theorist. His claim about the date of the bombing didn’t appear in a peer-reviewed journal, but rather in a newsletter by an anti-Israel advocacy group (and later in a book by a publisher of September 11 conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial secrets). And still, Shlaim preferred Giladi’s false date over that of his fellow professors.

Giladi is more explicit than Shalim in using the false date to suggest Jews timed the bomb to coincide with the passage of the denaturalization law: “The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March 1950. … In March, the bombings began.” But even he later came around to admit to the actual date in a 2nd edition of his book.

If any doubt remains, a contemporaneous source settles the question. In the March 20, 1951 edition of The Times (London), on page 3 under the headline “Explosion in Baghdad” and the dateline “Baghdad, March 19,” a short article reads:

Two men attempted this morning to throw a grenade into a room in the United States information office in which 50 students were reading, but the missile dropped in the entrance. It exploded and caused four casualties. The police made an arrest.

It bears repeating, because Shlaim’s distortions are scandalous, and because this part of the Jewish story, like other parts, shouldn’t be left to those who falsify history:

Of the five explosions mentioned in Shlaim’s book, four occurred only after most of the Jewish community had registered to leave. The other was, by the author’s own admission, an attack not by Zionist Jews but by members of an antisemitic Arab group. Shlaim shuffles the dates in his memoirs, turning Explosion 3, which he blames on Jews, into the first explosion. Only with this falsehood, and more broadly by glossing over the chronological relationship between bombs and registrations, could he cast the allegedly Jewish bomb as responsible for the disintegration of the community.

More Questionable Chronology

The distortion about Explosion 3 stands out, but it doesn’t stand alone. The book contains another trick to nudge forward Shlaim’s false thesis. While the author acknowledges that over 105,000 Jews had registered prior to the March 1951 deadline, he insists a few pages later that the Iraqi government “had extended the deadline for registration from March until the end of July” and that “by the end of 1951, over 120,000 Jews had registered.”

Historians of the Iraqi Jewish community argue otherwise.

To be clear, the question of whether the deadline was extended isn’t pivotal. Either way, the Jewish community had collapsed before the first allegedly Jewish bomb. Still, by creating a supposed extension to the deadline, and by describing an additional 15,000 registrations after the scheduled expiration, Shalim stretches the registration window to encompass the last three bombs, and in doing so bolsters his narrative that Jews chased out Jews.

Book critic Rayyan Al-Shawaf helpfully summarizes the discrepancy between historians Abbas Shiblak and Moshe Gat on the question:

Shiblak claims that the 8 March 1951 deadline was extended, but does not elaborate. Gat asserts that there was no extension of the deadline for registration, and that the only extension given was for the departure of those who had already registered. The significance of an extension for registration lies in the dates of the last three of the five bombings. Three of the five bombs went off after the expiration of the 8 March deadline, by which time only about 5,000 Jews had chosen to remain in Iraq. Gat argues that this effectively invalidates the assumption that the bombs were meant to intimidate Jews into emigrating. After all, these three attacks occurred when there were very few Jews left to intimidate, and all channels of legal emigration had closed. If Shiblak’s contention concerning an extension is correct, his reasoning as to why the last three attacks took place would be strengthened immeasurably.

Historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein concurs with Gat. “[T]he registration for emigration from Iraq had closed by 9 March 1951, once the Denaturalization Law had expired,” she explained. “After this date it was no longer possible to register, nor to rescind registration.” Claims to the contrary, she added, are “inaccurate.” The final three terrorist incidents “had no impact on the scope of emigration because they took place after the Denaturalization Law had expired and registration had closed.”

Although Shlaim includes works by Shiblak, Gat, and Meir-Glitzenstein in his bibliography, his claim about a purported extension of the registration deadline entirely ignores the conclusion of the latter two historians. Again, he seems more interested in tarring Zionists than in pursuing the truth.

Responsibility for the Bombs

We’ve established that, even if one accepts Shlaim’s attributions of responsibility, the bombs he blames on Jews couldn’t have been responsible for the mass flight. But what about those attributions, anyway? Were Jews responsible for the latter four bombs, as Shlaim claims? The question might never definitively be answered. But here, too, the author sets aside professionalism in pursuit of a preferred conclusion.

The Last Three Bombs

An Iraqi court executed two members of the Iraqi Zionist underground, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah (or Shalom Salih Shalom), after finding them guilty of the last three bombings—those that occurred after all 105,000 Jews had already registered to leave. The verdicts followed a confession by the latter defendant, which itself followed what even Shlaim describes as “most horrific forms of … torture.” In court, Salah linked his confession to the torture and is reported to have retracted the confession.

But Shlaim, like the Iraqi courts before him, shows little concern about the reliability of confessions extracted under torture. And as noted above, he avoids grappling with the question of motive (or lack thereof) for those last latter bombs, instead leading readers to believe they were meant to prompt an exodus that had already been signed, sealed, and mostly delivered.

Decades later, an Israeli member of the Zionist underground in Iraq, Yehuda Tajar, shared his suspicions that at least the final bomb, which exploded when relatively few Jews remained in Iraq, was caused by Jews. In his view, the purpose of the bombing was to exculpate colleagues in the Zionist underground, who had recently been arrested by Iraqi authorities. If a bomb went off while suspects were in custody, the line of thinking goes, it would prove they weren’t responsible for the earlier bombs.

The British embassy, meanwhile, speculated that the bombs may have been meant to push Israel to more quickly absorb the masses waiting in harsh conditions to leave Iraq. Iraqi Jews were registering faster than Israel, bogged down in absorbing refugees from Holocaust-scarred Europe, was taking them in, a cause of great frustration to Iraqi Zionist leaders.

If either of these hypotheses are correct, the bombings would be no less a criminal act. But the intent, effect, and takeaway would be far different from what Shlaim argues.

Explosion 2 and Shlaim’s “Undeniable Proof”

Perhaps the only new detail Shlaim adds to the body of work on the bombings relates to Explosion 2 at the Masuda Shemtob synagogue.

Shlaim recounts conversations he had with Yaacov Karkoukli, the 89-year-old veteran of Iraq’s Zionist underground, which convinced him that Jews were responsible for not only the three final bombs but also the synagogue bombing.

The story is strange and self-contradictory. At first, Karkoukli tells Shlaim that a Muslim driven by anti-Jewish animus bombed the synagogue. Shlaim recounts that conversation:

It was Salih al-Haidari, a Sunni Muslim of Syrian origins. Haidari, according to Karkoukli, was an unsavory character and a crook who lived off fraud and the immoral earnings of his five sisters. He had some Jewish acquaintances, but had made the mistake of trying to defraud them. They had reported him to the police, he had been arrested and convicted, and had served a prison sentence. Haidari had lobbed the hand grenade into the courtyard of the synagogue as an act of revenge against the Jews who had reported him to the authorities.

Seven months after hearing this account, Shlaim met again with Karkoukli, but this time heard an altogether different story:

He had told me that this was an act of revenge against the Jews, who he claimed had wronged him. But now he surprised me by saying that Haidari was put up to it by a police officer of the Bataween district [in Baghdad]. This did not make much sense and I said so. Why should an Iraqi police officer do the dirty job for the Zionist underground by putting pressure on the Jews to emigrate to Israel? On hearing Karkouli’s explanation, I nearly fell off my chair: the man in question was a collaborator who had received a bribe from the Zionist underground. The movement wanted to frighten the Jews who still hoped to stay in Iraq, so they had bribed the police officer, who had hired Haidari to do the dirty deed.

The police officer, Karkoukli said, was “arrested, tried and convicted of collaboration with the enemy.”

It’s possible that Shlaim’s source effectively contradicted himself over two meetings. (Although there are no direct quotes of Karkoukli in the book, Shlaim says he has an audio recording of the second interview.) But such a reversal would be strange, and stranger still because, in an on-camera interview just two years later, Karkoukli again implicated Haidari and an Iraqi police chief who gave him the explosives, while apparently saying nothing of Zionist bribes being behind the incident. Moreover, the police chief Karkoukli blames in the interview is an altogether different person than the captain Shlaim incriminates in his book.

Yaakov Karkoukli died in 2022, so I asked his son, David Karkoukli, if he had any insight into the discrepancies. To his knowledge, was anything substantive edited out of the video? Did his father believe that Zionists paid the police officer to bomb the synagogue?

David replied that the video wasn’t edited to remove any comments on bombing; that his father is the only one who has referenced a bomber named Salih al-Haidari (something that, David implied, raises questions about the reliability of this memory); and that, though bribes were the norm in Iraq at the time, he hasn’t found any convincing evidence about whether the official in question was bribed, let alone for what purpose he might have been bribed.

But if the police officer wasn’t bribed to bomb the synagogue, why would he have been arrested? Shlaim eventually shares that the police captain he blamed for the bomb was arrested after Iraq’s July 1958 coup d’état. The police chief named in Karkoukli’s interview likewise was arrested after the coup (though not for collaborating with Zionists). But then, who wasn’t? As the Guardian reported at the time, “Nearly all the members of the previous Government are under arrest, together with many miscellaneous appendages of the ancient regime.”

Did the usurping government really arrest the police officer for a seven-year-old episode, as Shlaim leads readers to believe? And even if so, should we assume their rationale for the arrest, at a time of mass arrests and executions, was legitimate? Shlaim doesn’t address these questions. And anyway, the point seems moot when he waves around a paper that he says closes the case.

In the first meeting between Shlaim and Yaakov Karkoukli, the latter claimed to have documents that prove his account of the synagogue bombing. And Shlaim excitedly declares that the promised evidence, a Baghdad police report, was eventually delivered. “This report was well worth the wait,” he excitedly tells readers, saying the document constitutes “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that helped to terminate two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.”

Whatever its contents, there’s something strange in Shlaim treating the police department as a paragon of integrity—one whose allegations amount to no less than “undeniable proof”—when just ten pages earlier he describes a captain from that department taking bribes and arranging the bombing of a synagogue. 

Regardless, the document proves nothing. The “report” given to Shlaim turned out to be an isolated page from a multi-hundred-page police file. Of its ten paragraphs, only four refer to bombings — two vaguely reference a confession by Shalom Salah, and two more purport a confession of some sort by Basri.

Click to read the document as it appears in Shlaim's book

At a 2019 lecture, after sharing his story of the synagogue bombing, the bribe, and the police officer, Shlaim claimed that Karkoukli’s report “confirmed all these details.” But according to his own book, this is false. The page says nothing about a bribed police officer, nor anything specific about Explosion 2 at the synagogue.

It doesn’t say much, in fact. The paper mentions confessions, but conceals the torture that preceded them. The police congratulate themselves on having “crack[ed] the big puzzle” in “the case of throwing bombs” targeting “Jewish shops,” but don’t specify which bombs.

All of them? It would seem so—this had been the police’s stance. But then, according to Shlaim’s own conclusion about Explosion 1, the document is erroneous.

Another purported Iraqi police document published elsewhere, meanwhile, quotes Shalom Salah confessing that an associate of his personally tossed the bombs at the synagogue and the al-Baida Café. Yet here again, Shlaim’s book, which concludes that both of those bombs were tossed by non-Jews, contradicts allegations by the police department. And yet Shlaim treats reports by this department as unimpeachable.

Not only does Shlaim’s document prove nothing, but it offers nothing substantively new. After all, historians already knew that the Iraqi police blamed Zionists for the bombings. They already knew Shalom Salah confessed after being tortured. And they already knew that these don’t amount to “undeniable proof.”

The document—the centerpiece of the accusation around which Shlaim’s central narrative revolves—is a dud.

Explosion 1

More questions arise about Shlaim’s integrity in assessing evidence when we look at the difference between what he counts as “undeniable proof” and what constitutes “flimsy evidence.”

His conclusion that the Istiqlal group was responsible for Explosion 1 was reached, he says, “tentatively, on the basis of one flimsy piece of evidence.” The “flimsy” evidence is a confession, voluntarily given by one of the bombers to Iraqi journalist Shamil Abdul Qadir, who directly quoted the confession in a 2013 book. “[W]e threw the bombs on the Jews sitting there and we escaped and hid in a house rented near the entry of Abu Newas Street near the casino and we disappeared,” the bomber told Qadir.

By contrast, his “undeniable” conclusion that Jews were responsible for Explosion 2 was not based on a claim by the bomber himself; nor by the police officer said to have directed the bomber; nor, it would seem, by anyone who authorized, paid, or moved the bribe. It came from someone whose level of involvement in the alleged act, if any, is unclear. (Notably, Karkoukli made other bold claims when talking to Shlaim that even the author admitted could not be true.)

As mentioned above, Karkoukli didn’t repeat the charge about the bribe when he subsequently discussed the bombing. And the document that we’re told substantiates the claim… doesn’t.

How is Shlaim even sure that his document comes from a police report? Its authenticity, he assures us, is vouched for by Shamil Abdul Qadir —the very same Iraqi journalist whose chronicle of Istiqlal’s confession Shlaim denigrates as “flimsy evidence.”

What separates flimsy and indisputable, then, isn’t the nature of the evidence, but rather the identity of the alleged perpetrators. Again, Shlaim’s professionalism is eclipsed by his enthusiasm.

Anti-Jewish Persecution

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein found that, in memoirs by those who left Iraq, the bombings were not cited as a reason for the flight: “none of them points to the terrorist incidents as a motive.” The autobiographers she encountered do recall “feelings of anxiety, concern, and even despair, incidents of physical or verbal violence that affected them personally, loss of employment” among the forces that drove them from their homes.

At times, Shlaim concedes the same. “We felt vulnerable because we were Jews,” he admits. It was already in 1948, before the series of bombs but after an anti-Jewish gang threatened to kidnap or kill members of his family, that his mother began “thinking about leaving Iraq for good.”

The bombs, he later elaborates, compounded a feeling of insecurity that had already existed:

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 in the civil service were dismissed and the entire 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.

And yet he allows himself to conclude elsewhere, “My family did not move from Iraq to Israel because of a clash of cultures or religious intolerance.”

This is part of a pattern. Though Shlaim is willing to detail antisemitic mistreatment, he is equally willing to shrug it off when making sweeping judgments.

Were Jews “subjected to a host of discriminatory regulations” over the centuries? Yes. But no matter. They were “the living embodiment of Muslim-Jewish co-existence.”

Was there an “infamous pogrom” —the anti-Jewish bloodbath known as the Farhud? Sure. But just one. “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful coexistence and fruitful interaction.”

What of the “harassment,” “Nazi militarism,” “official persecution,” “anti-Jewish propaganda,” “strident anti-Jewish … sentiments,” the “powerful popular wave of hostility toward … the Jews,” demonstrators who “marched through the streets of Baghdad, shouting ‘Death to the Jews,’” a “government that actively whipped up popular hysteria and suspicion against the Jews”? Rest assured. “Iraq was a land of pluralism and coexistence.”

The absurdity seems to know no limits. If during the Farhud “an angry mob armed with knives, sticks and axes set upon the Jews on buses, in the streets, and in their houses,” and if Jews were “murdered, raped, looted” until 179 Jewish corpses were tossed into a mass grave, Shlaim still finds someone to insist that the pogrom was “not an antisemitic episode.”

Shlaim’s mother didn’t get the memo. After the Farhud, she and her Jewish friends “began to wear abayas, the loose black overgarment worn by Muslim women, in order to conceal their Jewish identity. They also imitated the dialect of Iraqi Muslims, fearing their very voices would give them away.” Just as Ms. Shlaim made clear that their family left Iraq due to anti-Jewish persecution, she left little doubt that she understood the antisemitism behind the Farhud.

But Avi Shlaim knows better than his mother. He is, after all, a professional historian. One who changes dates. One who ignores chronology. One who dismisses facts that don’t suit his politics. But a professional—for what it’s worth.