Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945 and grew up in Israel where he did national service from 1964 to 1966.
His books include Collusion across the Jordan (winner of the 1988 Political Studies Association's W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize); The Politics of Partition (1990 and 1998); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995), The Cold War and the Middle East (co_editor, 1997), and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2001).
Avi Shlaim is one of those Israeli scholars who call themselves New Historians.
Among the new historians, AviShlaim is the most "classical." Benny Morris began as a journalist with a conscience, served time in a military prison for refusal to serve in Lebanon, and from this starting-point, came to write the "new history" about the creation of the refugee problem.
Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945, to a wealthy family with a magnificent three-story house and 10 servants, including a special servant who went to the market to do the shopping.
Shlaim claims that the retaliation operations in the 1950s, Dayan's baby, led to a deterioration, to an intensification of the hatred and to a distancing of the chance for dialogue.
Shlaim is basically interested in political and diplomatic history, and minimizes his account of the wars; Morris treats the military operations in copious detail, in the War of Independence and in later conflicts.
Shlaim's tendency to assume an air of objectivity toward Arab actions and to point a scolding finger at Israel is also conspicuous in his account of the deterioration that led to the Six-Day War.
Shlaim argues that the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1982 was not carried out for electoral reasons; the timing of the Israeli action, he explains, was owed to Begin's genuine anxiety about Israel's future, to fears rooted in his own experience in the Holocaust.
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