Avi Shlaim, Israeli-British historian: ‘Netanyahu wants to drag the US into a confrontation with Iran’

Avi Shlaim, born to a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1945, is one of the most respected historians specializing in the Middle East. A self-described Arab and Jew, he is an emeritus professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, where he lives. He is very careful with his measured speech. His smile cuts across his eyes, drawing a fine line behind his glasses. With curly, grey hair, Shlaim, who emigrated with his family to Israel in the 1950s, reflects for a few seconds before answering each question during the interview, held by video conference on October 4. Once he begins his presentation, tough and well-argued, the essayist seems to be pulling on a thread that he has built up on the fly, but with great consistency.

Author of works such as The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1999) and his latest, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023), Shlaim is part of a group known as the “New Historians,” who challenge the traditionally held version of Israeli history. Almost a year ago, at the end of October, Liverpool Hope University cancelled a lecture he was scheduled to give due to pressure from the Jewish community.

Question: You have said on occasion that you still hope that Israel will begin to act in a rational manner. Is this still the case?

Answer. Israel has changed a lot. Over the past two decades, since the Second Intifada [2000-2005], it has been moving steadily to the right. The current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, is the most right-wing, xenophobic, expansionist, Islamophobic, and racist in Israel’s history. There are extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of Internal Security and head of the Jewish Power party, and [Finance Minister] Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, who occupy key positions in the government. They are messianic, Jewish supremacists. Their ultimate goal is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the actual annexation of the West Bank. The policy guidelines of this government state that the Jewish people have an exclusive right to sovereignty over the entire land of Israel, which includes the West Bank. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Israel has ceased to be rational. The Hamas attack on October 7 last year unhinged Israeli society. Since then, the Israeli public has been clamoring for revenge, and revenge is not a policy. Although Netanyahu is unpopular, his policy of destruction in Gaza was popular, and so is his attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Q. Netanyahu’s popularity has risen again.

A. After the Hamas surprise attack on Israel, Netanyahu’s popularity was rock bottom: 80% of Israelis wanted him out of the way. The Israeli army has failed to achieve its declared aims, which are the destruction of Hamas and the recovery of the hostages. He assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, but then he has shifted the center of gravity to the northern front by attacking Hezbollah, a key ally of Iran, and assassinating its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a symbol of Arab resistance to Israeli and American imperialism. There is no question that Israel has scored a number of tactical successes, like the amazing pager and walkie-talkie attack. It looks now as if Israel has gone on the offensive against all of [Hamas’s] allies and is doing very well. That’s why Netanyahu’s popularity has been rising. But these are tactical successes: scoring victories and inflicting damage on Israel’s enemies, but they don’t amount to a strategic achievement because Hamas is still there, still firing rockets, and Hezbollah is still there, and still offering resistance to Israeli ground forces.

Q. There are indeed tactical victories, but they are in the midst of a very broad strategy that has also struck in Iran, Yemen and Syria. What do you think is Israel’s ultimate goal?

A. Israel’s ultimate goal is to change the balance of power in the Middle East. And its main opponent is Iran, the sponsor of the axis of resistance to Israel, which includes a number of proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and various pro-Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. Iran has avoided a direct clash with Israel, but has been putting pressure through all its proxies. Now Israel is trying to weaken this entire axis of resistance, constantly expanding the conflict. America’s aim is to contain the conflict, Israel’s aim is to spread and escalate it with its opponents. Israel is now fighting a war on four fronts: in Gaza, Lebanon, against the Houthis in Yemen, and attacking targets in Syria. But that is not the end of it. Israel really wants to engage Iran, to open that front, because Iran is the key. For two decades, Netanyahu has been unsuccessfully demanding U.S. intervention on Israel’s side to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Netanyahu is calling the shots and his aim in escalating is to drag the US into a confrontation with Iran with the aim of destroying Iranian nuclear facilities.

Q. How important is the role of the U.S. and the Western allies play in the current strategy of Israel?

A. It is a paradox: Israel is totally dependent on the U.S., while on the other hand the U.S. has very little influence on Israeli politics. American support for Israel is unconditional. So the U.S. supplies arms, money and diplomatic protection. It gives Israel $3.8 billion a year in military credits. During the war in Gaza, Congress voted another $14 billion and another $20 billion. It subsidizes Israel to a very high degree. Secondly, it uses the veto in the Security Council to defeat resolutions that are not to Israel’s liking. American support for Israel is not conditional on it respecting Palestinian human rights or international law. It’s unconditional. And that is why Israel literally gets away with it. We have seen Joe Biden trying to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, but without any success. Netanyahu is deliberately trying to offend and humiliate Biden because he would like his friend Donald Trump to win the forthcoming U.S. election.

Q. This conflict did not start on October 7, 2023. Israel has won a lot of different wars in the last century, but it has not won peace. On the contrary, the conflict is getting worse. Why?

A. This conflict began a century ago as a clash between two national movements: Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. The Palestinian issue is the heart and core of the conflict. And without a resolution to this issue, there will never be peace, security or stability in the Middle East. Israel, since 1967 [the year of the Six-Day War], has had to choose between giving up territory for peace or keeping the land. Israel, through its actions, has demonstrated time and again that with the Palestinians, it prefers land to peace. Israel does not have a peaceful solution to the conflict, it only uses military force. There is an Israeli saying that if force doesn’t work, use more force. There is the broadest international consensus behind the two-state solution. It has become fashionable to say that the two-state solution is dead because Israel killed it with settlements, a security barrier, and the annexation of East Jerusalem. I would argue that the two-state solution was never born. No Israeli government since 1967 has offered a formula for a two-state solution that even the most moderate of Palestinian leaders would accept. Secondly, no American government since 1967 has pushed Israel into a genuine two-state solution.

Q. I interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, former Palestinian Minister of Information, who advocates the one-state solution.

A. We must remember that Hamas is not a terrorist organization pure and simple. It is a political party that adopted the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, it won an absolute majority in a fair and free election, but Israel and its Western allies refused to recognize that government. So Hamas tried a diplomatic route, but was not allowed to pursue it. The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] signed the Oslo Accords with Israel; it gave up its claim to four-fifths, 78%, of historic Palestine in exchange for a Palestinian state on 22% of historic Palestine. But that wasn’t enough for Israel. It kept expanding settlements. As we speak, Israel is still confiscating more land in the West Bank and carrying out ethnic cleansing. I used to support the two-state solution, but it is an empty formula. I now advocate the only democratic solution to this conflict, which is one state, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of religion and ethnicity.

Q. What do you think of the restrained response from the region’s Arab neighbours?

A. It is striking how silent the Arab states have been when Israel has been conducting genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and a massive military offensive in Lebanon. Some of them have made peace treaties with Israel, the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu has always boasted that Israel can make peace with the Arab states without making concessions to the Palestinians, and these agreements vindicated him. There is a collective Arab position in the conflict, the Arab Peace Initiative, which was adopted by the Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002. And it offers Israel formal peace and normalization with all 22 members of the Arab League in return for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital city in East Jerusalem. This is the deal of the century. You cannot ask for more than that. Netanyahu has rejected it time and again. The Abraham Accords were a retreat from this collective Arab position and a stab in the back to the Palestinians.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition