Avi Shlaim

Avi ShlaimFBA (Hebrew: אבי שליים; Arabic: أفي شلايم; born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent. He is one of Israel's "New Historians", a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.

Born in 1945, his family emigrated to Israel in 1951 during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. He later moved to England in 1966 and studied and taught international relations at the University of Reading. He began studying the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 1982, when 1948 Arab–Israeli War archives were unclassified by the Israeli government. Shlaim has an extensive bibliography and has contributed to various newspapers and publishers.

Shlaim’s scholarship has been praised by historians and commentators, including Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris and Anne Irfan, especially for his use of newly available sources and reinterpretation of Israeli history, Zionism and Palestine. Others like Yoav Gelber, Joseph Heller and Efraim Karsh say his conclusions reflect political bias that leads to flaws in his methodology and interpretation.