Welcome to Card Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

I am privileged today to be joined by Professor Avi Schlem. He is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University

and the author of the new memoir, Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab Jew available from

One World. Professor Schlam, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

You know, I had always read,

because in descriptions and bios of you, it says you are a British Israeli historian or Israeli British, but this is not quite accurate, as we find out in this book, or it leaves out

one of the three worlds that is described in your book.

And your book is in many ways about a lost world, the original world that you came from.

It is about the world part of the Jews of Iraq in the era before the founding and immediately after the founding of the state of Israel.

And you say that one of the purposes of your memoir is to recover and reanimate a unique Jewish

civilization of the Near East, which was blown away in the first half of the 20th century

by the unforgiving winds of nationalism. So perhaps you could begin by introducing us to this first

world. Thank you. So the three words of the title, Baghdad, where I lived up to the age of five.

I was born in 1945 to a Jewish family. The second world is Ramad Gan, a town in Israel near Tel Aviv,

where I went to school from the age of 5 to 15.

And because I didn't do well at school and was about to be thrown out of high school,

my parents sent me to school in London from the age of 15 to 18.

And the book ends when I was 18, but there is a very long epilogue that traces the

evolution of my views about Israel up to the present day.

And today I'm a supporter of one state, one democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens.

So to answer your question about the first world, that's Baghdad, 1945 to 1950,

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