Hello I'm very honored today to be joined by a very distinguished guest professor

Avi Slame I know very many of you have been very excited I gave people a heads up

that I'm talking to you today I mean. So thank you so much for joining me.

For those who don't know, very distinguished historians, specialist of course in the Middle East,

Israel, Zionism. And in the current horror, one of the best pieces of work that I've certainly read was by you in Prospect magazine, and that went viral.

Now, I mean, first it's a huge honor to be joined by you so thank you so much for joining us.

I just want to start by talking about yourself if that's okay.

Because you've got a very fascinating and relevant backstory and I think we'll end up going full circle with this actually by the end.

You're Jewish and you were born in Iraq.

So I just want to give you to tell us just a bit about that history because it's obviously extremely relevant.

I was born in Baghdad in 1945 to a Jewish family.

And when I was five years old, my family moved to Israel.

So I went to school in Israel and I recently wrote an autobiography which is called Three

Worlds Memoirs of an Arab Jew. So today I describe myself as an Arab Jew and this is a very

controversial term in Israel.

Israelis say that it's a contradiction in terms.

It's an ontological impossibility.

If you're a Jew, you cannot be an Arab, and if you're an Arab, you cannot be a

Jew. Well, I beg to differ, and I can think of no better way of describing my initial identity as that of an Arab Jew.

We were Arab Jews in Baghdad.

We spoke Arabic at home.

We spoke only Arabic at home.

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