Avi Shlaim

On 27 September 2017, Shlaim was awarded the British Academy Medal "for lifetime achievement".

Shlaim is a member of the UK Labour Party. In August 2015, he was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's association with alleged antisemites.

Shlaim is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, and signed an open letter to that paper in January 2009 condemning Israel's role in the Gaza War.

Israeli historian Benny Morris has harshly criticised Shlaim for what he claims is Shlaim's anti-Israel and pro-Arab bias. Morris accused Shlaim of consistently portraying Palestinian Arabs as the victims and their cause as righteous while vilifying the Zionist cause and Israel, and of distorting and omitting crucial information to give a one-sided portrayal of history. In a 2009 New Republic article titled "Derisionist History," Morris characterised Shlaim's work as full of "careless and inflammatory hyperbole" against Israel, while being "mealy-mouthed, hesitant, disingenuous, and laudatory" toward the Arabs.

In 2006, Shlaim was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Shlaim taught international relations at Reading University, specialising in European issues. His academic interest in the history of Israel began in 1982, when Israeli government archives about the 1948 Arab–Israeli War were opened, an interest that deepened when he became a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford in 1987. He was Alastair Buchan Reader in international relations at Oxford from 1987 to 1996 and director of graduate studies in that subject in 1993–1995 and 1998–2001. He held a British Academy research readership in 1995–97 and a research professorship in 2003–2006.

He married the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1966, and holds dual British and Israeli nationality.

Shlaim grew up in Ramat Gan. He left Israel for England at the age of 16 to study at a Jewish school. He returned to Israel in 1964 to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, then moved back to England in 1966 to read history at Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained his BA degree in 1969. He obtained an MSc (Econ.) in International Relations in 1970 from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Reading. He was a lecturer and reader in politics in the University of Reading from 1970 to 1987.

Avraham "Avi" Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli-British historian, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and fellow of the British Academy. 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.

In the 1930s, the situation of the Jews in Iraq deteriorated, with persecution of Jews further increasing in 1948, the year of Israel's independence. In 1951, during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Shlaim's family, along with most of Iraq's Jews, registered to emigrate to Israel and forfeit their Iraqi citizenship. A subsequent law ruled that all those who left forfeited all rights, including property rights. The Shlaim family lost all their property. His father crossed the border illegally on a mule, while Shlaim, his mother and sisters flew to Cyprus and from there were airlifted to Israel. The family reunited in Israel.