It is a recent concept for me, the Arab-Jew; i.e., people who were Arab in nationality and culture and Jewish in religion. Shlaim uses his New Israeli Historian lens to look at his family history, a combination that allows for questioning received wisdom. He acknowledges that his family's history in Iraq is an upper class one and recommends a novel to expand the narrative to working class Iraqi-Jews, a novel based on experience and research: Victoria by Sami Michael. I've requested it from InterLibrary Loan.

The three worlds are Iraq, Israel, and London. The Iraq experience was mostly idyllic, the experience in Israel disorienting, in London a time for regaining self-confidence. In Israel, Arab-Jews were not treated as equal to Ashkenazi Jews, the latter forming the dominant society and seeking to assimilate all others in the quest to create national unity out of the mix of immigrants.

His family's experience in Iraq gives him hope that a one-state solution could work, one state where all citizens are equal. The last sentence of the book is ". . . I believe that nations, like individuals, are capable of acting rationally--after they have exhausted all other alternatives" (302).