The past two years have seen vilifications of Israel galore, by both traditional anti-Zionists and antisemites and by those minted since 7 October 2023. But few in the West have come out with full-throated, public support for Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organisation by the EU and most Western democracies.

Avi Shlaim has been an exception to the rule. Once a professed Zionist, Shlaim has now completed a perverse trajectory in the course of which he seems to have lost his moral compass. And Shlaim is not some ignorant, fashionably keffiyeh-draped American or European sophomore who chants “from the River to the Sea” without knowing which river and which sea. Shlaim is a respected Oxford University historian who is supposed to know something about the Middle East, who knows that Hamas slaughtered some 850 Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 and that it frankly espouses antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Western, and anti-democratic values and policies.

I can personally testify to Shlaim’s past Zionism and not only because I have read his writings closely over the past four to five decades. I lunched with him some twenty years ago in the dining hall of St Antony’s College, where my wife Leah asked him bluntly: “Would you call yourself a Zionist?”

He responded with a simple “yes.”

What did his assent mean? Well, the Earth is parcelled into nation-states, in most of which one people are sovereign. The Dutch have a state, the French have a state, the Czechs have a state, and so on—in fact, the Arabs, by the latest count, have 22 states as the result of a campaign of imperial conquest and proselytising that started in the seventh century. The Jews, dispersed among the nations, suffered oppression and massacre at the hands of Christians and Muslims for two millennia until, at the end of the nineteenth century, they finally woke up and, like so many others, demanded a state of their own. These were the first Zionists. A Zionist is someone who supported the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a Jewish state—as came to pass in 1948—and who sees that state’s continued existence as a moral and political imperative, especially in the light of the Holocaust. The Zionists established their state in “Zion”—one of the Bible’s names for the Land of Israel, which first the Romans, then the Christians and later the Arabs renamed “Palestine”—because it was the land where the Jews lived and exercised sovereignty for much of the time between 1200 BC and the second century AD. The return of an exiled people to their land and the re-establishment of sovereignty was a unique event in human history.

Shlaim understood all this and was a Zionist. In 1964, when he was inducted into the Israeli army as a young conscript and pledged loyalty to the Jewish state, he writes in his 2023 autobiography, Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, that he “felt nationalism in my bones.” In his latest book, Genocide in Gaza, Israel’s Long War on Palestine, a compilation of essays and papers written between 2009 and 2024, he explains, “I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.”

But the “has” in this sentence is misleading and Shlaim, whose grammar is usually faultless, should have deleted the word. For over time, his views changed.