Avi Shlaim FBA (born 31 October 1945) is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent.

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.

[8] He married the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration.

"[10] 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.

[13] In August 2015, he was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's association with alleged antisemites.

[14] In Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, Shlaim unveils "undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks" which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951.

[15] [16] In a review for the Journal of Refugee Studies, Anne Irfan described this book as "a hybrid genre of policital-social history, family history, and personal memoir" and reminiscent of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) by Rashid Khalidi, as well as having "striking similarities" to Edward Said's memoir Out of Place (1999).

In a negative review of Israel and Palestine, he described it as having an anti-Israel and pro-Arab bias, asserting that Shlaim distorted records to give a one-sided portrayal of history.