From the first pages, we know that the Guardian contributor is an Iraqi Jew-albeit Israel-born and Britain-bred-and she doesn’t hide the fact that her politics lie on the left. Just as Shabi is straightforward about the tight focus of Not the Enemy, she is also honest about her own background. Both sides conveniently ignore the Mizrahim, a group that has been rooted in the region for millennia, veiling the Middle Eastern face of Israel. Adhering to this strict narrative allows Israel to depict violence against the state as an attack on the Western world following this script, the Arab world can align the “European” country as a transplant that must be rooted out. The impasse is the sharp dichotomy of the “enemy”-the European, the West, pitted against the Oriental, the East. She writes: “This book is focused on the stifled, small-voice analysis seeking to break this stalemate formula.” Fortunately, Shabi has taken care to illuminate it in an old-fashioned thesis sentence. It is simple, a delicate foundation for hundreds of pages.

The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. She exaggerates how good things were for the Jews of the Orient, they moan.īut it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point. Shabi neglects the animosity that existed between Jews and Muslims long before 1948, the critics say. Some critics have faulted Rachel Shabi’s We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands as one-sided.

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