April 22 2026
Professor Arbella Bet-Shlimon's article has shaken up academic circles.
Her article is not simply a study of how Assyrians have been represented in modern scholarship; it is an indictment of the way an entire academic tradition has often treated Assyrians with suspicion, contempt, and dismissal. Her central argument is that the historical suffering of the Assyrian people has not only been neglected in political life, but has also been distorted within the field of Middle East studies itself, where some scholars have repeated narratives that minimize violence against Assyrians while portraying them as the authors of their own misfortune.
At the heart of her argument is the way the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq have been written about. Bet-Shlimon explains that one of the most influential accounts of those events was published in 1974 by Khaldun Husry, whose article became a standard reference for later historians. In that article, Husry dismissed Assyrian recollections of the massacres as “propaganda of the victims,” a phrase Bet-Shlimon treats as deeply revealing. For her, this language represents more than a careless choice of words; it exposes a pattern in which the testimony of survivors is treated not as evidence, but as something inherently unreliable because it comes from those who suffered. Rather than beginning with the violence committed against Assyrians, Husry’s narrative shifts attention toward the supposed faults of the Assyrians themselves, portraying them as arrogant, politically reckless, and responsible for provoking the state that later turned against them.
Bet-Shlimon argues that the significance of Husry’s article lies not only in what it said, but in how widely it was accepted. She points out that many later scholars repeated his conclusions without seriously questioning his assumptions or his hostility toward the people he was describing. Through repetition, a deeply problematic interpretation of the massacres became embedded in mainstream academic writing. The result, she says, was that an act of mass violence was transformed into a debatable episode in which the victims themselves remained under suspicion. What should have been understood as a massacre was instead reframed as a political crisis in which Assyrian suffering became secondary to arguments about state formation and nationalism.
The article also places this scholarship in a wider intellectual context. Bet-Shlimon notes that Husry’s work was published by Stanford Shaw, a historian whose own reputation was shaped by denial of the Armenian genocide. She sees this connection as important because it shows that the treatment of Assyrians was not isolated, but part of a broader pattern in which the suffering of indigenous Christian communities in the Middle East was repeatedly minimized. According to Bet-Shlimon, these narratives often followed the same logic: Christian minorities were portrayed as people who had become too closely tied to foreign powers, and violence against them was then rationalized as an unfortunate but understandable response to colonial entanglement. In this framework, the victims of violence were not seen primarily as victims at all, but as politically compromised communities whose tragedies could be explained away.
A major part of the author’s critique concerns the way Assyrian identity itself has been treated in academic literature. She observes that many scholars do not merely write about Assyrians; they question whether Assyrians should even be understood as a legitimate people. Again and again, she notes, scholarly works describe Assyrians as people who only “claim” descent from ancient Assyria, or suggest that their identity was largely created by Western missionaries in the nineteenth century. Bet-Shlimon argues that this kind of language imposes a level of scrutiny on Assyrians that few other groups are forced to endure. Instead of treating Assyrian identity as a living historical reality that evolved over time, some scholars have treated it as something artificial, suspicious, or ideologically constructed in a way that invalidates it. For her, this reflects a deeper prejudice in which Assyrians are approached not as a people whose history deserves to be understood, but as a people whose existence must first be questioned.
She is especially critical of scholars who claim that this skepticism is simply part of a broader critique of nationalism. Bet-Shlimon does not deny that nationalism can and should be examined critically, but she argues that in the case of Assyrians this critique has often become selective and cruel. Rather than analyzing Assyrian identity in the same way scholars analyze other modern identities, some writers single out Assyrians as uniquely problematic, treating their historical memory as delusion and their communal self-understanding as fantasy. She believes that this often allows scholars to present themselves as intellectually sophisticated while reproducing older forms of colonial thinking. In her view, what appears to be detached scholarship can sometimes become a way of dismissing the voices of a vulnerable minority.
Underlying the article is a larger warning about the consequences of bad scholarship. Bet-Shlimon argues that when historians repeat distorted narratives about vulnerable peoples, the damage is not merely academic. The way atrocities are remembered shapes whether they are acknowledged, whether justice is possible, and whether a people can defend their place in the present. For Assyrians, whose history has been marked by genocide, displacement, and continuing insecurity, the denial or minimization of past suffering has immediate consequences. The struggle over historical interpretation is therefore not simply about the past; it is part of the struggle over whether Assyrians will be recognized in the present at all.
Ultimately, what Bet-Shlimon is saying is that the problem is not only that Assyrians have been victims of violence, but that they have too often been denied the dignity of being believed. Her article challenges scholars to examine how prejudice can survive even in academic writing, and how intellectual authority can sometimes reinforce the very erasures it claims to expose. She is asking readers to see that the writing of history is never neutral when it concerns people whose survival has so often depended on whether others are willing to recognize their suffering.
