How Israel and Zionism Destroyed the World’s Oldest Jewish Community in Iraq
One World, London,
2023
Witness - The Last Jew of
Babylon - 15 Jul 07 - Part 1
Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of
International Relations at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. He is also an Iraqi
Jew who emigrated at the age of five to Israel before coming to England. It is a
tale of 3 worlds – life in Iraq as an Arab Jew, in Israel as an alienated de-Arabised
Jew and in England as a refugee from the Jewish ‘homeland.’ It is also, on a
personal level, the story of how Zionism destroyed a Jewish community which was
over 2,500 years old, in order to provide a working class for the ‘Jewish’
state to replace the Palestinian refugees.
Baruch Nadel, a journalist on Israel’s
largest selling newspaper Yediot
Aharanot, summed up the situation when he wrote that:
‘Zionism,
not having saved the Jews of Europe found itself after the Second World War
without a useful objective. To give a moral justification to the existence of
their country, the Zionists looked for a way to “save” other Jews, regardless
of their wishes. The only Jews with whom this would be possible were the Jews
of the Arab world’. (Marion Woolfson, p. 198)
The Jewish Chronicle's idea of a review is a full-frontal attack with all the usual distortions!
The book
is an intensely personal story that is symbolic of a far wider tragedy, the
impact of Zionism on Iraq’s Jewish community.
Zionism was a
movement that dedicated itself to one overriding goal since its founding at the
end of the 19th century, the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish
nation/race via the creation of a Jewish state. Shlaim describes how
We in the
Jewish community had much more in common linguistically and culturally with our
Iraq compatriots than with our European co-religionists. We did not feel any
affinity with the Zionist movement and we experienced no inner impulse to
abandon our homeland to go and live in Israel.
Witness - The Last Jew of Babylon - 15 Jul 07 - Part 2
Shlaim writes
of how
Relations that
were shaped over hundreds of years were erased in a few hours…. A history of
more than 2,000 years is liquidated in less than 2,000 hours…. The interaction
of two forces – Zionism and Arab nationalism – forced us to leave our homeland
and transformed our lives beyond recognition.
This tragedy
was personified in the figure of Shlaim’s father, Yusuf. A rich and prosperous merchant in Baghdad, on
first name terms with the ruling elite, his Jewish identity was ethnic cultural
not Zionist nationalist. In Israel Yusuf was reduced to poverty, jobless and living
off his wife, Saida’s earnings as a telephonist in the town hall.
Avi Shlaim
Shlaim
recalls when, in 1963, his Uncle Isaac, who was living in London, travelled to
Israel. Isaac was ‘utterly shocked by the
deterioration in the fortunes of the whole family’.
His mother, who
had owned a luxury villa by the Tigris River in Baghdad, now lived in a tiny
one-room bungalow in Ramat Gan. He remembered his uncles Jacob, Sha’ul and
Joseph as prosperous merchants and men of considerable social stature in
Baghdad. Now he saw for himself how drastically they had gone down in the
world.
Zionism
was not a ‘home-grown product but a
foreign ideology propagated by emissaries from Palestine.’ Shlaim describes
his mother’s ‘emphatic’ reaction when he asked her whether they had had any
Zionist friends in Iraq: ‘No! Zionism is
an Ashkenazi thing. It had nothing to do with us.’
When the
Zionist Committee was given permission to function by the British, the local
Jewish leaders met with the High Commissioner to express their opposition. ‘The Zionists were unable to enlist the
support of any influential Jewish leaders.’
The
largest, richest Jewish community in the Arab world, over 125,000, fled Iraq in
the space of less than one year as five bombs (Naim Giladi in Ben Gurion’s Scandals says there were
six) exploded in places frequented by Jews. It was the bombs which triggered
the stampede.
The Great Synagogue of Baghdad
On 21
July 1950, three months after the first bomb, the Shlaim family, except for his
father who came over later, moved to Israel. The reason according to Saida, was
that life had become too dangerous for Jews in Iraq and the bombs compounded
this sense of insecurity.
Shlaim
describes Iraq’s Jews during the Ottoman era as the ‘most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in culture and
the most prosperous.’ He describes his own childhood as ‘privileged and pampered.’ Among his
parents’ friends was Jamal Baban, Minister of Justice and the wife of the Prime
Minister, Tawfiq al-Suweidi.
By 1880
there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. During the British occupation they
controlled 75% of its imports. In 1935 the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce
consisted of 9 Jews, 4 Muslims and 2 Britons.
By
the end of 1951 all but 6,000 Jews had left in Operation Nehemiah and Ezra. When
they arrived in Israel they were sprayed with DDT like animals as they got off
the plane. Ben Gurion referred to them as ‘savage
hordes’ and Foreign Minister Abba Eban remarked that
The goal must
be to instil in them a Western spirit and not let them drag us into an
unnatural Orient.
In
October 1960 Ben Gurion declared that Jews in Muslim countries had ‘lived in a society that was backward,
corrupt, uneducated and lacking in independence and self respect.’ He
warned that ‘there is the danger that the
coming generation may transform Israel into a Levantine state.’ This
contemptuous racism towards Arab Jews later translated into victory for
Menachem Begin’s Likud in 1977 and the eclipse of what had been Mapai (the
Israeli Labor Party).
Iraq’s Jews
were pauperised overnight. Bankers, lawyers and other professionals were
reduced to begging for casual work. Saida described how, with the passage of
time, Baghdad looked more and more like a ‘lost Eden.’
Iraqi Jewish refugees in a Ma'abara (transit camp), April 1951
Living at
first in tents, they were dispersed mainly to development towns and collective
settlements on the borders of Israel, there to guard against ‘infiltrators’ –
Palestinian refugees trying to return. They had no say in where they went. It
was the defence establishment which decided on the location of the collective
settlements and development towns. Shlaim describes how
Books were
kept with the names of those who left without permission and the lists were
sent to labour exchanges to deny the escapees employment and housing. The
police were asked to set up checkpoints and not to allow them to pass. Such
draconian measures belied Israel’s claim to be a free and egalitarian society.
The Zionist
movement saw a Jewish state in Palestine as a colonial outpost in the Middle
East. In the words of the founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl,
‘We should there form a portion of a rampart
of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’
Zionism was
founded on a contempt for the Jewish diaspora that rivalled that of the
anti-Semites. Zionism began by accepting that Jews did not belong in the
countries where they lived. It agreed with the anti-Semites that ‘exile’ had
produced asocial characteristics in the Jews which in turn had led to
anti-Semitism.
Zionism
literally despised the Jewish Diaspora which it held responsible for all the
ills Jews had suffered from, including the Holocaust. According to Jacob
Klatzkin, the Jews were
a people
disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of
outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of
oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew
Such was the
vehemence of these denunciation that Joachim Doron was moved to describe how:
rather than
take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy
within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and
subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of Zionist sources reveals
criticism so scathing that the
generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. [Journal of Israeli History 8, Classic Zionism].
King Faisal I with Sir Sassoon Eskell, the Jewish first Minister of Finance, on an official tour of duty in Baghdad
The
Ashkenazi leaders of Israel were determined that the Arab Jews must forget
their roots and culture. They were to be shamed and made to forget where they
had come from. Shlaim described how, if he was to identify one key factor that
shaped his relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex.
Shlaim
describes how mortified he was as a child one day when his father approached
him in a playground with other children and began talking to him in Arabic,
forcing him to respond. Shlaim wrote that:
An
impressionable young boy I picked up and internalised the beliefs and biases of
my new environment. I wanted to turn my back on my Arab heritage… Speaking
Arabic did not sit well with the new identity I was adopting.
His
sister Dalia refused to speak Arabic, even at home, ‘because she regarded it as the language of the despised Diaspora.’
The first
lesson in the moulding of the Arab Jews was for them to discard Arabic. Hebrew
was the language with which they would become acculturated and assimilated to
Israel’s western-style culture. In the 1920s and 1930s a similar battle had
been waged against Yiddish – another diaspora language. In the 1940s Ramat Gan
became a battle ground in the country’s language war. A Yiddish language press
was blown up by Hebrew language fanatics.
Shlaim
describes how the sense of alienation he felt as a child translated into poor
performance at school where he was shy and withdrawn, refusing to participate
in and keeping silent.
I internalised
the inferior status that I thought society had assigned to me and I behaved
accordingly…. I felt out of place on account of being a Sephardi, an Oriental,
a Jew from the East, a Mizrahi.
Shlaim
describes one incident in his class where the teacher ordered him to remove his
necklace and ring. Wearing jewellery, especially by men, did not accord with
Zionism’s austere ideology. ‘It was a
deeply humiliating experience… This was my equivalent of being sprayed with
DDT.’ Yet despite this he passed his national exam.
Shlaim and
many other Arab/Misrahi Jews faced the condescending racism of their Ashkenazi
peers. Education Minister, Israeli Labor’s Zalman Aran, believed that poor
performance in school reflected low native intelligence rather than external
socio-economic factors. In 1959 Mizrahi children constituted 50% of their age
group but only 18.8% of those attending academic secondary schools.
The
curriculum was also Zionised. History
was
more related to the project of nation building than
to the disinterested pursuit of the truth…. The rich cultural heritage of the
Arab-Jews was not just ignored, it was erased.
Jewish
history was the history of Jewish suffering, what Salo Baron called the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history.’
At
Israeli universities there is a department of history and a department of
Jewish history devoted to rewriting history according to nationalist imperatives.
At this time the Holocaust did not figure prominently and this situation
pertained until the Eichmann trial.
Once the
Holocaust became part of Israel’s war of propaganda then holocaust history too
began to be rewritten to accord with the Zionist narrative. The heroism of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
was appropriated by Israeli propagandists to portray
other Diaspora Jews as passive and weak in contrast to Israel’s ‘new-Jews.
As I show
in Zionism During the Holocaust, the
Zionist fighters in Warsaw fought despite the instructions of their own youth
movements in Palestine to escape and come to Palestine. The real fight they
were told was against the Arabs not the Nazis.
Yemenite immigrants gather for a photo at Rosh Ha’ayin
The 1950s
was the era of Israeli Labor governments. During this time thousands of babies
were stolen
from Yemenite women to be given to Western Jews whilst the mothers were told
that their babies had died.
Shlaim argues
that anti-Semitism and anti-British feelings became intertwined as Iraq’s Jews were
seen by Arab nationalists, as British agents.
On April
1 1941 an anti-British coup by four senior army officers, the Golden
Square, caused the royal family and regent Abdul Illah to flee to Transjordan. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani an ardent nationalist was
appointed as Prime Minister and it was immediately decided to send an artillery
force to lay siege to the RAF base in Habbaniya. Not until the end of
May did the British regained control.
Immediately
after, on June 1, as British soldiers waited at the gates of Baghdad, a pogrom
broke out against Iraq’s Jews. Up to 189 were killed, hundreds injured and 10
women were raped. Shlaim suggests that keeping the troops outside Baghdad was ‘a fatal miscalculation’ but was it a
miscalculation or something more sinister?
British historian Tony Rocca, in an
investigation for the Sunday Times, found that Sir Kinahan Cornwallis,
Britain’s ambassador, denied the Army’s requests to put down the anti-Jewish
mobs and ‘while the Farhud raged,
Cornwallis went back to his residence and played a game of bridge.” Marion
Woolfson in Prophets in Babylon asked
whether Cornwallis deliberately used the Jews of Baghdad as a foil for
anti-British sentiment. Recounting
‘Farhud’ that ended 2,400 years of Iraqi Jewry
Shlaim
describes how his mother, Saida, learnt that the British had deliberately not
sent their troops into Baghdad and that
the secret
motive of the British was to turn the Jews into scapegoats for the national
humiliation that they themselves had inflicted on the Iraq army and the Iraqi
people.
Yemenite Jews in camps
To the Zionists the Farhud is proof of the enmity of Iraq’s Arabs for their Jewish
brethren. Yet it is a fact that hundreds of Jews were saved by their Moslem
neighbours before troops were sent in by the Regent to clear the mobs. Shlaim
quotes the case of one Muslim woman who stood in front of her neighbour’s gate
with her Colonel husband’s loaded rifle, threatening to shoot anyone who came
near them.
Compared to the horrendous massacres that
were taking place in Europe at around the same time, when thousands of Jews
were being killed in pogroms, what happened in Iraq was minor and one-off by comparison.
Today Zionism has forgiven what happened in Europe since its main enemy is in
the Middle East not Europe, with the neocon fiction about a ‘Judeo-Christian’
heritage.
To the
Zionists this was proof that Arab society was anti-Semitic. According to the Zionist
narrative ‘It was a turning point in
the history of the Jews in Iraq.’ Yet if that is so, why did Iraq’s Jews
take such ‘persuading’ to leave in 1950-1? Shlaim is clearly correct when he
says that anti-Semitism was on the increase but that nonetheless ‘it was more of a foreign import than a
home-grown product.’
Many
Iraqis looked to the Nazis in the 30s and 40s because the Nazis were the enemy
of their enemy, not because they supported Hitler’s doctrines of racial
supremacy. Arabs too were Untermenschen.
It was Britain not Germany that was occupying their country.
However anti-fascism
was also strong among Iraqis. As Orit Bashkin observed, ‘during the years 1941-1952, most of the influential Iraqi
intellectuals were identified with Socialist and Communist goals.’ It was
the Left, that was ‘the most resolute
opponent of Nazism and Fascism.’ [Iraqi Shadows, Iraqi Lights, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism, Ed.
Israel Gershoni, 2014]
Shlaim
says that it was ‘as supporters of the
British that the Jews of Baghdad were murdered and looted.’ This is
undoubtedly true but I have my doubts whether it was ‘an innocent celebration of a Jewish festival (which) became the spark for a barbaric pogrom.’ Shlaim
says that the Jews were dressed up in their finery during the festival of Shavuot and that they were mistaken for
celebrating the return of the British and royal family. Other reports suggest
that a Jewish delegation had gone to the airport to welcome the Regent back.
Far from
there being a pattern of attacks against Iraqi Jews, as the Zionists argue, there
had been no such attack for centuries. The Iraqi Jewish leaders saw the Farhud as ‘an aberration’
In the
wake of the Nakba and because a steady number of Jews were leaving Iraq
illegally, the Iraqi parliament on 9 March 1950 passed a Denaturalisation Law
which allowed Iraqi Jews to relinquish their citizenship and emigrate. At first
very few Jews registered and even those who did were hedging their bets. On the
first day after the law passed, just 3 people registered. But then the first
bomb went off outside the American Cultural Centre and Library on March 19. Yet
by April 7 just 126 Jews had registered. Then on April 8 a grenade was thrown
at the Dar al-Bayda, a Jewish owned coffee shop. Four Jews were injured and the
next day 3,400 Jews turned up to register.
It was widely
suspected that the Israeli government had come to an agreement with Nuri e-Said
that in exchange for Iraq’s Jews being allowed to emigrate, Iraq could keep
their assets. An advocate of such an agreement was Mordechai ben Porat, the
leader of the Iraqi Zionists and later a member of the Knesset.
By the
end of 1950 90,000 Jews had registered to leave. On 14 January 1951 a hand
grenade was thrown into the courtyard of the Masuda Shemtov synagogue. Three Jews
were killed and 25 were injured. By the beginning of March 1951 105,400 Jews
had registered to leave. But then Prime Minister Nuri e-Said introduced a law
by which all Jewish assets were frozen and then confiscated and shops were
closed and sealed by the police.
A couple
more bombs were thrown at Jewish owned enterprises and by the end of 1951 over
120,000 Jews had registered to leave.
Chapter 7
Baghdad Bombshell, takes up the story
that the Zionist movement in Iraq, decided to ‘encourage’ those Jews who were
unwilling to emigrate to Israel of their own accord by exploding bombs in
places Jews frequented. This was first
broken by Haolem Hazeh and Israel’s Black Panthers and then taken
up by authors David Hirst, Marion Woolfson, Abbas Shiblak and Naim Giladi,
The
Zionists have denied any role in the setting off of bombs in Baghdad but they
have not explained why they were hiding caches of weapons that could have
equipped an infantry company. As Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev
wrote:
It
is significant the rumor arose at all, and that it was persistently repeated,
even by Iraqi Jews. Obviously the idea was not unthinkable.’ [Tom Segev, The First Israelis']
When Iraq
hanged Yusuf Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom for having taken part in the bombing
campaign, Israel mounted a campaign of support for them among Iraqi Jews. As a
classified document to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett admitted, Iraqi
immigrants in the transit camps greeted the hangings with the attitude ‘That is God’s revenge on the movement that
brought us to such depths.’
It is indisputable
that the bombs played a major part in the emigration of the Jewish community.
The question is whether or not the Zionist underground played any part.
Shlaim’s research suggests that 3 of the bombs were the work of the Zionists in
the person of Yusuf Basri, who was arrested on 10 June 1951. Traces of TNT were
found in his car. Basri’s controller was an Israeli intelligence agent, Max
Binnet. In all 12 arms caches were uncovered.
Shlaim
uncovered in the course of his research vital new evidence of Zionist
involvement in the bombing campaign in the form of a new witness Yaacov
Karkoukli, who served several prison sentences in Iraq for his involvement in
Zionist activities.
Karkoukli
was a fanatical Zionist who agreed with the bombing campaign and supplied new
and important information as to who was responsible. Shlaim concludes that the
bomb at the Dar al-Beyda on 8 April 1950 was carried out by the right-wing
Iraqi nationalist party Istiqlal and the others by the Zionists or, in the case
of the Masuda Shemtov bombing, at their instigation by bribing an Iraqi
policeman, Salem al-Quraishi to have it carried out by one Salih al-Haidari’.
Shlaim
asked Karkoukli whether that meant that Zionist activists had deliberately set
off the bombs to which he replied in the affirmative. Karkoukli also confirmed
that the Israeli government had given tacit consent to the confiscation of the
property of Iraq’s Jews, mentioning that Israel intended to use this to offset
claims by Palestinian refugees.
Shlaim
also uncovered an Iraqi Police Report into the bombing obtaining one page of a 258
page document. Shlaim writes that
this report
constitutes undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that helped
terminate the two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.
The
report pointed to the involvement of Zionist agents in the bombing, coupled
with the fact that Zionist activist Yusef Basri led the Iraqi police from one
arms cache to another.
The
Zionist movement in Iraq had both opportunity, means and motive to carry out
the bombing campaign. We know from the Lavon Affair shortly after, in
which Israeli agents had been caught planting bombs in Egypt, that Israel had
no compunction about committing terrorist acts in neighbouring countries. They
did this despite the fact that it would inevitably rebound on Egypt’s large
Jewish community and cause hostility and suspicion against them.
Zionism rewrote
the history of Arab Jews so that the ‘Jewish’ state became the climax of their
dreams, rescuing them from centuries of pogroms and discrimination. Accordingly
the Arab Jews eagerly came to Israel in order to achieve their liberation.
This
narrative is a post-facto self-serving justification. The Jews of the Arab
world had lived in relative peace and harmony with their fellows. The Arab East
had been a place of refuge for Jews fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition.
Maimonedes, the greatest of Jewish philosophers, had sought refuge in Egypt as
Saladdin’s personal physician. Jewish-Moslem relations in Spain had been
harmonious in comparison with the Christian attacks on them.
To listen
to Zionist and neocon propagandists you would be forgiven for thinking that the
Holocaust had occurred in Arabia not
Europe. That is why at the 2015 World Zionist Congress Netanyahu blamed
the Mufti of Jerusalem for inspiring Hitler to perpetrate the Holocaust.
The story
of how it was the Muslims who fought
with the Jews against the Crusaders at the Battles of Hatin and Haifa and how Saladdin’s
capture of Jerusalem enabled the Jews who had been expelled to return has been
erased from Zionism’s historical memory. Even Zionist historian Bernard Lewis
had to admit
that ‘There is nothing in Islamic history
to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the
Nazi Holocaust.’
It has
suited the needs of the Israeli state to rewrite the history of Arab relations
with the Jews as one of enmity and persecution. However it wasn’t enmity
between Jew and Arab that explains the Israeli-Arab conflict but the imposition
by British colonialism of Zionism on the Middle East and Palestine. It is this that
explains the deterioration of relations between Arab Jews and their non-Jewish
neighbours.
Above all
it was the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the defeat of the Arab
armies that caused the deterioration in relations between Jew and Arab in the Arab
countries. As a Jewish State Israel purported to represent Jews the world over,
including those living in the Arab countries. Jews in many of these countries were
singled out as a client intermediary group, creating suspicion and hostility..
Zionism made
it impossible for Jewish communities to survive in the Arab world. Not only did
Israel expel ¾ million Palestinians in 1948 but they did it in the name of all
Jews. Not surprisingly many Iraqis questioned the loyalty of Iraq’s Jews. When UN
Resolution 181 was passed in November 1947 the General Council of Iraq’s Jews sent
the UN a telegram opposing the creation of a Jewish state.
Shlaim
describes how a ‘powerful popular wave of
hostility towards both Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through
the Arab world’ after the defeat and expulsion of the Palestinians. Britain’s
unpopular ruler, Nuri e-Said, ‘actively
whipped up popular hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.’ Zionism was outlawed and this marked the
start of the official persecution of the Jews. Shlaim describes how his mother
‘singled out the birth of Israel as the
decisive point in the crisis of Iraqi Jews.’
If Israel
and the UK were at war imagine how Jews here would be treated. One only has to
look at how the United States treated its Japanese citizens during WW2 after
the attack on Pearl Harbour to understand that the hostility between Israel and
the Arab countries was bound to impact adversely on the Jews of those
countries.
The final
part of the book concerns the decision of his mother to send her son to England
to continue his education. On 7 September 1961 Shlaim set sail from Haifa to
Marseilles and he was accepted as a pupil at the Jewish Free School in London.
It was now
that Shlaim began to blossom academically. He describes how ‘considerable glamour and kudos’ attached
at that time to being an Israeli yet because he was an ‘Israeli of the wrong kind’ he was left in something of a quandary
as his different identities collided.
Shlaim described
how Jewish history that was taught at JFS focussed on persecution and martyrdom
whereas Israeli history emphasised heroism and redemption: ‘the history we were taught at school was scarcely distinguishable from
Zionist propaganda.’ One suspects
that the same curriculum is still being followed today.
Shlaim concludes
from the experiences of his family that
there was another category of victims of the Zionist
project: the Jews of the Arab lands…. Unlike Europe Iraq did not have a ‘Jewish
problem’…. Zionism changed all that. By endowing Judaism with a territorial
dimension… it accentuated the difference between Jews and Muslims in Arab
spaces… Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the
Jews of the East into strangers in their own land. In 1947-49 it was not only
the land of Palestine that was partitioned but also the past.
Shlaim
who is now a supporter of a one democratic state solution notes how this would
also renew the relevance of the Arab Jew. In his concluding remarks Shlaim
notes how ‘apartheid in the twenty-first
century is simply not sustainable.’
If I have
one criticism of this book it is that we need a Dramatis Personae of all the friends and family who make an
appearance. At times I found it difficult to follow the many different stories.
Tony Greenstein
