    THE JEWS OF IRAQ By Naeim Giladi

    I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the
    American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic
    lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to
    leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more
    Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace
    initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first
    prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it
    because I was part of it.

    My Story

    Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic,
    and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was
    1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for
    smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then
    on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.

    I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers did
    everything they could to extract the names of my co-conspirators. Fifty
    years later, pain still throbs in my right toe - a reminder of the day my
    captors used pliers to remove my toenails. On another occasion, they
    hauled me to the flat roof of the prison, stripped me bare on a frigid
    January day, then threw a bucket of cold water over me. I was left
    there, chained to the railing, for hours. But I never once considered
    giving them the information they wanted. I was a true believer.

    My preoccupation during what I refer to as my "two years in hell" was
    with survival and escape. I had no interest then in the broad sweep of
    Jewish history in Iraq even though my family had been part of it right
    from the beginning. We were originally Haroons, a large and important
    family of the "Babylonian Diaspora." My ancestors had settled in Iraq
    more than 2,600 years ago - 600 years before Christianity, and 1,200 years
    before Islam. I am descended from Jews who built the tomb of Yehezkel, a
    Jewish prophet of pre-biblical times. My town, where I was born in 1929,
    is Hillah, not far from the ancient site of Babylon.

    The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and
    Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance - and
    opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became Iraq,
    experienced periods of oppression and discrimination depending on the
    rulers of the period, their general trajectory over two and one-half
    millennia was upward. Under the late Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish
    social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities
    flourished without outside interference, and Jews were prominent in
    government and business.

    As I sat there in my cell, unaware that a death sentence soon would be
    handed down against me, I could not have recounted any personal
    grievances that my family members would have lodged against the
    government or the Muslim majority. Our family had been treated well and
    had prospered, first as farmers with some 50,000 acres devoted to rice,
    dates and Arab horses. Then, with the Ottomans, we bought and purified
    gold that was shipped to Istanbul and turned into coinage. The Turks
    were responsible in fact for changing our name to reflect our
    occupation - we became Khalaschi, meaning "Makers of Pure."

    I did not volunteer the information to my father that I had joined the
    Zionist underground. He found out several months before I was arrested
    when he saw me writing Hebrew and using words and expressions unfamiliar
    to him. He was even more surprised to learn that, yes, I had decided I
    would soon move to Israel myself. He was scornful. "You'll come back
    with your tail between your legs," he predicted.

    About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952,
    most because they had been lied-to and put into a panic by what I came
    to learn were Zionist bombs. But my mother and father were among the
    6,000 who did not go to Israel. Although physically I never did return
    to Iraq - that bridge had been burned in any event - my heart has made the
    journey there many, many times. My father had it right.

    I was imprisoned at the military camp of Abu-Greib, about 7 miles from
    Baghdad. When the military court handed down my sentence of death by
    hanging, I had nothing to lose by attempting the escape I had been
    planning for many months.

    It was a strange recipe for an escape: a dab of butter, an orange peel,
    and some army clothing that I had asked a friend to buy for me at a flea
    market. I deliberately ate as much bread as I could to put on fat in
    anticipation of the day I became 18, when they could formally charge me
    with a crime and attach the 50-pound ball and chain that was standard
    prisoner issue.

    Later, after my leg had been shackled, I went on a starvation diet that
    often left me weak-kneed. The pat of butter was to lubricate my leg in
    preparation for extricating it from the metal band. The orange peel I
    surreptitiously stuck into the lock on the night of my planned escape,
    having studied how it could be placed in such a way as to keep the lock
    from closing.

    As the jailers turned to go after locking up, I put on the old army
    issue that was indistinguishable from what they were wearing - a long,
    green coat and a stocking cap that I pulled down over much of my face
    (it was winter). Then I just quietly opened the door and joined the
    departing group of soldiers as they strode down the hall and outside,
    and I offered a "good night" to the shift guard as I left. A friend with
    a car was waiting to speed me away.

    Later I made my way to the new state of Israel, arriving in May, 1950.
    My passport had my name in Arabic and English, but the English couldn't
    capture the "kh" sound, so it was rendered simply as Klaski. At the
    border, the immigration people applied the English version, which had an
    Eastern European, Ashkenazi ring to it. In one way, this "mistake" was
    my key to discovering very soon just how the Israeli caste system
    worked.

    They asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was the
    son of a farmer; I knew all the problems of the farm, so I volunteered
    to go to Dafnah, a farming kibbutz in the high Galilee. I only lasted a
    few weeks. The new immigrants were given the worst of everything. The
    food was the same, but that was the only thing that everyone had in
    common. For the immigrants, bad cigarettes, even bad toothpaste.
    Everything. I left.

    Then, through the Jewish Agency, I was advised to go to al-Majdal (later
    renamed Ashkelon), an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, very close to
    the Mediterranean. The Israeli government planned to turn it into a
    farmers' city, so my farm background would be an asset there.

    When I reported to the Labor Office in al-Majdal, they saw that I could
    read and write Arabic and Hebrew and they said that I could find a
    good-paying job with the Military Governor's office. The Arabs were
    under the authority of these Israeli Military Governors. A clerk handed
    me a bunch of forms in Arabic and Hebrew. Now it dawned on me. Before
    Israel could establish its farmers' city, it had to rid al-Majdal of its
    indigenous Palestinians. The forms were petitions to the United Nations
    Inspectors asking for transfer out of Israel to Gaza, which was under
    Egyptian control.

    I read over the petition. In signing, the Palestinian would be saying
    that he was of sound mind and body and was making the request for
    transfer free of pressure or duress. Of course, there was no way that
    they would leave without being pressured to do so. These families had
    been there hundreds of years, as farmers, primitive artisans, weavers.
    The Military Governor prohibited them from pursuing their livelihoods,
    just penned them up until they lost hope of resuming their normal lives.
    That's when they signed to leave.

    I was there and heard their grief. "Our hearts are in pain when we look
    at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us
    go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if
    we leave His trees untended." I asked the Military Governor to give them
    relief, but he said, "No, we want them to leave."

    I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those
    Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force-just
    put in trucks and dumped in Gaza. About four thousand people were driven
    from al-Majdal in one way or another. The few who remained were
    collaborators with the Israeli authorities.

    Subsequently, I wrote letters trying to get a government job elsewhere
    and I got many immediate responses asking me to come for an interview.
    Then they would discover that my face didn't match my Polish/Ashkenazi
    name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I
    didn't, they would ask where I came by a Polish name. Desperate for a
    good job, I would usually say that I thought my great-grandfather was
    from Poland. I was advised time and again that "we'll give you a call."

    Eventually, three to four years after coming to Israel, I changed my
    name to Giladi, which is close to the code name, Gilad, that I had in
    the Zionist underground. Klaski wasn't doing me any good anyway, and my
    Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didn't
    go with my origins as an Iraqi Jew.

    I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned
    personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned
    at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The
    principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a
    supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the
    urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews
    to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were
    driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.

    And I began to find out about the barbaric methods used to rid the
    fledgling state of as many Palestinians as possible. The world recoils
    today at the thought of bacteriological warfare, but Israel was probably
    the first to actually use it in the Middle East. In the 1948 war, Jewish
    forces would empty Arab villages of their populations, often by threats,
    sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to
    the rest. To make sure the Arabs couldn't return to make a fresh life
    for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery
    bacteria into the water wells.

    Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, has
    written and spoken about the use of bacteriological agents. According to
    Mileshtin, Moshe Dayan, a division commander at the time, gave orders in
    1948 to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and
    render water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria.

    Acre was so situated that it could practically defend itself with one
    big gun, so the Haganah put bacteria into the spring that fed the town.
    The spring was called Capri and it ran from the north near a kibbutz.
    The Haganah put typhus bacteria into the water going to Acre, the people
    got sick, and the Jewish forces occupied Acre. This worked so well that
    they sent a Haganah division dressed as Arabs into Gaza, where there
    were Egyptian forces, and the Egyptians caught them putting two cans of
    bacteria, typhus and dysentery, into the water supply in wanton
    disregard of the civilian population. "In war, there is no sentiment,"
    one of the captured Haganah men was quoted as saying.

    My activism in Israel began shortly after I received a letter from the
    Socialist/Zionist Party asking me to help with their Arabic newspaper.
    When I showed up at their offices at Central House in Tel Aviv, I asked
    around to see just where I should report. I showed the letter to a
    couple of people there and, without even looking at it, they would
    motion me away with the words, "Room No. 8." When I saw that they
    weren't even reading the letter, I inquired of several others. But the
    response was the same, "Room No. 8," with not a glance at the paper I
    put in front of them.

    So I went to Room 8 and saw that it was the Department of Jews from
    Islamic Countries. I was disgusted and angry. Either I am a member of
    the party or I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different
    politics because I am an Arab Jew? It's segregation, I thought, just
    like a Negroes' Department. I turned around and walked out. That was the
    start of my open protests. That same year I organized a demonstration in
    Ashkelon against Ben Gurion's racist policies and 10,000 people turned
    out.

    There wasn't much opportunity for those of us who were second class
    citizens to do much about it when Israel was on a war footing with
    outside enemies. After the 1967 war, I was in the Army myself and served
    in the Sinai when there was continued fighting along the Suez Canal. But
    the cease-fire with Egypt in 1970 gave us our opening. We took to the
    streets and organized politically to demand equal rights. If it's our
    country, if we were expected to risk our lives in a border war, then we
    expected equal treatment.

    We mounted the struggle so tenaciously and received so much publicity
    that the Israeli government tried to discredit our movement by calling
    us "Israel's Black Panthers." They were thinking in racist terms,
    really, in assuming the Israeli public would reject an organization
    whose ideology was being compared to that of radical blacks in the
    United States. But we saw that what we were doing was no different than
    what blacks in the United States were fighting against-segregation,
    discrimination, unequal treatment. Rather than reject the label, we
    adopted it proudly. I had posters of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
    Nelson Mandela and other civil rights activists plastered all over my
    office.

    With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Israeli-condoned Sabra and
    Shatilla massacres, I had had enough of Israel. I became a United States
    citizen and made certain to revoke my Israeli citizenship. I could never
    have written and published my book in Israel, not with the censorship
    they would impose.

    Even in America, I had great difficulty finding a publisher because many
    are subject to pressures of one kind or another from Israel and its
    friends. I ended up paying $60,000 from my own pocket to publish Ben
    Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews,
    virtually the entire proceeds from having sold my house in Israel.

    I still was afraid that the printer would back out or that legal
    proceedings would be initiated to stop its publication, like the Israeli
    government did in an attempt to prevent former Mossad case officer
    Victor Ostrovsky from publishing his first book. Ben Gurion's Scandals
    had to be translated into English from two languages. I wrote in Hebrew
    when I was in Israel and hoped to publish the book there, and I wrote in
    Arabic when I was completing the book after coming to the U.S. But I was
    so worried that something would stop publication that I told the printer
    not to wait for the translations to be thoroughly checked and proofread.
    Now I realize that the publicity of a lawsuit would just have created a
    controversial interest in the book.

    I am using bank vault storage for the valuable documents that back up
    what I have written. These documents, including some that I illegally
    copied from the archives at Yad Vashem, confirm what I saw myself, what
    I was told by other witnesses, and what reputable historians and others
    have written concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace
    overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of violence and death
    inflicted by Jews on Jews in the cause of creating Israel.

    The Riots of 1941

    If, as I have said, my family in Iraq was not persecuted personally and
    I knew no deprivation as a member of the Jewish minority, what led me to
    the steps of the gallows as a member of the Zionist underground? To
    answer that question, it is necessary to establish the context of the
    massacre that occurred in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, when several hundred
    Iraqi Jews were killed in riots involving junior officers of the Iraqi
    army. I was 12 years of age and many of those killed were my friends. I
    was angry, and very confused.

    What I didn't know at the time was that the riots most likely were
    stirred up by the British, in collusion with a pro-British Iraqi
    leadership.

    With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following WW I, Iraq came under
    British "tutelage." Amir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein who had led the
    Arab Revolt against the Ottoman sultan, was brought in from Mecca by the
    British to become King of Iraq in 1921. Many Jews were appointed to key
    administrative posts, including that of economics minister. Britain
    retained final authority over domestic and external affairs. Britain's
    pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however, triggered a growing
    anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries. Writing
    at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain's Ambassador in
    Baghdad, noted that, while before WW I Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more
    favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then
    "Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness
    has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist."

    King Faisal died in 1933. He was succeeded by his son Ghazi, who died in
    a motor car accident in 1939. The crown then passed to Ghazi's
    4-year-old son, Faisal II, whose uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was named regent.
    Abd al-Ilah selected Nouri el-Said as prime minister. El-Said supported
    the British and, as hatred of the British grew, he was forced from
    office in March 1940 by four senior army officers who advocated Iraq's
    independence from Britain. Calling themselves the Golden Square, the
    officers compelled the regent to name as prime minister Rashid Ali
    al-Kilani, leader of the National Brotherhood party.

    The time was 1940 and Britain was reeling from a strong German
    offensive. Al-Kilani and the Golden Square saw this as their opportunity
    to rid themselves of the British once and for all. Cautiously they began
    to negotiate for German support, which led the pro-British regent Abd
    al-Ilah to dismiss al-Kilani in January 1941. By April, however, the
    Golden Square officers had reinstated the prime minister.

    This provoked the British to send a military force into Basra on April
    12, 1941. Basra, Iraq's second largest city, had a Jewish population of
    30,000. Most of these Jews made their livings from import/export, money
    changing, retailing, as workers in the airports, railways, and ports, or
    as senior government employees.

    On the same day, April 12, supporters of the pro-British regent notified
    the Jewish leaders that the regent wanted to meet with them. As was
    their custom, the leaders brought flowers for the regent. Contrary to
    custom, however, the cars that drove them to the meeting place dropped
    them off at the site where the British soldiers were concentrated.

    Photographs of the Jews appeared in the following day's newspapers with
    the banner "Basra Jews Receive British Troops with Flowers." That same
    day, April 13, groups of angry Arab youths set about to take revenge
    against the Jews. Several Muslim notables in Basra heard of the plan and
    calmed things down. Later, it was learned that the regent was not in
    Basra at all and that the matter was a provocation by his pro-British
    supporters to bring about an ethnic war in order to give the British
    army a pretext to intervene.

    The British continued to land more forces in and around Basra. On May 7,
    1941, their Gurkha unit, composed of Indian soldiers from that ethnic
    group, occupied Basra's el-Oshar quarter, a neighborhood with a large
    Jewish population. The soldiers, led by British officers, began looting.
    Many shops in the commercial district were plundered. Private homes were
    broken into. Cases of attempted rape were reported. Local residents,
    Jews and Muslims, responded with pistols and old rifles, but their
    bullets were no match for the soldiers' Tommy Guns.

    Afterwards, it was learned that the soldiers acted with the
    acquiescence, if not the blessing, of their British commanders. (It
    should be remembered that the Indian soldiers, especially those of the
    Gurkha unit, were known for their discipline, and it is highly unlikely
    they would have acted so riotously without orders.) The British goal
    clearly was to create chaos and to blacken the image of the
    pro-nationalist regime in Baghdad, thereby giving the British forces
    reason to proceed to the capital and to overthrow the al-Kilani
    government.

    Baghdad fell on May 30. Al-Kilani fled to Iran, along with the Golden
    Square officers. Radio stations run by the British reported that Regent
    Abd al-Ilah would be returning to the city and that thousands of Jews
    and others were planning to welcome him. What inflamed young Iraqis
    against the Jews most, however, was the radio announcer Yunas Bahri on
    the German station "Berlin," who reported in Arabic that Jews from
    Palestine were fighting alongside the British against Iraqi soldiers
    near the city of Faluja. The report was false.

    On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in Baghdad between Jews
    who were still celebrating their Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who
    thought the Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British regent.
    That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus, removed the Jewish
    passengers, murdered one and fatally wounded a second.

    About 8:30 the following morning, some 30 individuals in military and
    police uniforms opened fire along el-Amin street, a small downtown
    street whose jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned. By 11
    a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and clubs were attacking
    Jewish homes in the area.

    The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2. During this time, many
    Muslims rose to defend their Jewish neighbors, while some Jews
    successfully defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400 injured,
    according to a report written by a Jewish Agency messenger who was in
    Iraq at the time. Other estimates, possibly less reliable, put the death
    toll higher, as many as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to
    1,300 stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were looted.

    Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter?

    Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the Zionist
    underground movement in Iraq, known then as Yehoshafat, claims it was
    the British. Meir, who now works for the Israeli Defense Ministry,
    argues that, in order to make it appear that the regent was returning as
    the savior who would reestablish law and order, the British stirred up
    the riots against the most vulnerable and visible segment in the city,
    the Jews. And, not surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent's
    loyal soldiers entered the capital.

    My own investigations as a journalist lead me to believe Meir is
    correct. Furthermore, I think his claims should be seen as based on
    documents in the archives of the Israeli Defense Ministry, the agency
    that published his book. Yet, even before his book came out, I had
    independent confirmation from a man I met in Iran in the late Forties.

    His name was Michael Timosian, an Iraqi Armenian. When I met him he was
    working as a male nurse at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan in
    the south of Iran. On June 2, 1941, however, he was working at the
    Baghdad hospital where many of the riot victims were brought. Most of
    these victims were Jews.

    Timosian said he was particularly interested in two patients whose
    conduct did not follow local custom. One had been hit by a bullet in his
    shoulder, the other by a bullet in his right knee. After the doctor
    removed the bullets, the staff tried to change their blood-soaked
    cloths. But the two men fought off their efforts, pretending to be
    speechless, although tests showed they could hear. To pacify them, the
    doctor injected them with anesthetics and, as they were sleeping,
    Timosian changed their cloths. He discovered that one of them had around
    his neck an identification tag of the type used by British troops, while
    the other had tattoos with Indian script on his right arm along with the
    familiar sword of the Gurkha.

    The next day when Timosian showed up for work, he was told that a
    British officer, his sergeant and two Indian Gurkha soldiers had come to
    the hospital early that morning. Staff members overheard the Gurkha
    soldiers talking with the wounded patients, who were not as dumb as they
    had pretended. The patients saluted the visitors, covered themselves
    with sheets and, without signing the required release forms, left the
    hospital with their visitors.

    Today there is no doubt in my mind that the anti-Jewish riots of 1941
    were orchestrated by the British for geopolitical ends. David Kimche is
    certainly a man who was in a position to know the truth, and he has
    spoken publicly about British culpability. Kimche had been with British
    Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad after the war. Later he
    became Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, the position he
    held in 1982 when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for
    International Affairs in London.

    In responding to hostile questions about Israel's invasion of Lebanon
    and the refugee camp massacres in Beirut, Kimche went on the attack,
    reminding the audience that there was scant concern in the British
    Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in the murder of
    500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941.

    The Bombings of 1950-1951

    The anti-Jewish riots of 1941 did more than create a pretext for the
    British to enter Baghdad to reinstate the pro-British regent and his
    pro-British prime minister, Nouri el-Said. They also gave the Zionists
    in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in
    Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara, Hillah, Diwaneia,
    Abril and Karkouk.

    Following WW II, a succession of governments held brief power in Iraq.
    Zionist conquests in Palestine, particularly the massacre of
    Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, emboldened the anti-British
    movement in Iraq. When the Iraqi government signed a new treaty of
    friendship with London in January 1948, riots broke out all over the
    country. The treaty was quickly abandoned and Baghdad demanded removal
    of the British military mission that had run Iraq's army for 27 years.

    Later in 1948, Baghdad sent an army detachment to Palestine to fight the
    Zionists, and when Israel declared independence in May, Iraq closed the
    pipeline that fed its oil to Haifa's refinery. Abd al-Ilah, however, was
    still regent and the British quisling, Nouri el-Said, was back as prime
    minister. I was in the Abu-Greib prison in 1948, where I would remain
    until my escape to Iran in September 1949.

    Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at
    the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property
    damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite
    meeting place for young Jews.

    The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at
    9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at
    Baghdad's El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover.
    Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed
    calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.

    The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed
    emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for
    permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the
    police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and
    synagogues.

    On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the
    display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company,
    destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.

    On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the
    El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis
    lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists
    sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from
    Iraq be increased.

    On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish-owned
    Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property
    damage but no casualties.

    On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews
    outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a
    high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak
    Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus
    of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.

    Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off
    by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible
    truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged
    their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.

    Among the most important documents in my book, I believe, are copies of
    two leaflets published by the Zionist underground calling on Jews to
    leave Iraq. One is dated March 16, 1950, the other April 8, 1950.

    The difference between these two is critical. Both indicate the date of
    publication, but only the April 8th leaflet notes the time of day: 4
    p.m. Why the time of day? Such a specification was unprecedented. Even
    the investigating judge, Salaman El-Beit, found it suspicious. Did the 4
    p.m. writers want an alibi for a bombing they knew would occur five
    hours later? If so, how did they know about the bombing? The judge
    concluded they knew because a connection existed between the Zionist
    underground and the bomb throwers.

    This, too, was the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior
    officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whom I had the
    opportunity to meet in New York in 1988. In his book, Ropes of Sand,
    whose publication the CIA opposed, Eveland writes:

    In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the
    Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library
    and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to
    Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with
    evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the
    anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an
    underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports
    that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the
    Zionists had "rescued" really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish
    population."

    Eveland doesn't detail the evidence linking the Zionists to the attacks,
    but in my book I do. In 1955, for example, I organized in Israel a panel
    of Jewish attorneys of Iraqi origin to handle claims of Iraqi Jews who
    still had property in Iraq. One well known attorney, who asked that I
    not give his name, confided in me that the laboratory tests in Iraq had
    confirmed that the anti-American leaflets found at the American Cultural
    Center bombing were typed on the same typewriter and duplicated on the
    same stenciling machine as the leaflets distributed by the Zionist
    movement just before the April 8th bombing.

    Tests also showed that the type of explosive used in the Beit-Lawi
    attack matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi
    Jew by the name of Yosef Basri. Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom
    Salih, a shoemaker, would be put on trial for the attacks in December
    1951 and executed the following month. Both men were members of Hashura,
    the military arm of the Zionist underground. Salih ultimately confessed
    that he, Basri and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks.

    By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but 6,000 of an
    estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel. Moreover, the
    pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said saw to it that all of their
    possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways
    of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange
    them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of
    the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate,
    but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they
    didn't return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous
    community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land
    dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but
    entirely hateful to them.

    The Ultimate Criminals

    Zionist Leaders:

    From the start they knew that in order to establish a Jewish state they
    had to expel the indigenous Palestinian population to the neighboring
    Islamic states and import Jews from these same states.

    * Theodor Herzl, the architect of Zionism, thought it could be done by
    social engineering. In his diary entry for 12 June 1885, he wrote that
    Zionist settlers would have to "spirit the penniless population across
    the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,
    while denying it any employment in our own country."

    * Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prime Minister Netanyahu's ideological
    progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could
    only be brought about by force.

    * David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, told a Zionist
    Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to
    "transfer Arab populations out of the area, if possible of their own
    free will, if not by coercion." After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted
    and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to look to the
    Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the resultant cheap labor
    market. "Emissaries" were smuggled into these countries to "convince"
    Jews to leave either by trickery or fear.

    In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told
    of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions
    grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them.

    A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a book was published
    in Iraq, in Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. The author was
    one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book,
    he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the emissaries sent by
    Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all copies
    just disappeared, even from libraries. The word was that agents of the
    Israeli Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up all the
    books and destroyed them. I tried on three different occasions to have
    one sent to me in Israel, but each time Israeli censors in the post
    office intercepted it.

    British Leaders: Britain always acted in its best colonial interests.
    For that reason Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour sent his famous 1917
    letter to Lord Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I.
    During WW II the British were primarily concerned with keeping their
    client states in the Western camp, while Zionists were most concerned
    with the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant
    cooperating with the Nazis. (In my book I document numerous instances of
    such dealings by Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership.)

    After WW II the international chessboard pitted communists against
    capitalists. In many countries, including the United States and Iraq,
    Jews represented a large part of the Communist party. In Iraq, hundreds
    of Jews of the working intelligentsia occupied key positions in the
    hierarchy of the Communist and Socialist parties. To keep their client
    countries in the capitalist camp, Britain had to make sure these
    governments had pro-British leaders. And if, as in Iraq, these leaders
    were overthrown, then an anti-Jewish riot or two could prove a useful
    pretext to invade the capital and reinstate the "right" leaders.

    Moreover, if the possibility existed of removing the communist influence
    from Iraq by transferring the whole Jewish community to Israel, well
    then, why not? Particularly if the leaders of Israel and Iraq conspired
    in the deed.

    The Iraqi Leaders: Both the regent Abd al-Ilah and his prime minister
    Nouri el- Said took directions from London. Toward the end of 1948,
    el-Said, who had already met with Israel's Prime Minister Ben Gurion in
    Vienna, began discussing with his Iraqi and British associates the need
    for an exchange of populations. Iraq would send the Jews in military
    trucks to Israel via Jordan, and Iraq would take in some of the
    Palestinians Israel had been evicting. His proposal included mutual
    confiscation of property. London nixed the idea as too radical.

    El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to create the conditions
    that would make the lives of Iraqi Jews so miserable they would leave
    for Israel. Jewish government employees were fired from their jobs;
    Jewish merchants were denied import/export licenses; police began to
    arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did not leave in any
    great numbers.

    In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat, the one
    mentioned in Venom of the Zionist Viper, to Iraq. One of the first
    things Ben-Porat did was to approach el-Said and promise him financial
    incentives to have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of
    Iraqi Jews.

    Soon after, Zionist and Iraqi representatives began formulating a rough
    draft of the bill, according to the model dictated by Israel through its
    agents in Baghdad. The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March
    1950. It empowered the government to issue one-time exit visas to Jews
    wishing to leave the country. In March, the bombings began.

    Sixteen years later, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri
    Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad
    bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied
    the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in
    Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs.

    As I said, all this went well beyond the comprehension of a teenager. I
    knew Jews were being killed and an organization existed that could lead
    us to the Promised Land. So I helped in the exodus to Israel. Later, on
    occasions, I would bump into some of these Iraqi Jews in Israel. Not
    infrequently they'd express the sentiment that they could kill me for
    what I had done.

    Opportunities for Peace

    After the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya in October,
    1953, Ben Gurion went into voluntary exile at the Sedeh Boker kibbutz in
    the Negev. The Labor party then used to organize many buses for people
    to go visit him there, where they would see the former prime minister
    working with sheep. But that was only for show. Really he was writing
    his diary and continuing to be active behind the scenes. I went on such
    a tour.

    We were told not to try to speak to Ben Gurion, but when I saw him, I
    asked why, since Israel is a democracy with a parliament, does it not
    have a constitution? Ben Gurion said, "Look, boy"-I was 24 at the
    time-"if we have a constitution, we have to write in it the border of
    our country. And this is not our border, my dear." I asked, "Then where
    is the border?" He said, "Wherever the Sahal will come, this is the
    border." Sahal is the Israeli army.

    Ben Gurion told the world that Israel accepted the partition and the
    Arabs rejected it. Then Israel took half of the land that was promised
    to the Arab state. And still he was saying it was not enough. Israel
    needed more land. How can a country make peace with its neighbors if it
    wants to take their land? How can a country demand to be secure if it
    won't say what borders it will be satisfied with? For such a country,
    peace would be an inconvenience.

    I know now that from the beginning many Arab leaders wanted to make
    peace with Israel, but Israel always refused. Ben Gurion covered this up
    with propaganda. He said that the Arabs wanted to drive Israel into the
    sea and he called Gamal Abdel Nasser the Hitler of the Middle East whose
    foremost intent was to destroy Israel. He wanted America and Great
    Britain to treat Nasser like a pariah.

    In 1954, it seemed that America was getting less critical of Nasser.
    Then during a three-week period in July, several terrorist bombs were
    set off: at the United States Information Agency offices in Cairo and
    Alexandria, a British-owned theater, and the central post office in
    Cairo. An attempt to firebomb a cinema in Alexandria failed when the
    bomb went off in the pocket of one of the perpetrators. That led to the
    discovery that the terrorists were not anti-Western Egyptians, but were
    instead Israeli spies bent on souring the warming relationship between
    Egypt and the United States in what came to be known as the Lavon
    Affair.

    Ben Gurion was still living on his kibbutz. Moshe Sharett as prime
    minister was in contact with Abdel Nasser through the offices of Lord
    Maurice Orbach of Great Britain. Sharett asked Nasser to be lenient with
    the captured spies, and Nasser did all that was in his power to prevent
    a deterioration of the situation between the two countries.

    Then Ben Gurion returned as Defense Minister in February, 1955. Later
    that month Israeli troops attacked Egyptian military camps and
    Palestinian refugees in Gaza, killing 54 and injuring many more. The
    very night of the attack, Lord Orbach was on his way to deliver a
    message to Nasser, but was unable to get through because of the military
    action. When Orbach telephoned, Nasser's secretary told him that the
    attack proved that Israel did not want peace and that he was wasting his
    time as a mediator.

    In November, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset that he was willing to
    meet with Abdel Nasser anywhere and at any time for the sake of peace
    and understanding. The next morning the Israeli military attacked an
    Egyptian military camp in the Sabaha region.

    Although Nasser felt pessimistic about achieving peace with Israel, he
    continued to send other mediators to try. One was through the American
    Friends Service Committee; another via the Prime Minister of Malta, Dom
    Minthoff; and still another through Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia.

    One that looked particularly promising was through Dennis Hamilton,
    editor of The London Times. Nasser told Hamilton that if only he could
    sit and talk with Ben Gurion for two or three hours, they would be able
    to settle the conflict and end the state of war between the two
    countries. When word of this reached Ben Gurion, he arranged to meet
    with Hamilton. They decided to pursue the matter with the Israeli
    ambassador in London, Arthur Luria, as liaison. On Hamilton's third trip
    to Egypt, Nasser met him with the text of a Ben Gurion speech stating
    that Israel would not give up an inch of land and would not take back a
    single refugee. Hamilton knew that Ben Gurion with his mouth had
    undermined a peace mission and missed an opportunity to settle the
    Israeli-Arab conflict.

    Nasser even sent his friend Ibrahim Izat of the Ruz El Yusuf weekly
    paper to meet with Israeli leaders in order to explore the political
    atmosphere and find out why the attacks were taking place if Israel
    really wanted peace. One of the men Izat met with was Yigal Yadin, a
    former Chief of Staff of the army who wrote this letter to me on 14
    January 1982:

    Dear Mr. Giladi:

    Your letter reminded me of an event which I nearly forgot and of which I
    remember only a few details.

    Ibrahim Izat came to me if I am not mistaken under the request of the
    Foreign Ministry or one of its branches; he stayed in my house and we
    spoke for many hours. I do not remember him saying that he came on a
    mission from Nasser, but I have no doubt that he let it be understood
    that this was with his knowledge or acquiescence....

    When Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal in spite of opposition
    from the British and the French, Radio Cairo announced in Hebrew:

    If the Israeli government is not influenced by the British and the
    French imperialists, it will eventually result in greater understanding
    between the two states, and Egypt will reconsider Israel's request to
    have access to the Suez Canal.

    Israel responded that it had no designs on Egypt, but at that very
    moment Israeli representatives were in France planning the three-way
    attack that was to take place in October, 1956.

    All the while, Ben Gurion continued to talk about the Hitler of the
    Middle East. This brainwashing went on until late September, 1970, when
    Gamal Abdel Nasser passed away. Then, miracle of miracles, David Ben
    Gurion told the press:

    A week before he died I received an envoy from Abdel Nasser who asked to
    meet with me urgently in order to solve the problems between Israel and
    the Arab world.

    The public was surprised because they didn't know that Abdel Nasser had
    wanted this all along, but Israel sabotaged it.

    Nasser was not the only Arab leader who wanted to make peace with
    Israel. There were many others. Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qasem,
    before he seized power in Iraq in July, 1958, headed an underground
    organization that sent a delegation to Israel to make a secret
    agreement. Ben Gurion refused even to see him. I learned about this when
    I was a journalist in Israel. But whenever I tried to publish even a
    small part of it, the censor would stamp it "Not Allowed."

    Now, in Netanyahu, we are witnessing another attempt by an Israeli prime
    minister to fake an interest in making peace. Netanyahu and the Likud
    are setting Arafat up by demanding that he institute more and more
    repressive measures in the interest of Israeli "security." Sooner or
    later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafat's
    strong-arm methods as Israel's quisling-and he'll be killed. Then the
    Israeli government will say, "See, we were ready to give him everything.
    You can't trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now there's no one to
    even talk to about peace."

    Conclusion

    Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to
    accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier
    for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from
    Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the
    Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning:
    bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.

    These players, I believe, should be held accountable for their crimes,
    particularly when they willfully terrorized, dispossessed and killed
    innocent people on the altar of some ideological imperative.

    I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders have a moral
    responsibility to compensate the victims and their descendants, and to
    do so not just with reparations, but by setting the historical record
    straight.

    That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel to seek
    reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to leave behind their
    property and possessions in Iraq. That is why I joined the Black
    Panthers in confronting the Israeli government with the grievances of
    the Jews in Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I have
    written my book and this article: to set the historical record straight.

    We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of
    any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab
    because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs
    on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And
    finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans
    need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel
    expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the
    Golan Heights.

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    ENDNOTES

    Mileshtin was quoted by the Israeli daily, Hadashot, in an article
    published August 13, 1993. The writer, Sarah Laybobis-Dar, interviewed a
    number of Israelis who had knowledge of the use of bacteriological
    weapons in the 1948 war. Mileshtin said bacteria was used to poison the
    wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants.

    On Sept. 12, 1990, the New York State Supreme Court issued a restraining
    order at the request of the Israeli government to prevent publication of
    Ostrovsky's book, "By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a
    Mossad Officer." The New York State Appeals Court lifted the ban the
    next day.

    Marion Woolfson, "Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World," p. 129

    Yosef Meir, "Road in the Desert," Israeli Defense Ministry, p. 36.

    See my book, "Ben Gurion's Scandals," p. 105.

    Wilbur Crane Eveland, "Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle
    East," NY; Norton, 1980, pp. 48-49.

    T. Herzl, "The Complete Diaries," NY: Herzl Press & Thomas Yoncloff,
    1960, vol. 1, p. 88.

    Report of the Congress of the World Council of Paole Zion, Zurich, July
    29-August 7, 1937, pp. 73-74.