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.