The
"Link" interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on
March 16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday. For nearly two other
delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by
his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi.
"It's our Arab culture,"
he said proudly. In our previous Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at
the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were
uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate confiscated
land. (VN: he means the khazars who are not Jewish, either DNA wise
or religious wise. They are pagans and Turkits)
Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other
Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued"
these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those
"rescued" Jews-Naeim Giladi-knows otherwise.
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 (VN:
Khazars) 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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The believed site of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, in the foregound, on a mound near the ancient city of Ninevah, northern Iraq (CHANNEL FOUR)
