The Jews of Iraq by Naeim Giladi 4:38pm Sun May 18 '03 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. www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html add your comments Source file

My Story by Naeim Giladi 4:42pm Sun May 18 '03 print comment 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. 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. 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[1]. 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. Bacteriological Warfare 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. 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[2]. 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. [continues...] www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html add your comments

the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices by Ella Habiba Shohatis 5:06pm Sun May 18 '03 print comment When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded. This piece is written with the intent of opening up the multicultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census's simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as "whites." It's also written with the intent of multiculturalizing American notions of Jewishness. My personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts. ---------------------------------------- I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the '50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently--the European Jews--were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of "us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been "Muslim," "Jew," and "Christian," not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that "Arabness" referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences. Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly--for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don't hide our Middle Easterness under one Jewish "we," it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness. As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the "mysteries" of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to "make it" into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you'll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque. Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history--Iraq, Israel and the U.S.--have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate "neat" national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives. War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities. The Gulf War, for example, intensified a pressure already familiar to the Arab Jewish diaspora in the wake of the Israeli-Arab conflict: a pressure to choose between being a Jew and being an Arab. For our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since at least the Babylonian exile, who have been Arabized for millennia, and who were abruptly dislodged to Israel 45 years ago, to be suddenly forced to assume a homogenous European Jewish identity based on experiences in Russia, Poland and Germany, was an exercise in self devastation. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms. Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed an an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation. Although I in no way want to idealize that experience--there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence--on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies. Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology. As Iraqi Jews, while retaining a communal identity, we were generally well integrated and indigenous to the country, forming an inseparable part of its social and cultural life. Thoroughly Arabized, we used Arabic even in hymns and religious ceremonies. The liberal and secular trends of the 20th century engendered an even stronger association of Iraqi Jews and Arab culture, which brought Jews into an extremely active arena in public and cultural life. Prominent Jewish writers, poets and scholars played a vital role in Arab culture, distinguishing themselves in Arabic speaking theater, in music, as singers, composers, and players of traditional instruments. In Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia, Jews became members of legislatures, of municipal councils, of the judiciary, and even occupied high economic positions. (The finance minister of Iraq in the '40s was Ishak Sasson, and in Egypt, Jamas Sanua--higher positions, ironically, than those our community had generally achieved within the Jewish state until the 1990s.) The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one's political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland was a social aliya (literally "ascent") was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida ("descent"). Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq's destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran. Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives. Oriental-Sephardic peace movements, from the Black Panthers of the '70s to the new Keshet (a "Rainbow" coalition of Mizrahi groups in Israel) not only call for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for the cultural, political, and economic integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle East. And thus an end to the binarisms of war, an end to a simplistic charting of Middle Eastern identities. ### Ella Habiba Shohatis Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies at CUNY. A writer, orator and activist, she is the author of Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ. of Texas Press, 1989) and the co-author (with Robert Stam) of Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge 1994). Shohat co-edited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Reflections (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and is the editor of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, (MIT Press/The New Museum, 2000). She writes often for such journals as Social Text and the Journal for Palestine Studies. add your comments

Old Blood Libel Re-Appears on Indymedia by Iraqi Jew 6:15pm Sun May 18 '03 print comment Aren't you guys getting tired of this nazi nonsense you print about Jews? This old blood libel is almost as old as the Protocols. You going to reprint them also? add your comments

Yawn by Yaw\\\! 12:05am Mon May 19 '03 print comment common yet desperate tactic by the zionist above to label what he cannot refute as 'bloodlibel'. Can't you at the very least come up with a new rebuttal? add your comments

Logic follows? by tovi 1:14am Mon May 19 '03 print comment It is evident from the article above that Zionists and Zionism betrayed Iraqi Jews. Is it also possible that Zionists and Zionism caused the havoc that was a holocaust to bring immigrants to Palestine???? add your comments

Iraq’s oldest Jew by Matthew Gutman 1:26am Mon May 19 '03 print comment It takes 15 minutes to cajole a grimacing Muhammed Fazi, literally the gatekeeper to Iraq’s dying Jewish community, to let a reporter peek into the small compound that holds Baghdad’s only remaining synagogue. Finally, Fazi cracks open the synagogue’s steel door. As if on cue, out of an adjacent cement block building, hobbles the 98-year-old Tawfiq Sofer, the oldest living member of Iraq’s Jewish community. Squinting in the glare of the blaring Iraqi sun, he sizes up his visitors and grins, displaying just a few teeth, almost as thin as needles. Gaunt and wearing striped pajamas and a loosely fitted knitted cap, the ailing Sofer offers his guest a seat and a glass of water. Haltingly and without irony, Sofer says in fluent English, “I am the youngest of my family.” He is also the last of it. Like 90 percent of Iraq’s once thriving Jewish community of 100,000, all of Sofer’s family fled Iraq, either for Israel, the United States or Europe after Israel’s independence in 1948. Only an estimated 35 Jews are left in the country. Unmarried and alone, Sofer’s sole company is Fazi, who attends to the ancient man 14 hours a day, and Nidal Sa’ aleh Ezra, a 28-year-old orphan the two “adopted” a few years ago. Sofer, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two bent septuagenarians, shuffles into the synagogue on Saturdays to pray, and to peek in at the Sefer Torah. Like many of the remaining Jewish sites in Baghdad, the synagogue itself, in central Baghdad, is deliberately nondescript. A dun-colored brick wall, about 10 feet high, conceals another austere yellow brick building inside. Its only decorative element is a set of old pine doors. Above the lintel a single word, written in black Hebrew lettering, reads “Adonai.” Beneath it, other Hebrew lettering reads: “The Synagogue of Meir Abraham Twigg.” Asked if he prays on weekdays, the ailing man swallows a glycerin tablet, leans forward on his battered cane and shoots back: “Do I pray! I pray well and properly three times a day. I even put on tefillin.” “Sure I wear a tallit,” he adds. “One must wear a tallit.” Sofer speaks fluent English, though his heart disease — which does not prevent him from smoking a cigarette after meals — makes it difficult for him to speak at length. Fazi, who serves as guard, gatekeeper, groundskeeper, nurse and shopper, says he has dedicated his life “to this Jewish community.” Fazi, whose own father, he says, is a well-to-do merchant who befriended many Jews in the middle of the century, absently taps the old man’s hand as he speaks. “I love him,” Fazi says of Sofer. “He is like my father.” Reflecting on life under Saddam Hussein, Sofer says times were not easy, “but at least we had security.” After several attacks on Jewish community buildings throughout the 1990s — one Palestinian attack five years ago killed two community members and two Iraqis — the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Police, which had already kept close tabs on Jews here, began to monitor the synagogue. “We had a system, by which we would call the Mukhabarat, and they would come if there was any trouble,” says Fazi. But now, with Baghdad submerged in anarchy, there is no one to call in case the little compound is besieged by looters. While once a prosperous section of Baghdad, Ba’tawin, where the synagogue stands, has become a gang stronghold. The nights crackle with gunfire and the explosion of an occasional grenade, as looters fight each other and American troops over turf. While poor, the community members look after their own. According to Sofer, Naji Jebrail Ya’acob, the community’s leader, helps supply the needy with food and clothing when necessary. Fazi says the greatest nuisance has been journalists. “I almost came to blows with some of them,” he says. “You are the first that I have let in here. “We don’t want to attract too much attention to this place, don’t want people to notice,” he says. The Jews here, and their Muslim keepers, many possessed with a dash of Judeophilia, cling to their secrecy as if it were life itself. The few dozen, aging Jews here live cloistered in neighborhoods scattered around the city. Few of their neighbors know their real identity, and that is the way many want to keep it. Outside the synagogue compound, a tea vendor, Hussein Riad, 24, says he is aware that Jews and the synagogue live beyond the walls. He says he has no problem with the Jews living in the area. “They let me stay here,” beside the compound wall, “so what do I have to complain about.” By and large the fire of anti-Semitism has not singed most Iraqis. The anti-Semitic chants heard round the Arab world have not marred popular demonstrations here. Only once during this reporter’s three-week stay in Iraq were specifically anti-Jewish chants heard. After Iraqi demonstrations two weeks ago in the town of Falluja, a former stronghold of Saddam Hussein turned violent, American forces opened fire on what it believed were armed men in the crowd. The next day a small group of Iraqi demonstrators marched on the U.S. encampment in the area chanting, “We swear by god, we must kill the Jew.” Once a thriving cultural and mercantile center for Jews, signs of Jewish life are few and far apart in Baghdad these days. But the Jews’ historical presence is still felt. The first Jewish presence in Mesopotamia dates back to the 6th century BCE when Babylonian King Nabuchadnezzer took captive thousands of Jews and marched them back to the present-day Iraq. He treated them well, and until the late 1940s, it was not uncommon for Muslim men to marry Jewish women. Grocers, butchers, merchants and doctors mixed freely with their Jewish countrymen. But despite the ensuing history of expulsion, several wars pitting Iraqis against Israelis and decades of Jewish life in hiding, flecks of the Jews’ influence on Iraq remain. Some ancient, crumbling Victorians buildings, all that remain of Britain’s colonial legacy here, are decorated with Stars of David. In the Shurja mercantile section of Baghdad, which suffered some of the heaviest and most violent looting during the war, the Jewish community continues to manage several buildings that were not expropriated by Saddam Hussein’s government. For his part, Sofer is lonely but destined to die here. Asked why he never followed the rest of his family abroad, he pauses, inhales a short breath and says, “I just could never bring myself to leave my home, my country.” www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhe... add your comments

The Jews of the Arab world by Lynne Vittorio 1:48am Mon May 19 '03 print comment They speak Arabic. They listen to Arabic music. They eat Arabic food. Were you to pass by an Arab Jewish synagogue during prayer, you would hear strains of music by Om Kolthoum, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, and Sayed Darwiche. And yet, here in New York, they are not considered a part of the Arab American community – by Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, or even by themselves (for the most part). Why not? In an effort to understand another fragmented community of people from Arab lands here in New York, we have chosen to delve into a subject matter that, for many members of this community, is very sensitive and provocative. It is not our intent to provoke, rather, to illuminate so as to satisfy our own curiosity and, in so doing, provide our readers with food for thought. Locating statistics which detail Arab Jewish immigration to New York proved extremely difficult, so much so that even the individuals we interviewed could not give us figures as to how large this community is. We know that approximately 800,000 Arab Jews lived in the Middle East prior to 1948 and that, today, there are approximately 8,000 Arab Jews left in those countries. We know that there was an Arab Jewish community in New York prior to the establishment of Israel and that the Arab Jews who managed to emigrate here from Israel were absorbed by that community. These two groups, however, have completely different experiences and memories of their lives in Arab countries prior to coming to New York. ********** Professor Ella Shohat is an Iraqi Jew who teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. - Why don’t we hear about Arab Jews? I hold responsible both Zionism and Arab nationalism. Zionism has always looked at the people of the East as inferior, including Jews from Arab countries. From the turn of the century, Zionists tried to bring Arab Jews to Palestine as cheap labor. Up to now, there are Arab Jews in Israel who are discriminated against within the Jewish population. It is largely the European Jews who set the tone. The rise of Arab nationalism and the forceful rise of Islam did not create a less problematic condition for diverse minorities, who have also suffered, but for the Arab Jews, it has been one of the most complicated stories, precisely because of the establishment of the state of Israel. For the first time in their history, Arab Jews had to choose between being Jews and being Arabs. - How would you describe the position of the Arab Jews in the Arab American community? There’s tremendous fragmentation. There are people who have been here for several generations, who speak Arabic at home, pray in the synagogues in Arabic, have Arabic culture, speak to each other in Arabic, yet, it is a community unto itself. There isn’t much exchange. It happens through the cultural realms: video stores, music stores. But there isn’t much interaction. They are very much separated, just as Arab Jews are also separated from the European Jewish community. - What was the backlash of September 11th on Arab Jews? If people are around their neighborhoods, or in the synagogue, they’ll speak Arabic without fear, but outside, or if they’re in their stores and customers come in, they’ll stop speaking Arabic. The immigration policies affect some of them, when their place of birth isn’t Israel. I read in the local Hebrew paper of New York, there were many Mizrahim who were arrested or detained because they thought they were terrorists. This happened often in Israel, when Arab Jews were confused with Palestinians. There are consequences to their looks. There is some fear there but it’s still different than being a Muslim. ********** David Shasha is an American born Arab Jew living in Brooklyn with a Master’s Degree in Jewish/Middle Eastern Studies from Cornell University. He is an activist, an educator, an author and an archivist and the Director of The Center for Sephardic Heritage. - What has the impact of your different opinions been on you? I have been called “Arab lover,” “terrorist,” I get the emails. It’s a very ugly situation right now. We just found out that there’s something called “Campus Watch.” Jewish organizations are monitoring Arab professors, or professors sympathetic to the Arab position. My library in itself is expressive of my guilt. The fact that I have a full shelf of Mahfouz already makes me guilty of being an Arab sympathizer and it has hurt my ability to make a living. - How important is it for Arab Jews to be associated with Arab Americans? Their relationship to the Arab American community is extremely negative. Their hatred for Arabs, I don’t think has peaked yet. The people who initially immigrated here, they did not experience great persecution. As the years went by, and they became more and more removed from the Arab world, they began to forget. Then, the people who did have experiences of persecution at the hands of Arab governments, Muslims, etc., began arriving in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Things began to develop without the intellectual structure of really understanding what the history was, as the Ashkenazi did, which is how they were able to come to terms with the experience of the Russian persecution of the late 19th century, the Communist Revolution, and the Holocaust, etc. All of these things have been examined, ad nauseum. You can get books and articles and movies and documentaries on every facet of their culture. With our culture, zero. Nothing was produced. You have very little information as to what Jewish life was like in those places. People didn’t write about it, there are no historians that have come out of the community. - What are you hoping to accomplish? I’m an activist within a community that despises what I do. This is a very peaceful community and I am stirring up elements that they would much rather not hear about. Everybody would much rather that Syria became something far, far away, in another galaxy. People are not interested. We live in America; they just want to be Americans and fit in and do whatever it is that’s necessary to be able to continue the lifestyle that they have. I’m concerned with cultural issues that are not addressed, or are addressed by a very small group of people. ********** Professor Ammiel Alcalay was born and raised in Boston and is of Bosnian origin. He teaches at Queens College and is the author of numerous books on Arab Jews and Levantine culture. - Why do you think they’re such an isolated community? Traditionally, the way that Arab Jews have related to their environment is to completely integrate themselves into it and you can see this during the periods of their greatest cultural creativity, in Spain and Iraq. You can see it through the music, through the poetry. What happened when they came here they faced an Ashkenazi community that did not understand who they were and because of the political situation in the Middle East, their own sense of their Arabness eroded more and more and they were left adrift, relating neither to one or the other. - If this is the case, why the radical refusal to call themselves Arabs or associate themselves with Arab Americans? There are several factors. If you ask most Arabs, they would identify with the plight of the Palestinians, more or less. Furthermore, a lot of Arabs believe that Americans don’t really understand what’s going on in the Middle East. I think that part of the reason they’re less willing to associate themselves with Arabs is because of the ‘ism’ associated with the politics in Israel. They need to identify themselves as Jewish and it’s very hard, culturally, except in a few places, to be Arab and Jewish at the same time. In America, it seems very strange to people that you can be both an Arab and a Jew. These are excerpts from Aramica’s larger story. For the whole story, please contact Aramica at aramica@aramica.com or (718) 680-8849. This article appeared in Edition 38 of Voices That Must Be Heard. www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/021016_ara... add your comments

'Cruel Zionism'--or The 'Ingathering' of Iraqi Jewry by David Hirst 2:02am Mon May 19 '03 print comment By David Hirst, Excerpts from his book: The Gun and the Olive Branch, 1977, Futura Publications It was the last day of Passover, April 1950. In Baghdad, the Jews had spent it strolling along the banks of the Tigris in celebration of the Sea Song. This was an old custom of the oldest Jewish community in the world; the 130,000 Jews of Iraq attributed their origins to Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile. A good 50,000 of them thronged the esplanade. By nine o'clock in the evening the crowds were thinning out. But on Abu Nawwas street young Jewish intellectuals were still gathered in the Dar al-Beida coffee-shop. Suddenly, the convivial atmosphere was shattered by an explosion. A small bomb, hurled from a passing car, had gone off on the pavement just outside. By chance no one was hurt. But the incident shook the Jewish community, They were convinced that Iraqi extremists wanted to kill them. The fainter-hearted began to murmur 'it is better to go to Israel'. The next day there was a rush to the offices where Jews wishing to renounce their Iraqi citizenship had to present themselves for registration. Their right to emigrate had been officially acknowledged by the government on the foot of Purim a month before. Its object was to prevent emigration by illegal means. As the newspapers had explained, 'the encounters between the police and the emigrant groups showed that some Iraqi Jews do not want to live in this country. Through their fleeing they give a bad name to Iraq. Those who do not wish to live among us have no place here. Let them go.'30 There had been little response. Police officers had appeared at synagogues and explained that all Jews had to do in order to leave Iraq peacefully was to sign the necessary form. But the Jews were afraid that this was a trap to unmask the Zionists among them; and Zionism, under Iraqi law, "was a grievous offence. In all, about 10,000 Jews signed up to leave after the bomb; the big Ezra Daud synagogue had to be set aside as a registration office; police officers and volunteer clerks worked day and night to complete the task. A special kitchen was set up to feed them. Most of the would-be emigrants were poor, with little to lose. The panic did not last very long, however, and registration tapered off. Moreover, they were to leave by air, but only one aeroplane came to take 120 of them, via Cyprus, to Israel. Then there was another explosion. This time it was at the US Information Centre, where many young Jews used to come and read. Again the theory was that an extremist Iraqi organization had planted the bomb, which only by chance failed to hurt anyone. Once again, therefore, there was a rush on the Ezra Daud synagogue; only this time the panic--and the number of would-be emigrants--was less than before. The year ended, and March 1951, the time-limit set for the renunciation of citizenship, was approaching. The third time there were victims. It happened outside the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue, which served as an assembly point for emigrants. That day in January the synagogue was full of Kurdish Jews from the northern city of Suleimaniyyah. Outside a Jewish boy was distributing sweet meats to curious onlookers. When the bomb went off he was killed instantly and a man standing behind him was badly wounded in the eyes. And this time there was no longer any doubt in Jews" minds: an anti-Jewish organization was plotting against them. Better to leave Iraq while there was still time. The queues lengthened outside the Ezra Daud synagogue, and on the night before the time-limit expired some were paying as much as 200 pounds to ensure that their names were on the list. A few days later the Iraqi parliament passed a law confiscating the property of all Jews who renounced their citizenship. No one was allowed to take more than 70 ponds out of the country. The planes started arriving at a rate of three or four a day. At first the emigrants were flown to Nicosia accompanied by an Iraqi police officer. But after a while even that make-believe was dropped and they went directly to Israel's Lydda airport-the police officer returning alone in the empty plane. Before long all that was left of the 130,000 abandoning home, property and an ancient heritage was a mere 5,ooo souls. It was not long before a bombshell of a different kind hit the pathetic remnants of Iraqi Jewry. They learned that the three explosions were the work not of Arab extremists, but of the very people who sought to rescue them; of a clandestine organization called 'The Movement', whose leader, 'commander of the Jewish ghettoes in Iraq', had received this letter from Yigal Allon, chief of the Palmach commandos, and subsequently Foreign Minister of Israel: Ramadan my brother.... I was very satisfied in learning that you have succeeded in starting a group and that we were able to transfer at least some of the weapons intended for you. It is depressing to think that Jews may once again be slaughtered, our girls raped, that our nation's honour may again be smirched ... should disturbances break out, you will be able to enlarge the choice of defenders and co-opt Jews who have as yet not been organized as members of the Underground. But be warned lest you do this prematurely, thereby endangering the security of your units which are, in fact, the only defence against a terrible pogrom.31 The astonishing truth-that the bombs which terrorized the Jewish community had been Zionist bombs-was revealed when, in the summer of 1950, an elegantly dressed man entered Uruzdi Beg, the largest general store in Baghdad. One of the salesmen, a Palestinian refugee, turned white when he saw him. He left the counter and ran out into the street, where he told two policemen:'I recognize the face of an Israeli.' He had been a coffee-boy in Acre, and he knew Yehudah Tajjar from there. Arrested, Tajjar confessed that he was indeed an Israeli, but explained that he had come to Baghdad to marry an Iraqi Jewish girl. His revelations led to more arrests, some fifteen in all. Shalom Salih, a youngster in charge of Haganah arms caches, broke down during interrogation and took the police from synagogue to synagogue, showing them where the weapons, smuggled in since World War II, were hidden. During the trial, the prosecution charged that the accused were members of the Zionist underground. Their primary aim-to which the throwing of the three bombs had so devastatingly contributed-was to frighten the Jews into emigrating as soon as possible. Two were sentenced to death, the rest to long prison terms. It was Tajjar himself who first brohe Jewish silence about this affair. Sentenced by the Baghdad court to life imprisonment, he was released after ten years and found his way to Israel. On 29 May 1966 the campaigning weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh published an account of the emigration of Iraqi Jews based on Tajjar's testimony. Then on 9 November 1972, the Black Panther magazine, militant voice of Israel's Oriental Jews, published the full story. The Black Panther account includes the testimony of two Israeli citizens who were in Baghdad at the time. The first, Kaduri Salim is 49 but looks 60. He is thin, almost hunch-backed, creased-face and with glass-eye: he lost his right eye at the door of the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue. He recounts: 'I was standing there beside the synagogue door. I had already waived my Iraqi citizenship, and wanted to know what was new. Suddenly, I heard a sound like a gun report. Then a terrible noise. I felt a blow, as if a wall had fallen on me. Everything went black around me'I felt something cold running down my check, I touched it-it was blood. The right eye. I closed my left eye and didn't see a thing. The doctor told me: 'It's better to take it out.' He remained in Iraq for three months after leaving the hospital. Then his turn to leave for Israel arrived. The ex-clerk was sent to an immigration camp. Since then, all his efforts to receive compensations have been in vain. He claimed: 'I was hurt by the bomb. The Court of Law established that the bomb was thrown by "The Movement". The Israel Government has to give me compensations.' But the Israel Government does not recognize its responsibility for the Baghdad bombs and, anyhow, cannot recognize him as hurt in action. 'I am ready to be a victim for the State,' he said, 'but when the situation at home is bad, when my wife wants money and there isn't any, what is the self-sacrifice and goodwill worth?' The second witness was an Iraqi lawyer, living in Tel Aviv. He told the Black Panther that After the first bomb was thrown at the Dar al-Bayda coffee-house, many rumours started running around about the responsible being communists. But the day after the explosion, at 4:00 am, leaflets were already being distributed amongst the first worshippers at the synagogue. The leaflets warned of the dangers revealed by the throwing of the bomb and recommended the people to come to Israel. Someone who saw in it something strange was Salman al-Bayyati, Investigating judge for South Baghdad. He declared that the distribution of the leaflet at such in early hour showed prior knowledge of the bombing. He therefore instructed the police to investigate in this direction, determining at the same time that those who threw the bomb were Jews trying to quicken the emigration. Indeed, two youngsters were arrested. Unexpectedly, the Ministry of Justice intervened. The two boys were set free. The case passed over to the hands of the Investigating Judge Kamal Shahin, from North Baghdad. In other words, at this stage, there was still a willingness not to see. For the whole emigration movement came as results of a willingness not to see-or perhaps even of a more active agreement between the Government, the Court and the Zionist representatives. But after two more bombs and after the arrest of the Israeli envoy-it was too much. The police started acting, and it was impossible to stop the wheels. There is only one more thing to add: in the objective conditions of the issue, the trial was made according to international law. The evidence was just such that it wasn't difficult at all to pronounce such sentences.[32] When Bengurion made his impassioned pleas for immigrants to people the new-born State of Israel he was addressing 'European'Jews (from both the New and the Old Worlds) in particular. Not only had European jewry fathered Zionism, it was the main source of that high-quality manpower, armed with the technical skills, the social and cultural attitudes which Israel needed. But with the Holocaust over, the source was tending to dry up. So the Zionists decided that 'Oriental' Jewry must be 'ingathered' as well. It is often forgotten that the 'safeguard' clause of the Balfour Declaration-'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country'-was de-signed to cover Diaspora Jews as well as native Arabs. But the uprooting of a million 'Oriental' Jews showed that, for the Zionists, it was a clause to be ignored in both its parts. Every-where they applied the same essential techniques, but nowhere, perhaps, with such thoroughness as they did in Iraq. 'Cruel Zionism', someone called it.33 If Zionism, as a historical phenomenon, was a reaction to anti-Semitism, it follows that, in certain circumstances, the Zionists had an interest in provoking the very disease which, ultimately, they hoped to cure. Herzl himself was the first to note the usefulness of anti-Semitism as an incentive to Jewish immigration. 'Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow-and so do I.'34 There were dedicated Zionists who considered that it was the duty of the Rabbinate, Jewish nationalists and community leaders to keep the prejudice alive.35 In the early fifties the need for immigrants was such that a columnist in Davar, influential voice of the Israel trade union movement, wrote: I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men-intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with the desire to help redeem Jews-and I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as 'Bloody Jew', 'Jews go to Palestine' and similar intimacies. I can vouch that the results in terms of a considerable immigration to Israel from these countries would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been preaching for decades to deaf ears.36 Zionism had much less appeal to Oriental than it did to European Jews. In the pre-State period only 10.4 per cent of Jewish immigrants came from 'Africa and Asia'.37 In their vast majority, the Oriental Jews were actually Arab Jews, and the reason for their indifference was simply that, historically, they had not suffered anything like the persecution and discrimination of their brethren in European Christendom. Prejudice did exist, but their lives were on the whole comfortable, and their roots were deep. They were nowhere more at home than in Iraq, and a government official conceded --tongue in cheek-- that their Mesopotamian pedigree was much superior to that of the Moslem majority: Many of us consider the Jews to be the original inhabitants of this country. We believe, according to the Koran, they are descendants of Abraham and that goes back nearly 4,000 years, Compared to them, therefore, we Muslims are interlopers because we have been here only about 1,500 years.[38] At one time, Baghdad numbered more Jewish than Arab residents. In this century, as an already prosperous, educated community, they were particularly well placed to benefit from the rapid development and modernization of the country. They controlled many national institutions, most of the banks and big shops. The poorest Jews were better off than the average Iraqi.39 Under the constitution, the Jews enjoyed equality with other citizens. They were represented in parliament, worked in the civil service, and from 1920 to 1925 a Jew was Minister of Finance. On the rare occasions in Arab history when Moslems --or Christians, for that matter-- turned against the Jews in their midst, it was not anti-Semitism, in its traditional European sense, that drove them, but fanaticism bred of a not unjustified resentment. For, like other minorities, the Jews had a tendency to associate themselves with, indeed to profit from, what the majority, regarded as an alien and oppressive rule. In recent times, this meant that from Iraq to Morocco the local Jewish communities found varying degrees of special favour with the French or British masters of the Arab world. If Arab Jews must themselves take some of the blame for the prejudice which this behaviour generated against them, they deserve much less blame for that other cause of Arab hostility-Zionism-which was ultimately to prove infinitely more disruptive of their lives. Zionist activities in Iraq and other Arab countries date from the beginning of the century. They were barely noticed at first. There was actually a time, in the early twenties, when the Iraqi government granted the local Zionist society an official licence, and even when the licence was not renewed, it continued to function, unofficially, for several years. At first it was the British, rather than local Jews, who bore the brunt of Arab animosity. In 1928, there were riots when the British Zionist Sir Alfred Mond visited Baghdad. The following year demonstrations in mosques and streets, a two-minute silence in Parliament, black-edged newspapers and telegrams to London marked 'Iraqi disapproval of the pro-Jewish policy of Great Britain'.40 It Was not until the mid-thirties, when the troubles of Palestine were reverberating round the world, that Arab Jews began to excite suspicion and resentment. In Iraq these emotions came to a head in 1941 when, in a two-day rampage, the mob killed some 170 to 180 Jews and injured several hundred more.41 It was terrible. But it was the first pogrom in Iraqi history. Moreover, it occurred at a time of political chaos; the short-lived pro-Nazi revolt of Rashid Ali Kailani was collapsing, and most members of his administration had taken flight as a British expeditionary force arrived at the gates of the city. There was no more such violence. On account of this, and their economic prosperity, the Jews felt a renewed sense of security." Nevertheless, the Zionists were still active in their midst. In the mid-forties, they disseminated booklets entitled 'Don't Buy from the Moslems'. However, they did not have the field to themselves. Left-wing Jews, who considered themselves 'Jewish and Arab at the same time', set up the League for Combating Zionism.43 By the end of Israel's 'War of Independence', there were still 130,000 Jews in Iraq. The Movement organized the 'Persian underground railway' to smuggle Jews to Israel via Iran. There were occasional clashes between the police and the caravan guides. It was these which prompted the government to legalize Jewish emigration. But, whether by legal or illegal means, very few actually left. As the Chief Rabbi of Iraq, Sassoon Khedduri explained a few years later: The Jews --and the Muslims-- in Iraq just took it for granted that Judaism is a religion and Iraqi Jews are Iraqis. The Palestine problem was remote and there was no question about the Jews of Iraq following the Arab position ... 44 But Bengurion and the Zionists would not give in so easily. Israel desperately needed manpower. Iraqi Jews must be 'in-gathered'. As Khedduri recalled: BY mid-1949 the big propaganda guns were already going off in the United States. American dollars were going to save the Iraqi Jews-whether Iraqi Jews needed saving or not. There were daily 'pogroms'--in the New York Times and under datelines which few noticed were from Tel Aviv. Why didn't someone come to see us instead of negotiating with Israel to take in Iraqi Jews? Why didn't someone point out that the solid, responsible leadership of Iraqi Jews believed this to be their country --in good times and bad-- and we were convinced the trouble would pass.45 But it did not. Neither the Iraqi Jews themselves, nor the government of what, by Western standards, was still a backward country, could cope with the kind of pressures the Zionists brought to bear: Zionist agents began to appear in Iraq-among the youth playing on a general uneasiness and indicating that American Jews were putting up large amounts of money to take them to Israel, where everything would be in applepie order. The emigration of children began to tear at the loyalties of families and as the adults in a family reluctantly decided to follow their children, the stress and strain of loyalties spread to brothers and sisters. Then a new technique was developed: Instead of the quiet individualized emigration, there began to appear public demands to legalize the emigration of Jews-en masse ... in the United States the 'pogroms' were already underway and the Iraqi government was being accused of holding the Jews against their will ... campaigning among Jews increased.. . The government was whip-sawed ... accused of pogroms and violent action against Jews... But if the government attempted to suppress Zionist agitation attempting to stampede the Iraqui Jews, it was again accused of discriminations.46 Finally there came the bombs. 'Ingathered' for what? The Iraqi Jews soon learned; those of them, that is, who actually went to Israel, or, having gone, remained there. For by no means all of uprooted Oriental Jewry did so. A great many of them --particularly the ones with money, connections, education and initiative-- succeeded in making their way to Europe or America. But what the irretrievably 'ingathered' learned was the cruellest and most enduring irony of all: Oriental Jewry was no more than despised cannon-fodder for the European creed of Zionism. What did you do, Bengurion? You smuggled in all of us! Because of the past, we waived our citizenship And came to Israel. Would that we had come riding on a donkey and we Hadn't arrived here yet! Woe, what a black hour it was! To hell with the plane that brought us here!47 This was the song which the Iraqi Jews used to sing. Nothing the rulers of Israel could do quelled the bitterness which the newcomers nurtured against them. They were lectured, in their transit camps, by teams of Zionist educators. But, long after they left the camps, they continued to sing that song, even at weddings and festive occasions. It remained popular throughout the fifties. Then it eventually disappeared, but it can hardly be said that nostalgia for the 'old country' disappeared with it. For the contrast between what they once were, 'in exile', and what they became, and remain, in the Promised Land is too great. One of the 'most splendid and rich communities was destroyed, its members reduced to indigents'; a community that 'ruled over most of the resources of Iraq ... was turned into a ruled group, discriminated against and oppressed in every aspect'. A community that prided itself on its scholarship subsequently produced fewer academics, in Israeli universities, than it brought with it from Iraq. A community sure of its own moral values and cultural integrity became in Israel a breeding ground 'for delinquents of all kinds'. A community which 'used to produce splendid sons could raise only "handicapped" sons in Israel'.48 NOTES 30. Black Panther (Hebrew journal), 9 November 1972, see Documents from Israel, Ithaca Press, London, 1975, P- 127. 31. Allon, Yigal, The Making of Israel's Army, Valentine, Mitchell and Co., London, 1970, PP. 233-4- 32. Black Panther, op. cit., PP. 130-2 33. Ibid., P. 131. 34. Herzi, The Complete Diaries, op. cit., Vol. 1, P. 7. 35. Lilienthal, Alfred, The Other Side of the Coin, Devin-Adair-, New York, p. 184. 36. Ibid., P. 47. 37. Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, No. 16, p. 96. 38. Berger, Elmer, Who Knows Better Must Say So, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, P. 34. 39. Black Panther, op. cit., P. 132. 40. Longrigg, Stephen Helmsley, Iraq, 1900 to 1950, Oxford University Press, London, 1953, PP. 19-23. 41. Cohen, Hayyim, J., The Jews of the Middle East 1860-1972, John Wiley and Sons, New York and Toronto, 1973, P. 30. 42. Ibid., P. 30. 43. 'The League for Combating Zionism in Iraq', Palestine Affairs, (Arabic, monthly), Beirut, November 1972, P. 162. 44. Berger, op. cit., P. 30. 45. Ibid., p. 30. 46. Ibid., pp. 32-3. 47. Black Panther, op. cit., p. 132. 48. Ibid., p. 133. www.mideastfacts.com/iraqi_jews_hirst.ht... add your comments

To Tovi: by me, 5:05am Tue May 20 '03 print comment The answer to your question is gahsp: of course. The question now is - are they behind the timely & strategic homicide attacks that threaten your existance add your comments

More Bullshit! by Ali 1:24am Sun May 25 '03 print comment Just more Bullshit and lies! add your comments