1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

http://tinyurl. com/4apu47

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally
recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the
only state in the world that is subjected to a constant
outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and
blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively
condemned by the international community; and whose right to
exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its
Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the
West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the
Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of
these
educated Westerners. The "one-state solution," as
it is
called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement
of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of
historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the
status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can
expiate the "original sin" of Israel´s
founding, an act
built (in the words of one critic) "on the ruins of Arab
Palestine" and achieved through the deliberate and
aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent
creation of the longstanding Palestinian "refugee
problem"
forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars
pressed by Israel´s alleged victims and their Western
supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed.
As early as the mid-1950´s, the eminent American historian
J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his
findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of
scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most
influential of Israel´s revisionist "new
historians," and
one who went out of his way to establish the case for
Israel´s "original sin," grudgingly
stipulated that there
was no "design" to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from
the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel´s
early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of
writers and ignored or distorted by the "new
historians,"
paint a much more definitive picture of the historical
record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not
only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What
follows is based on fresh research into these documents,
which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist
assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early
1920´s onward, and very much against the wishes of their
own
constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate
the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the
violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29,
1947, which called for the establishment of two states in
Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the
neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there
would have been no war and no dislocation in the first
place.

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been
amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a
substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal
footing "throughout all sectors of the country´s
public
life." The words are those of Ze´ev Jabotinsky, the
founding
father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of
today´s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky
voiced his readiness "to take an oath binding ourselves
and
our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to
the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try
to eject anyone."

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of
a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its
provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the
prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most
notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were
to enjoy the same legal standing, and "in every cabinet
where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership
shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa."

If this was the position of the more "militant"
faction of
the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only
took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in
the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster
Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann,
then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a
peace-and-cooperati on agreement with the Hashemite emir
Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent
pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the
state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held
hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These
included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal´s elder brother and
founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of
Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz
ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab
elites of all hues.

As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing
of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys
were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab
League´s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict
"was
uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,"
and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit "from
active policies of cooperation and development." Behind
this
proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material
progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would
ease the path for the local Arab populace to become
permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to
the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David
Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel´s first prime minister,
argued in December 1947:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, ...
if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way
to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the
Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly
subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab
alliance.

On the face of it, Ben-Gurion´s hope rested on reasonable
grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after
World War I had revived Palestine´s hitherto static
condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab
inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states.
The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially
in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the
capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to
improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the
world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as
did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive
groves quadrupled.

No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare.
Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim
population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from
37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in
Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a
third.

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the
neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention
India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish
contribution to Mandate Palestine´s socioeconomic
well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in
a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord
Peel:
The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on
Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in
the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected
by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in
1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase
percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while
in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only
7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.

Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to
their own devices, they would most probably have been
content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded
them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the
Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded
those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of
only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately
for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of
ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely
are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of
civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world,
moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who
have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst
deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among
the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.

So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel
report:
We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by
the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration,
this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary . . .
with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the
economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the
deterioration of the political situation.

In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by
their alleged betters for the crime of "selling
Palestine"
to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching
themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel
Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is either placed
under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all
the Jews in the country," facilitated the transfer of
7,500
acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives,
all respected political and religious figures, went a step
further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous
members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian
Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad
Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of
Jerusalem.

It was the mufti´s concern with solidifying his political
position that largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133
Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded-just as
it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered
the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in
1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt
against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then
streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In
fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far
more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs,
that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and
that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a
foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.

Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back
against their inciters, often in collaboration with the
British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish
underground defense organization. Still others sought
shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic
atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic
boycott, Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical
levels even during such periods of turmoil, and was largely
restored after their subsidence.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that
most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent
attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher
Committee (AHC), the effective "government" of the
Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition
resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in
their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no
time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were
negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors;
other localities throughout the country acted similarly
without the benefit of a formal agreement.

Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying
their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the
region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of
Jerusalem and the mufti´s close relative, found the
populace
indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms.
In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the
salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts
in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly
more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even
less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa,
Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven
out by angry residents protesting their village´s
transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the
few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to
obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then
return home.

There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The
outbreak of hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a
sharp drop in trade and an accompanying spike in the cost of
basic commodities. Many villages, dependent for their
livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities, saw no
point in supporting the AHC´s explicit goal of starving
the
Jews into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite
for war that in early February 1948, more than two months
after the AHC initiated its campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion
maintained that "the villages, in most part, have remained
on the sidelines."

Ben-Gurion´s analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general
Ismail
Safwat, commander-in- chief of the Arab Liberation Army
(ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the
fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel´s
proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800
of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from
Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either
before completing their training or immediately afterward.
Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no
less scathing, having found the Palestinians "unreliable,
excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized
warfare virtually unemployable."

This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the
fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the
partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but
complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere
was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by
Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely
viewed by Arab leaders as "Zionist in inspiration, Zionist
in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most
details" (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid
Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about
their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there
was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the
bloodletting.

Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the
Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state
while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab
compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it)
"equal
citizens, equal in everything without any exception,"
Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that "should partition be
implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the
Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women." Qawuqji
vowed "to drive all Jews into the sea." Abdel Qader
Husseini
stated that "the Palestine problem will only be solved by
the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine."

They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make
these threats come true, with every means at their disposal.
In addition to regular forces like the ALA, guerrilla and
terror groups wreaked havoc, as much among noncombatants as
among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping, ambushes,
bombings, which in today´s world would be condemned as war
crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians.
"[I]nnocent and harmless people, going about their daily
business," wrote the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem,
Robert Macatee, in December 1947,

are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the
streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in
their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was
shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The
ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned,
and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were
attacked and one of them stabbed to death.
As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well,
and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale
violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers
near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground
group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews
by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100
Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in
April 1948 was "avenged" within days by the killing
of 77
Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital
on Mount Scopus.

Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these
gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding
details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for
Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only
inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented
numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April
21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a
large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the
Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false
rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18),
during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa,
where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of
"hundreds of Arab men and women." Accounts of Deir
Yasin in
the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed
hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and
accusations of havoc and rape.

This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the
widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and
casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired
disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented
Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by
April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this
phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing
was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving
the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine
in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to
join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to
the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in
the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.

Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of
hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the
war reached their own doorstep. "Arabs are leaving the
country with their families in considerable numbers, and
there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab
centers," reported Alan Cunningham, the British high
commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that
the "panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a
steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the
country."

Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted
in mid-December an "evacuation frenzy that has taken hold
of
entire Arab villages." Before the month was over, many
Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems
created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with
the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the
Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early
exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs
to stay put and fight.

But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the
AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack
of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny.
Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units,
attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest
sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many "national
committees" (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export
of
food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying
towns and villages. Haifa´s Arab merchants refused to
alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza
refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron,
armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time
there was extensive smuggling, especially in the
mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to
Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.

The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by
the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands
of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was
there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even
a wider empathy beyond one´s immediate neighborhood, but
many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and
subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed
cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report:
"The refugees are hated wherever they have
arrived."

Even the ultimate war victims-the survivors of Deir
Yasin-did not escape their share of indignities. Finding
refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon
at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April
14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation
approached the AHC´s Jerusalem office demanding that the
survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their
relocation was forthcoming.

Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all,
for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre
(Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from
disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian
population organized its own militia-not so much to fight
the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many
exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially
by fleecing them for such basic necessities as
transportation and accommodation.

Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever
growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though
the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to
evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the
outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in- chief Safwat noted
with some astonishment that the Jews "have so far not
attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.") By
the time of Israel´s declaration of independence on May
14,
the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even
then, none of the 170,000-180, 000 Arabs fleeing urban
centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160, 000 villagers
who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.

The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were
uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military
considerations- reducing civilian casualties, denying
sites
to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces
to repel them-rather than political design. They were,
moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to
encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one
example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top
Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads
with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities
traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying
at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their
inhabitants to stay put.

What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is
that they took place at a time when huge numbers of
Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their
homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces,
whether out of military considerations or in order to
prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective
Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of
thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the
city of Haifa on the AHC´s instructions, despite
strenuous
Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier,
Tiberias´ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly
forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes.
In Jaffa, Palestine´s largest Arab city, the municipality
organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and
sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and
children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of
several neighborhoods.

Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced
out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA.
Within weeks of the latter´s arrival in Palestine in
January
1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to
Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages
so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce
the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.

By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of
the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and
May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being
comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana´s
intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general
order to remove the women and children from all villages
bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa
counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab
villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new
general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in
the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer
all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the
Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan´s Arab Legion likewise
ordered the emptying of scores of villages.

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had
placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course
with Zionism in the 1920´s and 1930´s and had now
dragged
them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get
themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most
critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local
leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High
Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with
quintessential British understatement:

You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine
is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those
who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For
instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days
ago and has not returned, and half the national committee
has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left
some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army
left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab
magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi
class has been evacuating in large numbers over a
considerable period and the tempo is increasing.
Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate
era and the doyen of Palestinian historians, described the
prevailing atmosphere at the time: "Wherever one went
throughout the country one heard the same refrain: `Where
are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the
AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine,
their own country, needs them?´"

Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during
the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words:
"The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened
their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had
no alternative but to triumph or to die."

This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason
for the refugees´ flight and radically distorts the
quality
of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy
from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the
Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There were
repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or
at the very least of young men of military age, many of whom
had arrived under the (false) pretense of volunteering for
the ALA. As the end of the Mandate loomed nearer, the
Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males
between eighteen and fifty and ordered all "healthy and
fit
men" who had already entered the country to register
officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full
weight of the law.

The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach,
banning from its territory all Palestinian males between
sixteen and fifty. In Egypt, a large number of demonstrators
marched to the Arab League´s Cairo headquarters and lodged
a
petition demanding that "every able-bodied Palestinian
capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay
abroad." Such was the extent of Arab resentment toward the
Palestinian refugees that the rector of Cairo´s al-Azhar
institution of religious learning, probably the foremost
Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made
the sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious
duty.

Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time.
"Fright has struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled
their
country," commented Radio Baghdad on the eve of the
pan-Arab
invasion of the new-born state of Israel in mid-May.
"These
are hard words indeed, yet they are true."
Lebanon´s
minister of the interior (and future president) Camille
Chamoun was more delicate, intoning that "The people of
Palestine, in their previous resistance to imperialists and
Zionists, proved they were worthy of independence," but
"at
this decisive stage of the fighting they have not remained
so dignified."

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees
themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews.
During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John
Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo
and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to
discover that while the refugees
express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that
matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with
the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab
states. "We know who our enemies are," they will
say, and
they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare,
persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I
even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a
welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the
district over.

Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and
their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they
have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished
on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders
have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.

It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two
leaders who determined their national development during the
20th century-Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the
latter
of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the
mid-1960´s
to his death in November 2004-were megalomaniacal
extremists
blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly obsessed with
violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace
and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had
promised the British officials who appointed him to his high
rank in the early 1920´s, the Palestinians would have had
their independent state over a substantial part of Mandate
Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic
experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO
from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation,
instead of turning it into one of the most murderous
terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state
could have been established in the late 1960´s or the
early
1970´s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli
peace
treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process; or at the
very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.

Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his
control in the 1990´s into an effective terror state from
where he launched an all-out war (the "al-Aqsa
intifada")
shortly after being offered an independent Palestinian state
in the Gaza Strip and 92 percent of the West Bank, with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the
Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
to a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of
Arab dictatorships and plunged their standard of living to
unprecedented depths.

What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is
that, far from being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and
Arafat were quintessential representatives of the cynical
and self-seeking leaders produced by the Arab political
system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the
Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents
against Zionism and the Jews, while lining its own pockets
from the fruits of Jewish entrepreneurship, so PLO officials
used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states
and, during the Oslo era, by the international community to
finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary
Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.

And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen
condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN
partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being
reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders.
This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006
replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian
leadership-from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia
(negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to
prime minister Salam Fayad-which refuses to recognize
Israel´s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on
the
full implementation of the "right of return."

And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the
name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and
fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the
dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these
dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look
forward to putting their self-inflicted
"catastrophe" behind
them.

The forgotten refugees of this conflict are the 850,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab lands

The Jews of Iraq
by what really happened Thursday, May. 08, 2008 at 12:43 PM

http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/jewsofiraq.htm

THE JEWS OF IRAQ - TESTIMONY OF A FORMER ZIONIST

Article by Naeim Giladi

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

My Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Riots of 1941

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bombings of 1950-1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ultimate Criminals

Zionist Leaders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

British Leaders.

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

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

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

The Iraqi Leaders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities for Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Giladi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights. END NOTES Mileshtin was quoted by the Israeli daily, Hadashot, in an article published August 13, 1993. The writer, Sarah Laybobis-Dar, interviewed a number of Israelis who had knowledge of the use of bacteriological weapons in the 1948 war. Mileshtin said bacteria was used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western interloapers of the Judeo-christian (small c, devil worshipping anti-Christians) draw a line across a map of Palestine (not including the eastern portion of Palestine Brittish occupiers gave to their heshemite buddies) and gives the Zionist invadors their blessings for the Zionists to be murderous thieves of 54%. The Palestinians resist the Zionist's theft of 54% of the land and the Zionists steal 74%.

Zionists like pushing the idea that western interloapers giving ZIinists their blessings for Zionist crusaders to be murderous thives of Palestinian lands makes the Zionist's murderous theft of Palestinian lands somehow less of an offense. They are full of shitt.

What is this "international community" that Zionists say has the authority to be promissing Palestinian lands to Zionist invadors? Zionists don't like to tell you that either. It is 33 Judeo-christian (small c, devil worshipping anti-Christians) states. 33! That is 1/6 the current number of states now represented at the UN.

And of that 33, how many states held an actual referendum? NONE! AND how many of those states were puppets of democraps and republitrash (nicaragua, Cuba, etc)? SO, the number of people tha actualy made up this alegged "international community" could fit into my old high school's gymnasium. That is some "international community.

Not that 33 states holding referendums would have any more business atributing to themselves satanic authority would have any more business gving Palestinian lands to the murderous thieving Zionist crusaders. Or 6 times that many states holding a referendum, for that matter.

Among the disingenous non-facts repeatedly spoted by "anti-zionists" is that Jews ony owned xxx percentage of "Palestine' and so the partition shouldhaveonly granted that percentage to Jews. The miseading implications are that "Palestinians' owned everything not owned by Jews (not at all true) and that all the land was of equal value. First, the vast majority of the land was un-owned rather than owned by "Palestinians". The vast majority of "Palestinians" were tenant farmers, renters, not owners of land. The vast majority of land owned by Arabs was owned by a very few Effendi familes who SOLD it to Jews. The land owned by Jewsincluded very valuble urban land and productive agriculturala land. Of the land alocated to the Jewish state in the partition was the Negev desert! So percentages can be misleading and dont speak to value or fairness.

STATE SANCTIONED PERSECUTION OF JEWS IN IRAQ

History

Iraq is the modern designation fro the country carved out of ancient Babylonia, Assyria, and the southern part of Turkey after World War I.

It is also the place of the oldest Jewish Diaspora and the one with the longest continuous history, from 721 BCE to 1949 CE, a time span of 2,670 years.

By the 3rd century, Babylonia became the center of Jewish scholarship, as is attested to by the community’s most influential contribution to Jewish scholarship, the Babylonian Talmud. Jews had prospered in what was then Babylonia for 1200 years before the Muslim conquest in 634 AD. Under Muslim rule, the situation of the Jewish community fluctuated. Some Jews held high positions in government or prospered in commerce and trade. At the same time, Jews were subjected to special taxes, restrictions on their professional activity. Under British rule, which began in 1917, Jews fared well economically, but all of this progress ended when Iraq gained independence in 1932.

In June 1941, the Mufti-inspired, pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali sparked rioting and a pogrom in Baghdad. Armed Iraqi mobs murdered 180 Jews and wounded almost 1,000.

Additional outbreaks of anti-Jewish rioting occurred between 1946-1949. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism became a capital crime.

In 1950, Iraqi Jews were permitted to leave the country within a year provided they forfeited their citizenship. A year later, however, the property of Jews who emigrated was frozen and economic restrictions were placed on Jews who chose to remain in the country. From 1949 to 1951, 104,000 Jews were evacuated from Iraq in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah; another 20,000 were smuggled out through Iran. Thus a community that had reached a peak of some 150,000 in 1947 dwindled to a mere 6,000 after 1951.

In 1952, Iraq’s government barred Jews from emigrating. With the rise of competing Ba’ath factions in 1963, additional restrictions were placed on the remaining Iraqi Jews. The sale of property was forbidden and all Jews were forced to carry yellow identity cards. Persecutions continued, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, when many of the remaining 3,000 Jews were arrested and dismissed from their jobs. Around that period, more repressive measures were imposed: Jewish property was expropriated; Jewish bank accounts were frozen; Jews were dismissed from public posts; businesses were shut; trading permits were cancelled; telephones were disconnected. Jews were placed under house arrest for long periods of time or restricted to the cities.

Persecution was at its worst at the end of 1968. Scores were jailed upon the discovery of an alleged local “spy ring” composed of Jewish businessmen. Fourteen men-eleven of them Jews-were sentenced to death in staged trials and, on January 27, 1969, were hanged in the public squares of Baghdad; others died of torture (Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”, p. 34).

In response to international pressure, the Baghdad government quietly allowed most of the remaining Jews to emigrate in the early 1970’s, even while leaving other restrictions in force. In 1973, most of Iraq’s remaining Jews were too old to leave and they were pressured by the government to turn over title, without compensation, to more than $200 million worth of Jewish community property (New York Times, February 18, 1973).

Today, approximately 61 Jews are left in Baghdad. A once flourishing Jewish community in Iraq has thus been extinguished (Associated Press, March 28, 1998).

Discriminatory Decrees and Violations of Human Rights
(Intended merely as a sampling and not an exhaustive compilation)

The first piece of legislation enacted that violated the rights of Jews was the 1948 amendment 12 to the 1938 supplement 13 to the Penal Code of Baghdad. The Baghdad Penal Code set out the provision regarding communism, anarchy and immorality in section 89A(1). The section generally prohibits the publication of anything that incites the spread of hatred, abuse of the government or the integrity of the people. This amendment, enacted in 1948, added “Zionism” to communism, anarchism and immorality, the propagation of which constituted an offence punishable by seven years imprisonment and/or a fine.

In an article that appeared in the New York Times on May 16, 1948, it was reported that: “In Iraq no Jew is permitted to leave the country unless he deposits £5,000 ($20,000) with the Government to guarantee his return. No foreign Jew is allowed to enter Iraq even in transit.”

Law No. 1 of 1950, entitled “Supplement to Ordinance Cancelling Iraqi Nationality,” in fact deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality. Section 1 stipulated that “the Council of Ministers may cancel the Iraqi nationality of the Iraqi Jew who willingly desires to leave Iraq...” (official Iraqi English translation).[1]

Law No. 5 of 1951 entitled “ A law for the Supervision and Administration of the Property of Jews who have Forfeited Iraqi Nationality” also deprived them of their property. Section 2(a) “freezes” Jewish property.[2]

There were a series of laws that subsequently expanded on the confiscation of assets and property of Jews who “forfeited Iraqi nationality”. These included Law No. 12 of 1951 16 and the attached Law No. 64 of 1967 (relating to ownership of shares in commercial companies) and Law No. 10 of 1968 (relating to banking restrictions).

_______________________

1. Law No. 1 of 1950 entitled “supplement to Ordinance canceling Iraqi Nationality”, Official Iraqi Gazette, March 9, 1950.

2. Law No. 5 of 1951 entitled “ A law for the Supervision and Administration of the Property of Jews who have Forfeited Iraqi Nationality” (Official Gazette, 10 March 1951, English version, p.17).

Chinese communists own land in the USA. But that wouldn't give the Chinese communists any right to take over ANY US lands or to move in millions of more Chinese to take over those lands. They can own lands here, as do the Dutch, Saudies, Japanese, etc. But that wouldn't give ANY of them ANY right to carve out a state in ANY portion of the US, percentage of land owned or ANY other portion.

Zionists have no right to take over ANY Palestinian lands even if some small percentage of Palestine was baught by them. And since they used the lands they did buy to create beachheads in the ZIonist's overt plan to carve a state out of Palestine, they have lost ALL claim to those lands. And it isn't just the laws Americans DEMAND for their own protection that backs that up, but ZIonist crusader's laws as well.

If you were to buy the land next top a bank and used that land to tunnel into the bank's vault, when you get out of PRISON for your CRIME, will you still own the land, OR would the bank's insurance have sued you for the land to make up the losses your OFFENSE forced on them??? Not just US laws would see you loose any claim to the land you once owned legaly, but the laws of the ZIonist crusaders as well. And if you killed a bank guard in your CRIMINAL OFFENSE against the bank, like ZIonists thieves of palestinian lands killed so many palestinians in their theft of Palestinian lands, you would probably NEVER get out of prison to pine over the legal loss of your property.

Ever been to YellowStone National park? NO AMericans own that piece of land. that doesn't mean it isn't AMERICAN land. Just because no palestinian owned portions of PALESTINE doesn't mean palestine isn't palestinian lands just as Yellowstone is land owned by ALL Americans. Duh.

What happens hundreds of miles AWAY from palestine is supposed to make the Zionist's chosen murderous theft of Palestinian lands somehow (?, please explain YOUR OWN supposition) less of an offense against the palestinians.

And it was Zionist agents who were terrorising the Iraqi jews into leaving to join the Zionist crusader's MURDEROUS THEFT of palestinian lands.

But you go ahead and keep slinging that crap at us. Some prejudiec people seem to like it.

Cleveland Indy Media Center