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Mideast Youth
June 10, 2010 Thursday 10:02 PM EST
What Truth Does Israel Hide? As told by Naeim Giladi; an Iraqi Jew.
by Ahmad H. Aggour (Egypt)
Jun. 10, 2010 (Mideast Youth delivered by Newstex) --
I saw the responses to my earlier article, and even though some of
them only tended to focus on the part where I mentioned the occupation
of Palestine by Israel, with the exception of a few who actually
discussed the main theme of the article. I thought maybe in response,
I should use words written by a man who knows more than what most
people ` especially here ` know, has seen more than what many saw, has
heard more than what many heard, and has experienced more than what
many had experienced when it comes to the history of Zionism and
foundation of Israel.
One of your own people.
The Giladis ` now U.S. Citizens ` live in New York, they no longer
hold Israeli citizenship. Naeim Gilani refers to himself as an Iraqi,
with Iraqi Arabic culture, Jewish religion and American citizenship.
This is an excerpt from his book: Ben Gurions Scandals: How the
Haganah and Mossad Eliminated Jews.
And yes! You will read all this, because I actually spent the time
typing ?this down!
Chapter I: The Jews of Iraq
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 wasnt 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 Å`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 Å`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 Å`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.
Å`Youll 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 Å`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 couldnt
capture the Å`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 Å`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 Governors 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. Thats when they signed to leave.
I was there and heard their grief. Å`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, Å`No, we want them to leave.
I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those
Palestinians who didnt 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 didnt match my Polish/Ashkenazi
name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I
didnt, 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 Å`well 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 wasnt doing me any good anyway, and my
Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didnt
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 Zionisms
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 Å`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 couldnt 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. Å`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, Å`Room No. 8. When I saw that they
werent even reading the letter, I inquired of several others. But the
response was the same, Å`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 Im not. Do I have a different ideology or different
politics because I am an Arab Jew? Its 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 Gurions racist policies and
10,000 people turned out.
There wasnt 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
(NYSE:SZEZY) 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 its 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 Å`Israels 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 Gurions 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 Gurions
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 didnt 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 Å`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.
Britains 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, Britains
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 Å`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 Ghazis
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 Iraqs 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, Iraqs 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 days newspapers with
the banner Å`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 Basras 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 Å`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
regents 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 Israels 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 Israels 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 Iraqs
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 Haifas 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
Baghdads 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 Å`rescued really just in order to
increase Israels Jewish population.
Eveland doesnt 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 didnt 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 Å`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 Netanyahus ideological
progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could
only be brought about by force.
- David Ben Gurion, Israels first prime minister, told a Zionist
Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to
Å`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. Å`Emissaries were smuggled into these countries to
Å`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 Å`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.
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 Israels 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 theyd 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, Å`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, Å`Then where
is the border? He said, Å`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 wont 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, Nassers 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 Hamiltons 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
Israels 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 didnt 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 Å`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 Å`security. Sooner
or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafats
strong-arm methods as Israels quisling-and hell be killed. Then the
Israeli government will say, Å`See, we were ready to give him
everything. You cant trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now
theres 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.
From: A. Papazian
June 10, 2010 Thursday 10:02 PM EST
What Truth Does Israel Hide? As told by Naeim Giladi; an Iraqi Jew.
by Ahmad H. Aggour (Egypt)
Jun. 10, 2010 (Mideast Youth delivered by Newstex) --
I saw the responses to my earlier article, and even though some of
them only tended to focus on the part where I mentioned the occupation
of Palestine by Israel, with the exception of a few who actually
discussed the main theme of the article. I thought maybe in response,
I should use words written by a man who knows more than what most
people ` especially here ` know, has seen more than what many saw, has
heard more than what many heard, and has experienced more than what
many had experienced when it comes to the history of Zionism and
foundation of Israel.
One of your own people.
The Giladis ` now U.S. Citizens ` live in New York, they no longer
hold Israeli citizenship. Naeim Gilani refers to himself as an Iraqi,
with Iraqi Arabic culture, Jewish religion and American citizenship.
This is an excerpt from his book: Ben Gurions Scandals: How the
Haganah and Mossad Eliminated Jews.
And yes! You will read all this, because I actually spent the time
typing ?this down!
Chapter I: The Jews of Iraq
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 wasnt 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 Å`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 Å`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 Å`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.
Å`Youll 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 Å`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 couldnt
capture the Å`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 Å`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 Governors 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. Thats when they signed to leave.
I was there and heard their grief. Å`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, Å`No, we want them to leave.
I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those
Palestinians who didnt 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 didnt match my Polish/Ashkenazi
name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I
didnt, 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 Å`well 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 wasnt doing me any good anyway, and my
Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didnt
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 Zionisms
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 Å`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 couldnt 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. Å`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, Å`Room No. 8. When I saw that they
werent even reading the letter, I inquired of several others. But the
response was the same, Å`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 Im not. Do I have a different ideology or different
politics because I am an Arab Jew? Its 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 Gurions racist policies and
10,000 people turned out.
There wasnt 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
(NYSE:SZEZY) 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 its 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 Å`Israels 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 Gurions 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 Gurions
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 didnt 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 Å`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.
Britains 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, Britains
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 Å`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 Ghazis
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 Iraqs 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, Iraqs 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 days newspapers with
the banner Å`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 Basras 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 Å`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
regents 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 Israels 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 Israels 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 Iraqs
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 Haifas 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
Baghdads 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 Å`rescued really just in order to
increase Israels Jewish population.
Eveland doesnt 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 didnt 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 Å`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 Netanyahus ideological
progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could
only be brought about by force.
- David Ben Gurion, Israels first prime minister, told a Zionist
Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to
Å`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. Å`Emissaries were smuggled into these countries to
Å`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 Å`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.
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 Israels 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 theyd 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, Å`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, Å`Then where
is the border? He said, Å`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 wont 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, Nassers 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 Hamiltons 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
Israels 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 didnt 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 Å`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 Å`security. Sooner
or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafats
strong-arm methods as Israels quisling-and hell be killed. Then the
Israeli government will say, Å`See, we were ready to give him
everything. You cant trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now
theres 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.
From: A. Papazian