Here is a great piece on the Iraqi Jews, by Adam Shatz in LRB. There are only a dozen Jews left in Baghdad today, there were 125,000 in 1948, including famous families like the Sassoons. The plight of the Iraqi Jews is nowadays often cited by Israel lobbyists to try and stymie talk of a right of return for Palestinians; but Shatz shows how difficult it is to compare the two people's situations.
The Jews of Baghdad were at times hugely privileged, at other times they were subject to pogroms. They did well under Ottoman rule, which provided protection to minorities, but seemed to see a special role under the Brits, and they were punished as overweening. They had no interest in Zionism. They sniffed at the idea of leaving the paradise of Mesopotamia, where the Talmud was composed, for the rocky coast. Soon they would all do so.
1948…the state of Israel was
proclaimed, the Arab armies invaded, and al-Said imposed martial law. A
week later, newspapers in Iraq were calling for a boycott of Jewish
shops, to ‘liberate’ Iraqis from the ‘economic slavery and domination
imposed by the Jewish minority’. This suspicion of Jews was encouraged
by a weak and reviled government for whom Arab nationalism was a crude
but effective weapon, distracting attention from its colonial docility,
and from its poor military performance in Palestine….
The freezing
of Palestinian assets by the Israeli government and the arrival in Iraq
of eight thousand Palestinian refugees in the summer of 1948 did
nothing to calm things. Responding to a wave of popular anger, the
Iraqi government declared Zionism a capital offence, fired Jews in
government positions and, invoking Stalin’s support of partition, found
another pretext to round up Communists of all sects.
Israel encouraged the flight of the Iraqi Jews.
back armed resistance to al-Said’s government, or find itself unable to
prevent Iraqi Jews already in Israel from killing Palestinians in
revenge. The Israelis also began to promote the idea of a ‘sorting out’
of populations, involving a swap of Iraqi Jews for an equal number of
Palestinian refugees, an idea quietly encouraged by the Foreign Office:
‘National exuberance is a phenomenon which is going to last a long time
in the Middle East. On the whole, elimination of awkward minorities is
likely to cool rather than fan the flames.’ If Israel was a sanctuary
for Iraq’s Jews, it was also among the reasons they were in such
desperate need of one.
The US Embassy in Baghdad agreed with Tawfiq al-Suwaida that mass
emigration was unlikely, so long as Israel ‘pursues a policy of
moderation and agrees to a peace settlement considered not too
unreasonable by the Arabs’. But the ‘ingathering of the exiles’, not a
peace settlement, was Israel’s goal, for strategic as much as
sentimental reasons. Israel had conquered 20 per cent more territory
than it had been allotted under the partition agreement, and it needed
more Jews to settle the land, particularly along the border. [emphasis mine]
I don't mean to suggest that Israel was the bad guy here. No way. Obviously, all societies in the Middle East have had problems giving rights to minority populations; and Jews have been an often-persecuted, and privileged, caste for a long time in the Middle East. And if the creation of Israel has made Iraqi Jews feel more secure–as an Iraqi-Israeli novelist proclaimed at AIPAC last June–it's been a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Shatz includes the Nakba: In 1950, the Iraq Jews flew into Lydda, which had lately been ethnically-cleansed. I don't see why Americans should be taking one side in this ongoing cycle of human-rights denigration. And why we can't lead by our own example, how we have dealt with "awkward minorities."
