Haaretz resurrects Baghdad bombings scandal
The Baghdad bombings are back in the news. Every time you think the issue is dead and buried, it rises again. Whodunnit? Arab historians, Arabists and academics in Israel and abroad have charged that five bombings in 1950 -51 – one killed four Jews – were a Zionist false flag operation to cause the Jews of Iraq to emigrate to Israel. The Mossad operatives who organised the airlift have always fiercely denied that they were responsible.
The latest to breathe life back into the scandal is Haaretz, writing about a new film called ‘Baghdad files’ by Avida Livni. The film takes up the story of files deposited by a journalist called Baruch Nadel at Yale University. Nadel, who died in 2014, seems to have made a speciality of bashing the Israeli establishment. He wrote for the iconoclastic magazine Haolam Hazeh. The files contain 117 testimonies from Iraqi Jews: Nadel collected them when he toured transit camps or ma’abarot in the 1950s. The principal allegation made by the refugees was that they had emigrated because of bombs thrown at them on orders from Israel.
No wonder such rumours circulated: conditions in the ma’abarot were atrocious. The accommodation was primitive and at the mercy of the elements. There was no adequate sanitation. There were no food. No jobs. The refugees had every reason to feel betrayed and bitterly disappointed, lured under false pretences by the Zionists, while the few thousand Jews who had remained in Iraq continued to enjoy comfortable lives.
The central inconsistency in this story is why 117 Iraqi -Jewish refugees might be better informed as to the identity of the bombers, while there is more evidence than hearsay to argue that Iraqi non-Jews did it. For instance, the only fatal bombing – of the Messouda Shemtob synagogue in January 1951, has been attributed to Iraqi nationalists. There is credible evidence that an Arab nationalist threw a bomb at a café frequented by Jews in April 1950. Until then, suspecting an Iraqi government trap, Mossad had hesitated to authorise the community to begin registering to leave.
The Haaretz article claims that three Zionists were executed for carrying out the bombings. In fact two Jews were executed, Shalom Saleh and Yusuf Basri, and neither was accused by the Iraqi court of the Massouda Shemtob synagogue bombing. (The synagogue was being used as a registration centre for departing Jews – which begs the question, why would the Mossad kill Jews who were already leaving? ) Haaretz then claims that the bombing was a catalyst, persuading 80,000 Jews to register . In truth 80,000 had already registered and forfeited their citizenship by the time of the Shemtob bombing: they were waiting impatiently to board the planes to take them to Israel, but the airlift was painfully slow.
Next comes the next piece of blatant Haaretz revisionism erasing the persecution, extortion, anti-Jewish discrimination and arrests characterising the late 1940s in Iraq. Despite the Farhud massacre of 1941,” the Iraqi Jews’continued to live comfortably next to their Muslim neighbours. They were in no hurry to make aliya.”
Then the Haaretz article alleges that the conclusions of an official inquiry had not been revealed. In fact a commission appointed by the Mossad head Isser Harel compiled a report in 1960. The full findings are published for all to see in To Baghdad and Back by the chief Mossad operative in Baghdad, Mordechai Ben Porat. Ben Porat sued Baruch Nadel for slander after he published a hit piece in Haolam Hazeh : Nadel apologised. ‘He was influenced by wicked fabrications invented by the Iraqi authorities and he was not equipped with the necessary facts,’ wrote Ben Porat.
Two well-known contrarian academics, Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani and Hannan Hever, have since picked up the trail of the Baghdad files in an article called ‘Violence in Baghdad (1950-1). The historian of Iraqi Jewry Esther Meir-Glitzenstein set the record straight in an article of her own.
Baruch Nadel is probably applauding Haaretz and the film-maker Livni from beyond the grave. But for people who want to know the true facts, it is a pity that Haaretz has fallen foul of the most basic standards of journalism in its politically-motivated, sensationalist and sloppy piece.