Jewish targets were bombed in Baghdad, Iraq, between April 1950 and June 1951.
Two activists in the Iraqi Zionist underground were found guilty by an Iraqi court for a number of the bombings, and were sentenced to death. Another was sentenced to life imprisonment and seventeen more were given long prison sentences.Morris & Black, 1992, pages 91-92 The allegations against Israeli agents had "wide consensus" amongst Iraqi Jews in Israel. Many of the Iraqi Jews in Israel who lived in poor conditions blamed their ills and misfortunes on the Israeli Zionist emissaries or Iraqi Zionist underground movement. The theory that "certain Jews" carried out the attacks "in order to focus the attention of the Israel Government on the plight of the Jews" was viewed as "more plausible than most" by the British Foreign Office. Telegrams between the Mossad LeAliyah Bet agents in Baghdad and their superiors in Tel Aviv give the impression that neither group knew who was responsible for the attack.
Israeli involvement has been consistently denied by the Israeli government, including by a Mossad-led internal inquiry, even following the 2005 admission of the Lavon affair.Cohen, p111
Those who assign responsibility for the bombings to an Israeli or Iraqi Zionist underground movement suggest the motive was to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel, as part of the ongoing Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Those historians who have raised questions regarding the guilt of the convicted Iraqi Zionist agents with respect to the bombings note that by 13 January 1951, nearly 86,000 Jews had already registered to immigrate, and 23,000 had already left for Israel, that the British who were closely monitoring the Jewish street did not even mention the bombs of April and June 1950, nor were they mentioned in the Iraqi trials, meaning these were minor events. They have raised other possible culprits such as a nationalist Iraqi Christian army officer, and those who have raised doubt regarding Israeli involvement claimed that it is highly unlikely the Israelis would have taken such measures to accelerate the Jewish evacuation given that they were already struggling to cope with the existing level of Jewish immigration.
Background
Before the exodus of Jews to Israel, there were about 140,000 Iraqi Jews. Most lived in Baghdad, of which Jews made up a sixth of the city's population. High Jewish populations also existed in the towns of Basra and Mosul.
Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world's oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities. By 1936 there was an increased sense of insecurity among the Jews of Iraq. In 1941 after the government of pro-Nazi Rashid Ali was defeated, his soldiers and policemen, aided by the Arab mob, started the Farhud ("violent dispossession").The terror behind Iraq's Jewish exodus Julia Magnet (The Telegraph, 16 April 2003) A government commission later reported that at least 180 Jews had been killed and 240 wounded, 586 Jewish businesses pillaged, and 99 Jewish homes burned. Jewish sources claimed much higher casualties.
In the summer of 1948, following the declaration of the State of Israel, the Iraqi government declared Zionism a capital offense and fired Jews in government positions. In his autobiography, Sasson Somekh, a Baghdadi Jew, wrote: Emigration until 1946 or 1947 was infrequent, despite the growing feeling among Iraqi Jews that their days in the Land of the Two Rivers were numbered. By the time war broke out in Palestine in 1948, many civil servants had been dismissed from their governmental jobs. Commerce had declined considerably, and the memory of the Farhud, which had meanwhile faded, returned.Baghdad, Yesterday:The Making of an Arab Jew, Sasson Somekh, Ibis, 2003, p. 150 At this time, he writes, "hundreds of Jews... were sentenced by military courts to long prison sentences for Zionist and Communist activity, both real and imagined. Some of the Baghdadi Jews who supported the Zionist movement began to steal across the border to Iran, from where they were flown to Israel."Baghdad, Yesterday:The Making of an Arab Jew, Sasson Somekh, Ibis, 2003, p. 152
Elie Kedourie writes that after the 1948 show trial of Shafiq Ades, a respected Jewish businessman, who was publicly hanged in Basra, Iraq Jews realized they were no longer under the protection of the law and there was little difference between the mob and Iraqi court justice.
Emigration from Iraq to Israel was banned in 1948Gat 2013, p. 55 and by 1949 the Iraqi Zionist underground was smuggling Iraqi Jews out of the country at the rate of 1,000 a month.R. S. Simon, S. Reguer, M. Laskier, The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 365 In March 1950, Iraq passed a law which temporarily allowed emigration to Israel, limited to one year only, and stripping Jews who emigrated of their Iraqi citizenship.Gat, 2013, p. 183 The law was motivated by economic considerations (the property of departing Jews would be seized by the state treasury) and a sense that Jews were a potentially troublesome minority that the country would be better off without. At first, few registered, as the Zionist movement suggested they not do so until property issues had been clarified. After mounting pressure from both Jews and the Iraqi government, the movement relented and agreed to registrations. Israel was initially reluctant to absorb so many immigrants, (Hillel, 1987) but in March 1950, organized Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, an airlift to Israel, and sent in emissaries to encourage Jews to leave.
In April 1950, an agent of Mossad LeAliyah Bet, Shlomo Hillel, using the alias Richard Armstrong, flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad as a representative of the American charter company Near East Air Transport, to organize an airlift of Iraqi Jews to Israel via Cyprus. Earlier, Hillel had trained Zionist militants in Baghdad under the alias Fuad Salah. Near East Air Transport was owned by the Jewish Agency. The first flight of "Near East Airlines" with immigrating Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel on 20 May 1950. At that time, 46,000 Iraqi Jews had registered under the De-naturalization law.
Israel could not cope with so many immigrants and limited the rate of the flights from Iraq. By early January 1951, the number of Jews who registered to leave was about 86,000, but only 23,000 had departed.
According to Adam Shatz, the Mossad LeAliyah Bet had been promoting Jewish emigration since 1941. Nuri al-Said had warned the Jewish community of Baghdad to accelerate their flights out of the country, otherwise, he would take the Jews to the borders himself. Nuri al-Said's threats encouraged Iraqi officials to abuse the departing Jews before they boarded the planes and to destroy their baggage.Glitzenstein, 2004, p. 206
Bombing incidents According to the Baghdad police who gave evidence at the trial, the weapon used was a British-made World War II hand grenade "No. 36".Quoted in Gat, 1997, "it was clear that in each case a hand-grenade of high-explosive type No. 36 was used: these are available in Iraq only to the armed forces." Between April 1950 and June 1951, several explosions had occurred in Baghdad:Gat, 2013, p. 172Ian Black, 1991, p. 91
In April 1950, a bomb was thrown into El-Dar El-Bayda Coffee shop in Baghdad. Four Jews were injured in the blast. On 10 May 1950, a grenade was thrown at Beit-Lawi Automobile company building, a company with Jewish ownership. On 3 June 1950, a grenade exploded in El-Batawin, then a Jewish area of Baghdad, with no casualties. On 14 January 1951, a grenade damaged a high-voltage cable outside Masuda Shem-Tov Synagogue. Three, or four Jews were killed, including a 12-year-old boy, and ten were wounded. On 14 March 1951, a bomb went off in the American Cultural Center and Library wounding some of the Jews using the facilities. On 5 June 1951, a bomb went off next to the Jewish Stanley Sashua car dealership on El Rasjid Street. Nobody was injured. On 19 March 1951, the US legation's information office was attacked.Gat, 2013, p. 179 In May 1951, a Jewish home was attacked.Black and Morris, 1992, p. 91
Trial The pro-Western Iraqi government of Faisal II and Nuri al-Said prosecuted the alleged Jewish perpetrators in court, in a trial which began in October 1951. Two confirmed activists in the Zionist underground, Shalom Salah Shalom, a 19-year-old weapons expert, and Yosef Ibrahim Basri, a lawyer active in collecting intelligence material, were executed after being convicted of the bombings. Whilst their involvement in the underground movement and holdings of weapons caches were not disputed, both denied involvement in the bombings.One of the defendants admitted responsibility under torture, although he rescinded this admission in court. Salah's testimony under torture indirectly allowed the Iraqi police to find large weapons caches of the Zionist underground in three synagogues (Masuda Shemtov, Hakham Haskal and Meir Tuweik) and in private homes, including 436 hand-grenades, 33 machine-guns, 97 machine-gun cartridges, 186 pistols. Shlomo Hillel, also once a member of the Iraqi Zionist underground, noted that the last words of the executed defendants were "Long live the State of Israel". The British Foreign Office noted in a file note "Trial of Jews at Baghdad, 20 December 1951" that they had "no reason to suppose that the trials were conducted in anything but a normal manner".
Baghdad police officers who gave evidence at the trial appear to have been convinced that the crimes were committed by Jewish agents, claiming that "anyone studying the affair closely will see that the perpetrator did not intend to cause loss of life among the Jews" and that each grenade was "thrown in non-central locations and there was no intention to kill or injure a certain person".
Historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, in her book, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s states that the charges in the Iraqi trial were "groundless for several reasons", because many thousands of Iraqi Jews had already registered to leave by the time of the later bombings, and the charges related only to these later bombings.
Responsibility for the bombings There has been debate over whether the bombs were in fact planted by the Mossad LeAliyah Bet or the Iraqi Zionist underground in order to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to the newly created state of Israel or whether they were the work of Arab anti-Jewish extremists in Iraq. The issue has been the subject of lawsuits and inquiries in Israel.
The true identity and objective of the culprits behind the bombings has been the subject of controversy. A secret Israeli inquiry in 1960 found no evidence that they were ordered by Israel or any motive that would have explained the attack, though it did find out that most of the witnesses believed that Jews had been responsible for the bombings.Morris and Black, p. 93; Gat, p. 186–187. The issue remains unresolved: Iraqi activists still regularly charge that Israel used violence to engineer the exodus, while Israeli officials of the time vehemently deny it.Morris and Black; Gat; passim Historian Moshe Gat reports that "the belief that the bombs had been thrown by Zionist agents was shared by those Iraqi Jews who had just reached Israel".Gat, p. 177 Sociologist Phillip Mendes backs Gat's claims, and further attributes the allegations to have been influenced and distorted by feelings of discrimination.
Claims for Israeli or Iraqi Zionist involvement