1950–1951 Baghdad bombings

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"). 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. 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." Elie Kedourie writes that after the 1948 show trial of Shafiq Ades, a respected Jewish businessman, who was publicly hanged in Basra, and by 1949 the Iraqi Zionist underground was smuggling Iraqi Jews out of the country at the rate of 1,000 a month. 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. Near East Air Transport was owned by the Jewish Agency. ==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". Between April 1950 and June 1951, several explosions had occurred in Baghdad: • In April 1950, a bomb was thrown into El-Dar El-Bayda Coffee shop in Baghdad. Four Jews were injured in the blast. • In May 1951, a Jewish home was attacked. ==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. 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 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 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. 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". Sociologist Phillip Mendes backs Gat's claims, and further attributes the allegations to have been influenced and distorted by feelings of discrimination. The Mossad forbade him to conduct negotiations about or carry out any acts of terror, an order which he reported that he had "confirmed and accepted". Rayyan Al-Shawaf and Yehouda Shenhav, there is "wide consensus among Iraqi Jews that the emissaries threw the bombs in order to hasten the Jews' departure from Iraq". Shenhav noted an Israeli Foreign Ministry memo which stated that Iraqi Jews reacted to the hangings of Salah and Basri with the attitude: "That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths." The British Embassy in Baghdad assessed that the bombings were carried out by Zionist activists trying to highlight the danger to Iraqi Jews, in order influence the State of Israel to accelerate the pace of Jewish emigration. Another possible explanation offered by the embassy was that bombs were meant to change the minds of well-off Jews who wished to stay in Iraq. and this would undermine Western confidence in the existing Egyptian regime by generating public insecurity and actions to bring about arrests, demonstrations, and acts of revenge, while totally concealing the Israeli factor. The operation failed, the perpetrators were arrested by Egyptian police and brought to justice, two were sentenced to death, several to long term imprisonment. The Iraqi Jewish anti-Zionist author Naeim Giladi maintains that the bombings were "perpetrated by Zionist agents in order to cause fear amongst the Jews, and so promote their exodus to Israel." Giladi claims that he is supported by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his book Ropes of Sand. According to Eveland, whose information was presumably based on the Iraqi official investigation, which was shared with the US embassy, who wrote in My Friend, The Enemy that "After the disclosure of the Lavon Affair... the Baghdad affair became more plausible". Claims of no Israeli involvement Jewish Telegraph Agency analysis The Jewish Telegraph Agency notice from the time states that the bombers were charged with both the January 14, 1951 synagogue bombing and the 19th March grenade attack. Moshe Gat's analysis According to historian Moshe Gat, "not only did Israeli emissaries not place the bombs at the locations cited in the Iraqi statement, but also that there was in fact no need to take such drastic action in order to urge the Jews to leave Iraq for Israel". • Gat relates to the alleged Israeli motivation to accelerate the Jewish registration to leave Iraq: "just over 105,000 Jews had registered by 8 March, of whom almost 40,000 had left the country. Some 15,000 more left illegally before and after the law was passed. Since the number of Jews living in Iraq before emigration began has been estimated at 125,000 this means that about 5,000 Jews were left, who had preferred to remain in Iraq. Why, then, would anyone in Israel have wanted to throw bombs? Whom would they have wanted to intimidate?" According to Mendes, it was highly unlikely that 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. • The 1950–1951 bombings followed a long history of anti-Jewish incidents in Iraq (such as the Farhad) and the prosecution was not able to produce a single eyewitness. • Shalom Salah told the court that he had confessed after being severely tortured. The prosecutor "claimed that the perpetrators had planned to cause injury but not loss of life. The grenade, however, had claimed five lives at the synagogue (or four, according to the charges) and injured more than 20 people. This did not prevent the prosecutor, in his concluding address, from including this incident in the list of charges against the underground, although this contradicted the evidence of the two witnesses." Nevertheless, they were not accused for the synagogue bombing. Gat suggests the perpetrators could have been members of the anti-Jewish Istiqlal Party. Yehuda Tajar, one of the alleged bombers, said the bombing were carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood. Other claims of no Israeli involvement Mordechai Ben Porat, founder and chair of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, who was coordinating Jewish emigration at the time, was accused of orchestrating a bombing campaign to speed up the Jewish exodus from Iraq by Israeli journalist Baruch Nadel in 1977. Ben Porat sued the journalist for libel, ending in an out-of-court compromise, where Nadel retracted all the accusations against the Israeli emissaries, and apologized ==Effects on Iraqi Jewish emigration==

In March 1950 the government of Iraq passed the Denaturalisation Act that allowed Jews to emigrate if they renounced their Iraqi citizenship. Iraqi prime minister Tawfiq al-Suwaidi expected that 7,000–10,000 Jews out of the Iraqi Jewish population of 125,000 would leave. Historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein disputed the claim that the bombings were the primary motive for the emigration of Iraqi Jews, noting that most accounts by these Jews did not mention the bombings as a cause for immigration. ==See also==