JEWS OF IRAQ
Strider
by Naeim Giladi
The Link interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on March
16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday. For nearly two other
delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by
his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi. "It's our Arab culture," he said
proudly.
In our previous Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of
thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room
for foreigners who would come to populate confiscated land. Most were
Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came
from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued" these
Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those "rescued"
Jews-Naeim Giladi-knows otherwise.
In his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated
Jews, Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to
import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be plowed to provide
food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with
conscripts to defend the stolen lands. Mr. Giladi couldn't get his book
published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered he could do so only
if he used his own money.
The Giladis, now U.S. citizens, live in New York City. By choice, they no
longer hold Israeli citizenship. "I am Iraqi," he told us, "born in Iraq, my
culture still Iraqi Arabic, my religion Jewish, my citizenship American."
John F. Mahoney
Executive Director, AMEU
The Jews of Iraq
By Naeim Giladi
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 wasn't 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 "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
"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
"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. "You'll 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 "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 couldn't capture
the "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 "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 Governor's 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. That's when they signed to
leave.
I was there and heard their grief. "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, "No, we want them to leave."
I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians
who didn't 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 didn't match my Polish/Ashkenazi name. They
would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I didn't, 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 "we'll 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 wasn't doing me any good anyway, and my Eastern friends
were always chiding me about the name they knew didn't 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 Zionism's 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 "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 couldn't 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. "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, "Room No. 8." When I saw that they weren't even reading the letter, I
inquired of several others. But the response was the same, "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
I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different politics because I am
an Arab Jew? It's 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 Gurion's
racist policies and 10,000 people turned out.
There wasn't 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 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 it's 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
"Israel's 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 Gurion's 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 Gurion's 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.
ELurio
eric l.
pete...@fdn.com
"ELurio" <elu...@aol.com> wrote in message
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