The Borg at War:The Story of an Iraqi Jew in Israel

The Borg at War:
The Story of an Iraqi Jew in Israel
By
Robert E. Reis

Naeim Giladi is a former Iraqi Jew who fled to Israel in 1950 and later rejected his Israel citizenship. He has written a book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals” and an article “The Jews of Iraq.”

When Ezra led Jewish exiles in Babylon to Jerusalem, Naeim Giladi’s family stayed behind.

His ancestors had settled in Iraq 600 years before Christianity and 1,200 years before Islam. He was born near the site of Babylon.

For him and his family Babylon had been a “land of milk, honey, abundance-and opportunity.” For two and one-half millenniums, despite some periods of oppression they had prospered. “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.”

When he was seventeen Giladi joined the Zionist underground movement in Iraq. His father told him that he would come back to Iraq with his tail between his legs when he discovered Naiem planned to move to the Promised Land. Instead he was captured, tortured, condemned to death, and escaped from prison to Israel. He could never go back.

His father and mother never left Iraq. Six thousand Iraqi Jews stayed behind. 125,000 left for Israel.

Naiem Giladi’s disillusion with Zionism began early and became complete.

He spoke Arabic and Hebrew. The people who monopolized political power spoke Yiddish and Hebrew. They were European Jews, mainly Eastern European Jews, the Ashkenazim.

He was a farmer’s son so he volunteered to work on a farming kibbutz. The new immigrants were given the worst of everything, “even bad toothpaste.” He left.

The government then sent him to work in the Military Governor’s office about nine miles from Gaza. The Zionist planned to turn the area into an Israeli farmers’ city.  They had decided to ethnically cleanse the area. Galadi’s job was to give out forms in Arabic to imprisoned farmers saying they voluntarily wanted leave and move into the Gaza strip. Giladi resigned.

Giladi discovered that when he applied for other government jobs he would be asked if he spoke Polish or Yiddish. The good niches were reserved for Jews who did.

He discovered the Ashkenazim saw the Jews from Islamic countries as “a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farmwork that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.”

Giladi learned how the Palestinians had been persuaded to abandon their homes. “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.”

According to Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, Moshe Dayan gave orders to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and render water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria. He told the journalist Sarah Laybobis-Dar that bacteria were used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants.

The Haganah put typhus bacteria into the spring that fed the city of Acre.

The Ashkenazim segregated Oriental Jews into separate sections in the Socialist party.

Oriental Jews were good enough to serve in the Israeli army. Giladi fought in the 1967 war.

When Israel excused the the massacres at the refugee camps in Lebanon, Giladi had had enough. He immigrated to the United States and he revoked his Israeli citizenship.

He says that he still dreams of Iraq. Also, he has learned why Iraqi Jews fled to Israel.

Six months after Giladi escaped from Abu Ghreib prison bombs began exploding in Baghdad. The perpetrators targeted places where Iraqi Jews congregated. Grenades were tossed from a moving car at a Passover party. Leaflets were distributed calling on the Jews to leave Iraq immediately. More bombs were exploded. Jews were killed and injured as the bombings continued. Jews fled Iraq in droves.

Giladi tells us the deadly bombs were thrown by Zionist Jews. He cites a book by a former senior official in the C.I.A. who wrote:

“In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”

Laboratory tests in Iraq confirmed that the anti-American leaflets found at the American Cultural Center bombing were typed on the same typewriter and copied on the same stenciling machine as the leaflets scattered by the Zionist movement just before the April 8th bombing. The explosive used in one attack matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew who was a member of the military arm of the Zionist underground.

Giladi reports that when the Jewish refugees from Iraq tried to exchange their Iraqi currency for Israeli currency, the Israeli government confiscated half their value.

After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion   had emissaries smuggled into the Arab countries to “convince” Jews to leave either by trickery or fear. “In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them.”

Giladi reveal that Jews represented a large part of the Communist party in Iraq. Hundreds of Jews also occupied key positions in the hierarchy of the Socialist party.  Britain was then the preeminent colonial power in Iraq. He suggests that Britain cooperated with the Zionist to remove the communist influence from Iraq by transferring the whole Jewish community to Israel.

He says that evidence exists that the Israelis sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat to Baghdad in September 1949. He offered the leader of Iraq financial incentives to have a law passed that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi Jews. He claims that Zionists and Iraqi officials used a draft dictated by Israel. The bill enacted by the Iraqi parliament empowered the government to issue onetime exit visas to Jews wishing to leave the country.

Giladi closes: “I knew Jews were being killed and an organization existed that could lead us to the Promised Land. So I helped in the exodus to Israel. Later, on occasions, I would bump into some of these Iraqi Jews in Israel. Not infrequently they’d express the sentiment that they could kill me for what I had done.”

Posted by Robert Reis on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 04:17 AM in
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