Mick Hartley

Compared with other instances of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, far better publicised yet less clear-cut, this story should perhaps be better known:

For 25 centuries, until they were expelled by antisemitic decree in 1950-51, Jews had lived in Iraq untroubled. In Baghdad, according to Benjamin [Marina Benjamin, author of “Last Days in Babylon“], Jews were so integrated as to be virtually indistinguishable from the Shia and Sunni communities. Prior to their expulsion, they made up approximately one third of the city’s population. Jews formed the very backbone of the state, and thought of themselves as Iraqi patriots.

For centuries the community believed it was untouched by Jew-hatred. When, therefore, the Iraqi government allied itself to Germany in 1933, apprehension of massacre came slowly. Polish or Russian Jews with their Hassidic kaftans might arouse hostility, but Iraqi Jewry’s integration into Muslim society was surely a guarantee of safety.

With the outbreak of the second world war, however, the tide turned against Iraq’s Jews. A cabal of pro-Nazi Iraqi army officers began to agitate against the nation’s Jews and encourage Arab nationalists to support Hitler in the war against colonial British interests. On the night of June 1, 1941, a mob rampaged through Baghdad’s Jewish quarter, and killed almost 200 inhabitants. Swastikas began to appear on the walls of the synagogue.

Even at the war’s end, with Hitler now defeated, the Iraqi government retained its semi-Nazified ideology. Immediate antagonism flared between Jews and Arabs after the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Martial law was imposed and the country’s Jews were gradually eliminated from the civil service, the army and the police. Hundreds of Zionist suspects were arrested, tortured and executed, and in 1950 a Denaturalisation Act revoked their citizenship. An estimated 120,000 stateless but once prosperous Jews were airlifted out of Iraq to Israel, where, to their dismay, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe treated them as little better than road sweepers. Later, the few Jews who remained in Iraq were either harassed or hanged by the antiJewish Ba’ath party under Saddam Hussein. By any other name, this was ethnic cleansing.