What do Palestinians and Arab-Jews Have in Common ?

/shenhav1.htm

  • Une association de juifs irakiens dénonce la récupération de leur histoire par le gouvernement israélien, lequel tente actuellement d’exploiter le départ des juifs du monde arabe. Ce faisant, ils évoquent les fortes suspicions de l’implication sioniste dans les attentants antijuifs à Bagdad dans les années 50. Iraqi Jews reject ‘cynical manipulation’ of their history by Israel, Zionists, writer Almog Behar tells EIectronic Intifada
    http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/iraqi-jews-reject-cynical-manipulation-their-history-israel-zion

    We demand the establishment of an investigative committee to examine:

    1) If and by what means negotiations were carried out in 1950 between Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and if Ben-Gurion informed as-Said that he is authorized to take possession of the property and assets of Iraqi Jewry if he agreed to send them to Israel;

    2) who ordered the bombing of the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in Baghdad, and if the Israeli Mossad and/or its operatives were involved. If it is determined that Ben-Gurion did, in fact, carry out negotiations over the fate of Iraqi Jewish property and assets in 1950, and directed the Mossad to bomb the community’s synagogue in order to hasten our flight from Iraq, we will file a suit in an international court demanding half of the sum total of compensation for our refugee status from the Iraqi government and half from the Israeli government.

    Ils rejoignent ainsi le récit de Naiem Giladi :

    The role of Israel and Zionist undercover agents in helping precipitate the departure of Jews from Iraq has long been suspected.

    Naiem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq, wrote that, “Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country.” But “the terrible truth,” Giladi said, “is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.”

    Giladi, who was born Naeim Khalaschi, gave his account in an article published by Americans for Middle East Understanding in 1998 which summarizes his book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad eliminated Jews.

    Au sujet de Naeim Giladi :
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naeim_Giladi

    Giladi has strong views on Zionism and its negative effects and his article begins with the following passage: “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.”

    Giladi’s position that the 1950–1951 Baghdad bombings were “perpetrated by Zionist agents in order to cause fear amongst the Jews, and so promote their exodus to Israel” is shared by a number of anti-Zionist authors, including the Israeli Black Panthers (1975), David Hirst (1977), Wilbur Crane Eveland (1980), Uri Avnery (1988), Ella Shohat (1986), Abbas Shiblak (1986), Marion Wolfsohn (1980), and Rafael Shapiro (1984).[5] In his article, Giladi notes that this was also the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who outlined that allegation in his book “Ropes of Sand”.[2]

    D’autres informations sur la fiche des attentats de Bagdad : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bombings

    The Iraqi Jewish anti-Zionist[19] 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.”[20] This theory is shared by Uri Avnery,[21] and Marion Wolfsohn.[21] Giladi claims that it is also supported by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his book Ropes of Sand.[14]

    According to Eveland, whose information was presumably based on the Iraqi official investigation, which was shared with the US embassy,[1] “In an attempt 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 the synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel... 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.”[14]

    Allegedly, identical tactics were used later in 1954 by Israeli military intelligence in operation Suzanna,[14] when a group of Zionist Egyptian Jews attempted to plant bombs in an US Information Service library, and in a number of American targets Cairo and Alexandria. According to Teveth, they were hoping that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, ’unspecified malcontents’ or ’local nationalists’ would be blamed for their actions[22] 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 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.[11]

    • Yehuda Shenhav: What do Palestinians and Arab-Jews Have in Common?
      http://prrn.mcgill.ca/prrn/papers/shenhav1.htm

      The possibility that Iraq’s Jews could remain in their native land – the so-called “Iraqi option” (Qazzaz, 1991) – was rendered unfeasible by two reasons that were not unrelated. One reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the surging Pan-Arab and Iraqi nationalist movements (Shiblak, 1986). Israel’s establishment in May 1948 was a boost for the Iraqi nationalists, and the practice of Zionism was outlawed in July 1948. Jews in the civil service were dismissed, and the entire Jewish community was placed under surveillance. The situation was aggravated by Prime Minister Nuri Sa’id’s co-option of the right wing nationalist party Istiqlal into the government. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry informed the State Department in Washington that the Government of Iraq was concerned about the inroads being made by Communism and Zionism among the Jews. (Shiblak, 1986: 70) The second reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the activity of the Zionist movement in Iraq and the establishment of the State of Israel, which resulted in the Jews irrevocable identification with Zionism. Indeed, the activity of the Halutz movement in Iraq caused many local Jews to be perceived as Zionists, and hence as a fifth column. The actions of the Zionist movement in Iraq forged a reality that, in retrospect, justified its own presence there. As Ben-Tzion Yisraeli, an emissary of the Jewish Agency in Iraq, foresaw in 1943, “They [the Iraqi Jews] are liable to be among the first to pay the price for our enterprise in the Land of Israel...”(7)

      Plus loin:

      Sharett responded:

      “On the question of a population exchange, it was reported in the press, purportedly citing the spokesman of the Survey Group, that the Prime Minister of Iraq has allegedly made such an offer. We asked the Survey Group about the truth of this report. We received an official reply that in the course of a conversation Nuri Sa’id had ‘thrown out’ an idea along the lines of a possible exchange of Iraq’s Jews for the Arab refugees... Agreeing to this would mean, in my opinion, our agreement to have the property of Iraq’s Jews confiscated by the Iraqi Treasury in return for the Arab property we have confiscated here, and then we assume responsibility for compensating the Jews of Iraq on account of the Arabs’ property, as against the Jews’ property there. That would create a dangerous precedent with regard to Egypt and other countries. It could also be construed to mean that every Arab country undertakes to accept refugees only to the extent that it has Jews.”