GiladiLink

The Link

Published by Americans for

Middle East Understanding, Inc.

Volume 31, Issue 2

April-May, 1998

The Link

interviewed Naeim

Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three
hours on March 16, 1998, two days
prior to his 69

birthday. For nearly

two other delightful hours, we were
treated to a multi-course Arabic
meal prepared by his wife Rachel,
who is also Iraqi. “It’s our Arab
culture,” he said proudly.

In our previous

Link,

Israeli

historian Ilan Pappe looked at the
hundr eds of thous a nds 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. His book is listed in our
catalog on pages 13-15.

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

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.”

`çåíá åìÉÇ= çå=

The author, Naeim Giladi, pictured

in 1947—the year his account for

The Link

begins.

The Jews of Iraq

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=O=

AMEU Board of Directors

Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr.

Atwater, Bradley & Partners, Inc.

Henry G. Fischer

(Vice President)

Curator Emeritus, Dept. of Egyptian Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bonnie Gehweiler

Coordinator, Bethlehem 2000 Project

Grace Halsell

Writer

Nell MacCracken

Consultant

Robert L. Norberg

Lachlan Reed

President, Lachlan International

Talcott W. Seelye

Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria

Donald L. Snook

Jack B. Sunderland

(President)

President, American Independent Oil Co.

L. Humphrey Walz

Associate Executive, H.R. Presbyterian Synod

of the Northeast

Miriam Ward, RSM

Professor, Religious Studies

Mark R. Wellman

(Treasurer)

Financial Consultant

AMEU National Council

Hon. James E. Akins
Isabelle Bacon
William R. Chandler
David S. Dodge
Barbro Ek
Paul Findley
Joseph C. Harsch
Dr. Francis H. Horn
Dr. Cornelius B. Houk
O. Kelly Ingram
Moorhead Kennedy
Ann Kerr
John D. Law
Prof. George Lenczowski
David Nes
C. Herbert Oliver
George L. Parkhurst
Marie Petersen
John J. Slocum
Dr. John C. Trever
Don W. Wagner, Jr.

AMEU Staff

John F. Mahoney,

Executive Director

Shibabaw Wubetu,

Accounts Manager

AMEU (

ISSN 0024-4007

) grants permission to

reproduce material from

The Link

in part or in

whole. We ask that credit be given to AMEU and
that one copy be sent to our office at 475

Riverside Drive, Room 245, New York, New York

10115. Tel. 212-870-2053; Fax 212-870-2050; E-

Mail <AMEU@aol.com>

==j

bj lof ^j

We announce with sadness the deaths of

Ambassador Marshall W. Wiley and Father
Joseph L. Ryan, S.J.

Marshall W. Wiley

served in various

Foreign Service posts, as U. S. Ambassador to
Oman, Deputy Chief of Mission in Saudi
Arabia, Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in
Baghdad, and Director of North African Affairs
at the U.S. State Department in Washington.
He also did tours of duty in Yemen, Lebanon
and Jordan.

In recent years, Ambassador Wiley

lectured widely on the Middle East and was a
frequent participant on national TV news
programs. Since 1986, he served on our Board
of Directors.

His presence on our Board will be missed

greatly.  We will miss his Middle East
expertise, his legal counsel, and his company.
The one-day, round-trip trek by train from his
home in Maryland to our office in Manhattan
can be tiresome at best. Marshall seldom
missed a Directors meeting. The obligation of
an educational organization to provide reliable
information was of profound importance to
him—particularly if the organization was one
on whose board he served.

Joseph L. Ryan

was a Jesuit priest who

taught at the Jesuits’ Baghdad College in Iraq,
and later served as dean and academic vice-
president of Al-Hikma University in Iraq.
From 1971 to 1975, he was an associate of the
Center for the Study of the Modern Arab World
at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut, and from
1984 to 1990 he directed the Pontifical Mission
for Palestine in Amman, Jordan.

Father Ryan served on our Board of

Directors until a few years ago when his health
began to fail. Even then he maintained his
public endorsement of our efforts by accepting
membership on our National Council.

An unobtrusive and shy man, Joseph

Ryan was also an insightful observer of the
human condition, who did not fear to speak on
the plight of the Palestinians before
congressional committees and in churches and
synagogues. For the past seven years he was in
residence at Fairfield University in Connecticut,
where from time to time I’d have lunch or
supper with him. His assignment was
directing retreats for other Jesuits, and he’d
always be reading the latest books on
spirituality. Occasionally he’d tell me about a
particularly good book he had just read and
how much it had impressed him. Then he’d
ask, “How is it over there?”

—John F. Mahoney

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

(Continued from Page 1.)

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=P=

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

AEIM

ILADI

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=Q=

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.

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=R=

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.

The Riots of 1941

If, as I have said, my family in Iraq was not

persecuted personally and I knew no deprivation as a
member of the Jewish minority, what led me to the steps
of the gallows as a member of the Zionist underground?
To answer that question, it is necessary to establish the
context of the massacre that occurred in Baghdad on June
1, 1941, when several hundred Iraqi Jews were killed in
riots involving junior officers of the Iraqi army. I was 12
years of age and many of those killed were my friends. I
was angry, and very confused.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the riots

most likely were stirred up by the British, in collusion
with a pro-British Iraqi leadership.

With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following

WW I, Iraq came under British “tutelage.” Amir Faisal,
son of Sharif Hussein who had led the Arab Revolt
against the Ottoman sultan, was brought in from Mecca
by the British to become King of Iraq in 1921. Many Jews
were appointed to key administrative posts, including
that of economics minister. Britain retained final
authority over domestic and external affairs.

Britain’s pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however,

triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it
did in all Arab countries. Writing at the end of 1934, Sir
Francis Humphreys, Britain’s Ambassador in Baghdad,
noted that, while before WW I Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a
more favorable position than any other minority in the
country, since then “Zionism has sown dissension
between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up
between the two peoples which did not previously
exist.”

King Faisal died in 1933. He was succeeded by his

son Ghazi, who died in a motor car accident in 1939. The
crown then passed to Ghazi’s 4-year-old son, Faisal II,
whose uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was named regent. Abd al-Ilah

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=S=

selected Nouri el-Said as prime minister.  El-Said
supported the British and, as hatred of the British grew,
he  was  forced  from  office  in  March  1940  by  four  senior
army officers who advocated Iraq’s independence from
Britain. Calling themselves the Golden Square, the
officers  compelled the regent to name as prime minister
Rashid Ali al-Kilani, leader of the National Brotherhood
party.

The time was 1940 and Britain was reeling from a

strong German offensive. Al-Kilani and the Golden
Square saw this as their opportunity to rid themselves of
the British once and for all. Cautiously they began to
negotiate for German support, which led the pro-British
regent Abd al-Ilah to dismiss al-Kilani in January 1941.
By April, however, the Golden Square officers had
reinstated the prime minister.

This provoked the British to send a military force

into Basra on April 12, 1941. Basra, Iraq’s second largest
city, had a Jewish population of 30,000. Most of these
Jews made their livings from import/export, money
changing, retailing, as workers in the airports, railways,
and ports, or as senior government employees.

On the same day, April 12, supporters of the pro-

British regent notified the Jewish leaders that the regent
wanted to meet with them. As was their custom, the
leaders brought flowers for the regent. Contrary to
custom, however, the cars that drove them to the
meeting place dropped them off at the site where the
British soldiers were concentrated.

Photographs of the Jews appeared in the following

day’s newspapers with the banner “Basra Jews Receive
British Troops with Flowers.”  That same day, April 13,
groups of angry Arab youths set about to take revenge
against the Jews.  Several Muslim notables in Basra heard
of the plan and calmed things down. Later, it was
learned that the regent was not in Basra at all and that
the matter was a provocation by his pro-British
supporters to bring about an ethnic war in order to give
the British army a pretext to intervene.

The British continued to land more forces in and

around Basra.  On May 7, 1941, their Gurkha unit,
composed  of  Indian  soldiers  from  that  ethnic  group,
occupied Basra’s el-Oshar quarter, a neighborhood with
a large Jewish population. The soldiers, led by British
officers, began looting. Many shops in the commercial
district were plundered. Private homes were broken into.
Cases of attempted rape were reported. Local residents,
Jews and Muslims, responded with pistols and old rifles,
but their bullets were no match for the soldiers’ Tommy
Guns.

Afterwards, it was learned that the soldiers acted

with the acquiescence, if not the blessing, of their British

commanders. (It should be remembered that the Indian
soldiers, especially those of the Gurkha unit, were
known for their discipline, and it is highly unlikely they
would have acted so riotously without orders.) The
British goal clearly was to create chaos and to blacken the
image of the pro-nationalist regime in Baghdad, thereby
giving the British forces reason to proceed to the capital
and to overthrow the al-Kilani government.

Baghdad fell on May 30. Al-Kilani fled to Iran, along

with the Golden Square officers. Radio stations run by
the British reported that Regent Abd al-Ilah would be
returning to the city and that thousands of Jews and
others were planning to welcome him. What inflamed
young Iraqis against the Jews most, however, was the
radio announcer Yunas Bahri on the German station
“Berlin,” who reported in Arabic that Jews from
Palestine were fighting alongside the British against Iraqi
soldiers near the city of Faluja. The report was false.

On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in

Baghdad between Jews who were still celebrating their
Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who thought the
Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British
regent. That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus,
removed the Jewish passengers, murdered one and
fatally wounded a second.

About 8:30 the following morning, some 30

individuals in military and police uniforms opened fire
along el-Amin street, a small downtown street whose
jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned.
By 11 a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and
clubs were attacking Jewish homes in the area.

The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2.

During this time, many Muslims rose to defend their
Jewish neighbors, while some Jews successfully
defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400
injured, according to a report written by a Jewish Agency
messenger who was in Iraq at the time. Other estimates,
possibly less reliable, put the death toll higher, as many
as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to 1,300
stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were
looted.

Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter?

Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the
Zionist underground movement in Iraq, known then as
Yehoshafat, claims it was the British. Meir, who now
works for the Israeli Defense Ministry, argues that, in
order to make it appear that the regent was returning as
the savior who would reestablish law and order, the
British stirred up the riots against the most vulnerable
and visible segment in the city, the Jews. And, not
surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent’s loyal
soldiers entered the capital.

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=T=

My own investigations as a journalist lead me to

believe Meir is correct. Furthermore, I think his claims
should be seen as based on documents in the archives of
the Israeli Defense Ministry, the agency that published
his book. Yet, even before his book came out, I had
independent confirmation from a man I met in Iran in
the late Forties.

His name was Michael Timosian, an Iraqi Armenian.

When I met him he was working as a male nurse at the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan in the south of
Iran. On June 2, 1941, however, he was working at the
Baghdad hospital where many of the riot victims were
brought. Most of these victims were Jews.

Timosian said he was particularly interested in two

patients whose conduct did not follow local custom. One
had been hit by a bullet in his shoulder, the other by a
bullet in his right knee. After the doctor removed the
bullets, the staff tried to change their blood-soaked
cloths. But the two men fought off their efforts,
pretending to be speechless, although tests showed they
could hear. To pacify them, the doctor injected them with
anesthetics and, as they were sleeping, Timosian
changed their cloths. He discovered that one of them had
around his neck an identification tag of the type used by
British troops, while the other had tattoos with Indian
script on his right arm along with the familiar sword of
the Gurkha.

The next day when Timosian showed up for work,

he was told that a British officer, his sergeant and two
Indian Gurkha soldiers had come to the hospital early
that morning. Staff members overheard the Gurkha
soldiers talking with the wounded patients, who were
not as dumb as they had pretended. The patients saluted
the visitors, covered themselves with sheets and, without
signing the required release forms, left the hospital with
their visitors.

Today there is no doubt in my mind that the anti-

Jewish riots of 1941 were orchestrated by the British for
geopolitical ends. David Kimche is certainly a man who
was in a position to know the truth, and he has spoken
publicly about British culpability. Kimche had been with
British Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad
after the war. Later he became Director General of
Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the position he held in 1982
when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for
International Affairs in London.

In responding to hostile questions about Israel’s

invasion of Lebanon and the refugee camp massacres in
Beirut, Kimche went on the attack, reminding the
audience that there was scant concern in the British
Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in
the murder of 500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941.

The Bombings of 1950-1951

The anti-Jewish riots of 1941 did more than create a

pretext for the British to enter Baghdad to reinstate the
pro-British regent and his pro-British prime minister,
Nouri el-Said. They also gave the Zionists in Palestine a
pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in
Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara,
Hillah, Diwaneia, Abril and Karkouk.

Following WW II, a succession of governments held

brief power in Iraq.  Zionist conquests in Palestine,
particularly the massacre of Palestinians in the village of
Deir Yassin, emboldened the anti-British movement in
Iraq.  When the Iraqi government signed a new treaty of
friendship with London in January 1948, riots broke out
all over the country.  The treaty was quickly abandoned
and Baghdad demanded removal of the British military
mission that had run Iraq’s army for 27 years.

Later in 1948, Baghdad sent an army detachment to

Palestine to fight the Zionists, and when Israel declared
independence in May, Iraq closed the pipeline that fed its
oil to Haifa’s refinery. Abd al-Ilah, however, was still
regent and the British quisling, Nouri el-Said, was back
as prime minister. I was in the Abu-Greib prison in 1948,
where I would remain until my escape to Iran in
September 1949.

Six months later—the exact date was March 19,

1950—a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center
and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and
injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite
meeting place for young Jews.

The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on

April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young
passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad’s El-Dar El-
Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four
people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were
distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.

The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with

nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce
their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for
Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to
open registration offices in Jewish schools and
synagogues.

On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the

direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned
Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the
building. No casualties were reported.

On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a

speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where
most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was
hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent
telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=U=

immigration from Iraq be increased.

On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the

Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid
street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.

On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown

at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov
Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable,
electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak
Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the
attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700
per day.

Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs

in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted
Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the
grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and
damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.

Among the most important documents in my book, I

believe, are copies of two leaflets published by the
Zionist underground calling on Jews to leave Iraq. One
is dated March 16, 1950, the other April 8, 1950.

The difference between these two is critical. Both

indicate the date of publication, but only the April 8

leaflet notes the time of day: 4  p.m.  Why the time of
day?   Such a specification was unprecedented.  Even the
investigating judge, Salaman El-Beit, found it suspicious.
Did the 4 p.m. writers want an alibi for a bombing they
knew would occur five hours later?  If so, how did they
know about the bombing? The judge concluded they

knew because a connection existed between the Zionist
underground and the bomb throwers.

This, too, was the conclusion of Wilbur Crane

Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), whom I had the opportunity
to meet in New York in 1988. In his book,

Ropes of Sand

whose publication the CIA opposed, Eveland writes:

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.”

Eveland doesn’t detail the evidence linking the

Zionists to the attacks, but in my book I do. In 1955, for
example, I organized in Israel a panel of Jewish attorneys
of Iraqi origin to handle claims of Iraqi Jews who still
had property in Iraq. One well known attorney, who
asked that I not give his name, confided in me that the
laboratory tests in Iraq had confirmed that the anti-
American leaflets found at the American Cultural Center
bombing were typed on the same typewriter and

xq ê~åëä~íá çåz =

p~íìêÇ~óI=^é êá ä= UI=NVRMI=Q=
ç∞ ÅäçÅâ=éKãK=

`~ää= íç=qÜÉ= gÉïë=

xqçz=^ ää= çÑ=q ÜÉ=qêá ÄÉ= çÑ=

wá çå=

=iá îá åÖ=á å=_~Äó äçå=

cçê= íÜÉ= ëÉÅçåÇ= íáãÉ=á å=

íÜÉ= Üá ëíçêó= çÑ= íÜÉ=
Çá ~ëéçê~I= ïÉ= Ü~îÉ= ~å=
çééçêíìåá íó= íç= äÉ~îÉK=t É=
ÉåÅçìê~ÖÉ=óçì= íç= Üìêêó =
~åÇ= äÉ~îÉK=

qçÇ~óI= íÜÉ= gÉïë=~êÉ=á å= ~=

åÉï= Éê~= çÑ= íÜÉ= Üá ëíçêó= çÑ=
íÜÉ= Çá ~ëéçê~K=qÜÉ= íáãÉ= Ü~ë=

Leaflets distributed by the Zionist underground in Iraq were
few in number, sometimes issued months apart. The leaflet of
April 8, 1950, was unusual in that it carried the time of day—4
o’clock p.m.—not just the date. Five hours later, during
Passover celebrations in Baghdad, a cafe frequented by Jews
was the target of a bomb. Was the hour mentioned because
the underground itself was behind the bombing, which it
hoped would violently punctuate its 4 p.m. advisory? There
is strong evidence to support that conclusion.

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=V=

duplicated on the same stenciling machine as the leaflets
distributed by the Zionist movement just before the April
8

bombing.

Tests also showed that the type of explosive used in

the Beit-Lawi attack matched traces of explosives found
in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew by the name of Yosef Basri.
Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom Salih, a shoemaker,
would be put on trial for the attacks in December 1951
and executed the following month. Both men were
members of Hashura, the military arm of the Zionist
underground.  Salih ultimately confessed that he, Basri
and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks.

By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but

6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel.
Moreover, the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said
saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen,
including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting
Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to
exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli
government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those
Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who
happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if
they didn’t return within a specified time. An ancient,
cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and
its people transplanted to a land dominated by East
European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but
entirely hateful to them.

The Ultimate Criminals

Zionist Leaders

. From the start they knew that in

order to establish a Jewish state they had to expel the
indigenous Palestinian population to the neighboring
Islamic states and import Jews from these same states.

Theodor Herzl

, the architect of Zionism, thought it

could be done by social engineering. In his diary entry
for 12 June 1885, he wrote that Zionist settlers would
have to “spirit the penniless population across the border
by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,
while denying it any employment in our own country.”

Vladimir Jabotinsky

, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s

ideological progenitor, frankly admitted that such a
transfer of populations could only be brought about by
force.

David Ben Gurion

, Israel’s first prime minister, told

a Zionist Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish
state would have to “transfer Arab populations out of the
area, if possible of their own free will, if not by
coercion.”

After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and

their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to
look to the Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the
resultant cheap labor market. “Emissaries” were
smuggled into these 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.

A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a

book was published in Iraq, in Arabic, titled

Venom of the

Zionist Viper

. The author was one of the Iraqi

investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book,
he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the
emissaries sent by Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon
as the book came out, all copies just disappeared, even
from libraries. The word was that agents of the Israeli
Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up
all the books and destroyed them. I tried on three
different occasions to have one sent to me in Israel, but
each time Israeli censors in the post office intercepted it.

British Leaders

. Britain always acted in its best

colonial interests. For that reason Foreign Minister

Arthur Balfour

sent his famous 1917 letter to Lord

Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I.
During WW II the British were primarily concerned with
keeping their client states in the Western camp, while
Zionists were most concerned with the immigration of
European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant
cooperating with the Nazis. (In my book I document
numerous instances of such dealings by Ben Gurion and
the Zionist leadership.)

After WW II the international chessboard pitted

communists against capitalists. In many countries,
including the United States and Iraq, Jews represented a
large part of the Communist party. In Iraq, hundreds of
Jews of the working intelligentsia occupied key positions
in the hierarchy of the Communist and Socialist parties.
To keep their client countries in the capitalist camp,
Britain had to make sure these governments had pro-
British leaders. And if, as in Iraq, these leaders were
overthrown, then an anti-Jewish riot or two could prove
a useful pretext to invade the capital and reinstate the
“right” leaders.

Moreover, if the possibility existed of removing the

communist influence from Iraq by transferring the whole
Jewish community to Israel, well then, why not?
Particularly if the leaders of Israel and Iraq conspired in
the deed.

The Iraqi Leaders

. Both the regent

Abd al-Ilah

and

his prime minister

Nouri el- Said

took directions from

London. Toward the end of 1948, el-Said, who had
already met with Israel’s Prime Minister Ben Gurion in
Vienna, began discussing with his Iraqi and British
associates the need for an exchange of populations. Iraq
would send the Jews in military trucks to Israel via

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=N M=

Jordan, and Iraq would take in some of the Palestinians
Israel had been evicting. His proposal included mutual
confiscation of property. London nixed the idea as too
radical.

El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to

create the conditions that would make the lives of Iraqi
Jews so miserable they would leave for Israel. Jewish
government employees were fired from their jobs; Jewish
merchants were denied import/export licenses; police
began to arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did
not leave in any great numbers.

In September 1949, Israel sent the spy

Mordechai

Ben-Porat

, the one mentioned in

Venom of the Zionist

Viper

, to Iraq. One of the first things Ben-Porat did was to

approach el-Said and promise him financial incentives to
have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi
Jews.

Soon after, Zionist

a n d   I r a q i
representatives began
formulating a rough
draft of the bill,
according to the
model dictated by
Israel through its
agents in Baghdad.
The bill was passed by
the Iraqi parliament in
March 1950. It
e m p o w e r e d   t h e
government to issue
one-time exit visas to
Jews wishing to leave
the country. In
March, the bombings
began.

Sixteen years later,

the Israeli magazine

H a o l a m H a z e h

published by Uri
Avnery, then a
Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad
bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset
member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the
magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him
Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs.

As I said, all this went well beyond the

comprehension of a teenager. 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.

Opportunities

for Peace

After the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of

Qibya in October, 1953, Ben Gurion went into voluntary
exile at the Sedeh Boker

kibbutz

in the Negev. The Labor

party then used to organize many buses for people to go
visit him there, where they would see the former prime
minister working with sheep. But that was only for
show. Really he was writing his diary and continuing to
be active behind the scenes. I went on such a tour.

We were told not to try to speak to Ben Gurion, but

when I saw him, I asked why, since Israel is a democracy
with a parliament, does it not have a constitution? Ben
Gurion said, “Look, boy”—I was 24 at the time—“if we

have a constitution,
we have to write in it
the border of our
country.  And this is
not our border, my
dear.”  I asked, “Then
where is the border?”
He said, “Wherever
the

Sahal

will come,

this is the border.”

Sahal

is the Israeli

army.
Ben Gurion told the
world that Israel
accepted the partition
and the Arabs rejected
it. Then Israel took
half of the land that
was promised to the
Arab state. And still
he was saying it was
not enough. Israel
needed more land.

How can a country
make peace with its

neighbors if it wants to take their land? How can a
country demand to be secure if it won’t say what borders
it will be satisfied with? For such a country, peace would
be an inconvenience.

I know now that from the beginning many Arab

leaders wanted to make peace with Israel, but Israel
always refused. Ben Gurion covered this up with
propaganda. He said that the Arabs wanted to drive
Israel into the sea and he called Gamal Abdel Nasser the
Hitler of the Middle East whose foremost intent was to
destroy Israel. He wanted America and Great Britain to
treat Nasser like a pariah.

The author (right) was an activist in what became known as Israel’s “Black
Panthers,” a movement of Jews from Islamic countries that fought against
ethnic discrimination. Giladi represented the movement on the executive
committee of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union. This photo was taken in 1979
as members of an Israeli Architects Association signed petitions for Giladi’s
candidacy in Histadrut elections.

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=N N =

In 1954, it seemed that America was getting less

critical of Nasser. Then during a three-week period in
July, several terrorist bombs were set off: at the United
States Information Agency offices in Cairo and
Alexandria, a British-owned theater, and the central post
office in Cairo. An attempt to firebomb a cinema in
Alexandria failed when the bomb went off in the pocket
of one of the perpetrators. That led to the discovery that
the terrorists were not anti-Western Egyptians, but were
instead Israeli spies bent on souring the warming
relationship between Egypt and the United States in
what came to be known as the Lavon Affair.

Ben Gurion was still living on his

kibbutz

. Moshe

Sharett as prime minister was in contact with Abdel
Nasser through the offices of Lord Maurice Orbach of
Great Britain. Sharett asked Nasser to be lenient with the
captured spies, and Nasser did all that was in his power
to prevent a deterioration of the situation between the
two countries.

Then Ben Gurion returned as Defense Minister in

February, 1955. Later that month Israeli troops attacked
Egyptian military camps and Palestinian refugees in
Gaza, killing 54 and injuring many more. The very night
of the attack, Lord Orbach was on his way to deliver a
message to Nasser, but was unable to get through
because of the military action. When Orbach telephoned,
Nasser's secretary told him that the attack proved that
Israel did not want peace and that he was wasting his
time as a mediator.

In November, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset

that he was willing to meet with Abdel Nasser anywhere
and at any time for the sake of peace and understanding.
The next morning the Israeli military attacked an
Egyptian military camp in the Sabaha region.

Although Nasser felt pessimistic about achieving

peace with Israel, he continued to send other mediators
to try. One was through the American Friends Service
Committee; another via the Prime Minister of Malta,
Dom Minthoff; and still another through Marshall Tito of
Yugoslavia.

One that looked particularly promising was through

Dennis Hamilton, editor of

The London Times

. Nasser

told Hamilton that if only he could sit and talk with Ben
Gurion for two or three hours,  they  would  be  able  to
settle the conflict and end the state of war between the
two countries. When word of  this reached Ben Gurion,
he  arranged  to  meet  with  Hamilton.  They  decided  to
pursue the matter with the Israeli ambassador in
London, Arthur Luria, as liaison. On Hamilton's third
trip to Egypt, Nasser met him with the text of a Ben
Gurion speech stating that Israel would not give up an
inch of land and would not take back a single refugee.

Hamilton knew that Ben Gurion with his mouth had
undermined a peace mission and missed an opportunity
to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Nasser even sent his friend Ibrahim Izat of the

Ruz El

Yusuf

weekly paper to meet with Israeli leaders in order

to explore the political atmosphere and find out why the
attacks were taking place if Israel really wanted peace.
One of the men Izat met with was Yigal Yadin, a former
Chief of Staff of the army who wrote this letter to me on
14 January 1982:

Dear Mr. Giladi:
Your letter reminded me of an event

which I nearly forgot and of which I remember only
a few details.

Ibrahim Izat came to me if I am not

mistaken under the request of the Foreign Ministry
or one of its branches; he stayed in my house and we
spoke for many hours. I do not remember him
saying that he came on a mission from Nasser, but I
have no doubt that he let it be understood that this
was with his knowledge or acquiescence....

When Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal

in spite of opposition from the British and the French,
Radio Cairo announced in Hebrew:

If the Israeli government is not influenced by

the British and the French imperialists, it will
eventually result in greater understanding between
the two states, and Egypt will reconsider Israel's
request to have access to the Suez Canal.

Israel responded that it had no designs on Egypt, but

at that very moment Israeli representatives were in
France planning the three-way attack that was to take
place in October, 1956.

All the while, Ben Gurion continued to talk about the

Hitler of the Middle East. This brainwashing went on
until late September, 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser
passed away. Then, miracle of miracles, David Ben
Gurion told the press:

A week before he died I received an envoy from

Abdel Nasser who asked to meet with me urgently
in order to solve the problems between Israel and
the Arab world.

The public was surprised because they didn't know

that Abdel Nasser had wanted this all along, but Israel
sabotaged it.

Nasser was not the only Arab leader who wanted to

make peace with Israel.  There were many others.
Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qasem, before he seized
power in Iraq in July, 1958, headed an underground
organization that sent a delegation to Israel to make a
secret agreement. Ben Gurion refused even to see him.  I
learned about this when I was a journalist in Israel.  But

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=N O=

Americans f

or Middle

East Unders

tanding

New York, NY

January 27,

1998

Dear Mr. Jo

hn F. Mahone

Thank you fo

r your Jan.

-March, 1997

Link. It

was one of

the publicat

ions that m

otivated us

to get acti

ve.

My name is Ko

uthar Al-Ra

wi and I am

10 years

old. My sist

er is Marwa and

she is 9 ye

ars

old.

We want to t

ell everyone

that an Ir

aqi child

dies every 10

minutes, th

at is 150 c

hildren a

day, and 4,

500 children

a month. T

he children

in Iraq see

me, my sist

er and othe

r children

watching th

em die a cr

uel, painful,

slow

death, and no

t doing a th

ing to save

them. We

all hold th

e ability to

save these

children’s

lives.

That is why

my sister a

nd I starte

d a

campaign called Reme

mber the Iraqi Childr

en,

One Million Postcard

s to President Clinto

We have a mission to

educate the public on

this tragedy in Iraq

, and call for the en

d of

the embargo. An enti

re generation of chil

dren

is disappearing becau

se of no food, no cl

ean

water, and no medicin

We are calling on peo

ple, especially other

children, to write a po

stcard to President

Clinton calling fo

r an end of the embar

go on

Iraq, for the sake of

the children. Send y

our

cards to us:

Kouthar and Marwa Al

-Rawi

Remember the Iraqi Ch

ildren,

One Million Postcard

s to President Clinto

Campaign

P.O. Box 1141

San Pedro, CA 90733

When we reach our goa

l of one million

postcards, we will de

liver them to Preside

Clinton.

Postcards to Clinton Campaign

whenever I tried to publish even a small part of it, the
censor would stamp it "Not Allowed."

Now, in Netanyahu, we are witnessing another

attempt by an Israeli prime minister to fake an interest in
making peace.  Netanyahu and the Likud are setting
Arafat up by demanding that he institute more and more
repressive measures in the interest of Israeli “security.”
Sooner or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had
enough of Arafat’s strong-arm methods as Israel’s
quisling—and he’ll be killed.  Then the Israeli
government will say, “See, we were ready to give him
everything. You can’t trust those Arabs—they kill each
other. Now there’s no one to even talk to about peace.”

Conclusion

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier

for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.
Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the
Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands
because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the
Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more
discerning: bigger players on the world stage were
pulling the strings.

These players, I believe, should be held accountable

for their crimes, particularly when they willfully
terrorized, dispossessed and killed innocent people on
the altar of some ideological imperative.

I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders

have a moral responsibility to compensate the victims
and their descendants, and to do so not just with
reparations, but by setting the historical record straight.

That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel

to seek reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to
leave behind their property and possessions in Iraq. That
is why I joined the Black Panthers in confronting the
Israeli government with the grievances of the Jews in
Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I
have written my book and this article: to set the historical
record straight.

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our

ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between
Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs—I say Arab because
that is the language my wife and I still speak at home—

(Continued on page 13)

March to Protest Aid to Israel

A march on Capitol Hill to protest U.S. aid to Israel will be
held on May 15, 1998, sponsored by the Council for the
National Interest. For information, contact the Council’s
Chairman, former Congressman Paul Findley, at 202-628-
6962.

qÜÉ=iáåâ=

m~ÖÉ=N P=

(Continued from page 12)

we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace
with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen
and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop
supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel
expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South
Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

ENDNOTES

Mileshtin was quoted by the Israeli daily,

Hadashot

, in an article

published August 13, 1993. The writer, Sarah Laybobis-Dar,
interviewed a number of Israelis who had knowledge of the use of
bacteriological weapons in the 1948 war. Mileshtin said bacteria was
used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab

inhabitants.

On Sept. 12, 1990, the New York State Supreme Court issued a

restraining order at the request of the Israeli government to prevent
publication of Ostrovsky’s book, “By Way of Deception: The Making
and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer.” The New York State Appeals
Court lifted the ban the next day.

Marion Woolfson, “Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World,” p.

129

Yosef Meir, “Road in the Desert,” Israeli Defense Ministry, p. 36.

See my book, “Ben Gurion’s Scandals,” p. 105.

Wilbur Crane Eveland, “Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in

the Middle East,” NY; Norton, 1980, pp. 48-49.

T. Herzl,

“The Complete Diaries,” NY: Herzl Press & Thomas

Yoncloff, 1960, vol. 1, p. 88.

Report of the Congress of the World Council of Paole Zion, Zurich,

July 29-August 7, 1937, pp. 73-74.

Book Catalog Listings

Excluded

From Internet Version

Rush Order Form

Place

next to the book you are ordering and indicate if you

wish more than one copy. Postage and handling are included in
AMEU’s prices. For international orders, add 50¢ per book. For
UPS delivery, add $2 per order. Make checks payable to AMEU.

No. of Books and Videos Ordered _______

Total Price _________

Add $2.00 for UPS delivery, if desired _________

Add 50¢ per book for international delivery _________

Total Amount Enclosed _________

Name ______________________________________

Address ____________________________________

City ______________ State _____ Zip+4 _________

MAIL ORDER WITH CHECK TO:

AMEU, Room 245, 475 Riverside Drive,

New York, NY 10115-0241

Telephone 212-870-2053, Fax 212-870-2050, or

E-Mail AMEU@aol.com

žPlease send me your complete book catalogue.

To Support

The Link

A $ 3 5 v o l u n t a r y a n n u a l
subscription is requested to defray
cost of publishing and distributing

The Link

and AMEU’s Public Affairs

Contribution to AMEU (tax deductible)

Please Send Free Pamphlet Collection

A check or money order for $________ is
enclosed, payable to AMEU.

Name ________________________________

Address ______________________________

_____________________________________

Zip+4 _________________

4/1/98

ATCHING

IFT

ROGRAM

AMEU’s Matching Gift Program

enables us to double the amount

of your donation of $75.00 toward

the purchase of gifts for a

school or public library.

When a donor sends us $75.00, we

match that amount and assemble a

selection of books priced in our

catalog at $150.00 (AMEU’s

price), but worth significantly

more at the retail list price.

The donor may designate a library

to receive the books or ask us to

make the selection. Unless

requested otherwise, we will

include a card announcing that

the books are being sent in the