1950–1951 Baghdad bombings
In 1941 after the government of pro-Nazi Rashid Ali was defeated, his soldiers and policemen, aided by the Arab mob, started the Farhud ("violent dispossession").
"[25] Elie Kedourie writes that after the 1948 show trial of Shafiq Ades, a respected Jewish businessman, who was publicly hanged in Basra,[25] Iraq Jews realized they were no longer under the protection of the law and there was little difference between the mob and Iraqi court justice.[22].
In April 1950, an activist of Mossad L'Aliyah Bet, Shlomo Hillel, using the alias Richard Armstrong, flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad as a representative of the American charter company Near East Air Transport, to organize an airlift of Iraqi Jews to Israel via Cyprus.
[38] Between April 1950 and June 1951, several explosions had occurred in Baghdad:[39][40] The pro-Western Iraqi government of Faisal II and Nuri al-Said prosecuted the alleged Jewish perpetrators in court, in a trial which began in October 1951.
[45] Shlomo Hillel, also once a member of the Iraqi Zionist underground, noted that the last words of the executed defendants were "Long live the State of Israel".
[47] Baghdad police officers who gave evidence at the trial appear to have been convinced that the crimes were committed by Jewish agents, claiming that "anyone studying the affair closely will see that the perpetrator did not intend to cause loss of life among the Jews" and that each grenade was "thrown in non-central locations and there was no intention to kill or injure a certain person".
A secret Israeli inquiry in 1960 found no evidence that they were ordered by Israel or any motive that would have explained the attack, though it did find out that most of the witnesses believed that Jews had been responsible for the bombings.
[52] The issue remains unresolved: Iraqi activists still regularly charge that Israel used violence to engineer the exodus, while Israeli officials of the time vehemently deny it.
[53] Historian Moshe Gat reports that "the belief that the bombs had been thrown by Zionist agents was shared by those Iraqi Jews who had just reached Israel".
[58][59] Shenhav noted an Israeli Foreign Ministry memo which stated that Iraqi Jews reacted to the hangings of Salah and Basri with the attitude: "That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths.
"[60] 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.
The Iraqi Jewish anti-Zionist[62] 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.
"[63] Giladi claims that he is supported by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his book Ropes of Sand.
[21] Moshe Gat asserts that Avnery wrote "without checking facts", Wolfsohn "distort(ed) the dates of the explosions", and that their works "served as the basis for the arguments of the Palestinian author Abbas Shiblak".
[64] Yehuda Tajar, who spent ten years in Iraqi prison for his alleged involvement in the bombings, was interviewed in Arthur Neslen's 2006 book "Occupied Minds".
According to Tajar, the widow of one of the Jewish activists implied he had organized attacks after his colleagues were arrested for the Masuda Shemtov synagogue bombing, to prove that those on trial were not the perpetrators.
[65] The Jewish Telegraph Agency notice from the time states that the bombers were charged with both the January 14, 1951 synagogue bombing and the 19th March grenade attack.
[66] According to historian Moshe Gat, "not only did Israeli emissaries not place the bombs at the locations cited in the Iraqi statement, but also that there was in fact no need to take such drastic action in order to urge the Jews to leave Iraq for Israel".
Ben Porat sued the journalist for libel, ending in an out-of-court compromise, where Nadel retracted all the accusations against the Israeli emissaries, and apologized [76][51] In his 1996 book "To Baghdad and Back," Ben-Porat published the full report of a 1960 investigation committee appointed by David Ben-Gurion, which "did not find any factual proof that the bombs were hurled by any Jewish organization or individual" and was "convinced that no entity in Israel gave an order to perpetrate such acts of sabotage.
[23] In his memoir of Jewish life in Baghdad, Sasson Somekh writes: "The pace of registration for the citizenship waiver was slow in the beginning, but it increased as tensions rose between Jews and their neighbors and after acts of terror were perpetrated against Jewish businesses and institutions – especially the Mas'uda Shem-Tov Synagogue...This was the place to which emigrating citizens were required to report with their luggage before leaving for Israel.
