Operation Ezra and Nehemiah

In the direct aftermath of the Farhud, many joined the Iraqi Communist Party in order to protect the Jews of Baghdad, yet they did not want to leave the country and rather sought to fight for better conditions in Iraq itself.

[11][12] In the first half of the 1940s, Mossad LeAliyah Bet began sending emissaries to Iraq to begin to organize emigration to Israel, initially by recruiting people to teach Hebrew and hold lectures on Zionism.

In late 1942, one of the emissaries explained the size of their task of converting the Iraqi community to Zionism, writing that "we have to admit that there is not much point in [organizing and encouraging emigration].... We are today eating the fruit of many years of neglect, and what we didn't do can't be corrected now through propaganda and creating one-day-old enthusiasm.

"[17] Jews working in government jobs were dismissed, and hundreds were arrested for Zionist or Communist activity, whether actual or merely alleged, tried in military courts, and were given harsh prison sentences or heavily fined.

On October 23, 1948, Shafiq Ades, a respected Jewish businessman, was publicly hanged in Basra on charges of selling weapons to Israel and the Iraqi Communist Party, an event that increased the sense of insecurity among Jews.

[20][21] The Jewish community general sentiment was that if a man as well-connected and powerful as Shafiq Ades could be eliminated by the state, other Jews could no longer be assured of safety.

[23] At the time, the British believed that the Zionist underground was agitating in Iraq in order to assist US fund-raising and to "offset the bad impression caused by the Jewish attitudes to Arab refugees".

[30] In July 1949, the British government proposed to Nuri al-Said a population exchange in which Iraq would agree to settle 100,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq; Nuri stated that if a fair arrangement could be agreed, "the Iraqi government would permit a voluntary move by Iraqi Jews to Palestine.

[33] At the Jewish Studies Conference in Melbourne in 2002, Philip Mendes summarised the effect of al-Said's vacillations on Jewish expulsion as: "In addition, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said tentatively canvassed and then shelved the possibility of expelling the Iraqi Jews, and exchanging them for an equal number of Palestinian Arabs.

According to Abbas Shiblak, many scholars state that this was a result of British, American and Israeli political pressure on Tawfiq al-Suwaidi's government, with some studies suggesting there were secret negotiations.

[40] According to Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, "The thousands of poor Jews who had left or been expelled from the peripheral cities, and who had gone to Baghdad to wait for their opportunity to emigrate, were in an especially bad state.

[46][47] On 12 October 1950, Nuri al-Said summoned a senior official of the transport company and made similar threats, justifying the expulsion of Jews by the number of Palestinian Arabs fleeing from Israel.

[citation needed] According to Gat, it is highly likely that one of Nuri as-Said's motives in trying to expel large numbers of Jews was the desire to aggravate Israel's economic problems (he had declared as such to the Arab world), although Nuri was well aware that the absorption of these immigrants was the policy on which Israel based its future.

[48] The Iraqi Minister of Defence told the U.S ambassador that he had reliable evidence that the emigrating Jews were involved in activities injurious to the state and were in contact with communist agents.

[55] In his 2023 memoir Avi Shlaim, a historian of Iraqi-Jewish origins, argues that of the 5 bombings, three were planted by a member of the Zionist underground in Baghdad, Yusef Ibrahim Basri, basing his conclusion on the testimony of Yaacov Karkoukli.

The synagogue bombing was carried out by a Sunni crook, Salih al-Haidari, who was motivated by a desire to avenge himself against Jews who had reported his attempt to defraud them, but who had been persuaded to do so by Salem al-Quraishi, a captain in the Special Division of the Baghdad City Police Directorate.

This mass movement stunned the Iraqi government, which had not expected the number of immigrants to exceed 8,000, and feared that administrative institutions run by Jews might collapse.

[citation needed] Until Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, there were 28 Jewish educational institutions in Baghdad, 16 under the supervision of the community committee and the rest privately run.

Although they enjoyed a brief period of security during the reign of Abdul Karim Qassim, later regimes would seriously increase the persecution of Iraqi Jews.