Iraqi Jews Tell Israel to Stop "Tampering with Our History"

A group of Iraqi Jews living in Israel have demanded that the Israeli government stop "tampering with, exploiting, and deleting our history" as a way to negate the rights of Palestinians. "The way the Israeli establishment uses our history from the 1950s, is not in order to give us our rights back, but in order to get rid of the rights of the Palestinians, and avoiding a peace agreement with them,” Almog Behar, founder of Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan, wrote to the website The Electronic Intifada.

The Iraqi Jews are trying to recover the property they left behind in Iraq, but they object to the Israeli government's attempt to have that property cancel out Palestinian claims to the property they lost during the Nakba, or catastrophe associated with the founding of the state of Israel. The Committee states:

We are seeking to demand compensation for our lost property and assets from the Iraqi government--NOT from the Palestinian Authority--and we will not agree with the option that compensation for our property be offset by compensation for the lost property of others (meaning, Palestinian refugees) or that said compensation be transferred to bodies that do not represent us (meaning, the Israeli government).

The article at the site also discusses long-disclosed information that Jews left Iraq not because of pressure from the Iraqi government but because of false-flag operations by the Israeli Mossad. The Committee stated:

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.

The Electronic Intifada site features a video interview with the late Naeim 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."