What are the reasons why 140,000 Jews living in the storied 2,600-year-old Babylonian community—the oldest Jewish diaspora—have dwindled to just three people? The vast majority of the community left between 1950 and 1951 after the Iraqi government passed a “denaturalization” law in March 1950, which permitted emigration on condition the Jews forfeited their citizenship. A year later, a second law nationalized Jewish property.
Most historians agree that the causes of the exodus were intolerance of minorities, antisemitic persecution and lethal violence. But one historian, in particular, has been giving oxygen to the claim that “the Zionists” committed “false-flag” operations—namely bombings in 1950 and 1951—to make the Jews leave. In his memoir Three Worlds, the Baghdad-born Oxford professor emeritus Avi Shlaim accuses the Zionists of unleashing the events leading up to the departure of 105,000 Jews for Israel. (A rumor of Mossad’s involvement, ironically, spread among disgruntled Iraqi-Jewish refugees arriving in Israeli tent camps, but two Israeli commissions of inquiry did not find any evidence of Mossad’s involvement.)
Shlaim’s argument revolves around five explosions: three, he contends, were caused by Jews, one by Iraqi nationalists, and, one, a fatal attack in January 1951 at a synagogue, was committed by Iraqis at the behest of “the Zionists.”
“The shocking truth about the Baghdad bombings of 1950-51” blared the title of a review of the book by Justin Marozzi in The Spectator.
Shlaim’s thesis is that Zionists planted bombs in Baghdad to help eradicate the presence of Jews in Iraq. Shockingly, Shlaim falsifies the chronology of the bombings to imply that an explosion that occurred in June 1951 occurred in March 1950, to make it coincide with the passing by the Iraqi Parliament of the March 1950 “denaturalization” law.
The hidden Zionist hand, he asserts, was behind a fatal bombing in January 1951—six weeks before the deadline for legal Jewish emigration from Iraq was due to expire—at the Massouda Shemtob synagogue, then being used by “the Zionists” as a registration center for departing Jews.
It is a mystery why “the Zionists” might have thought it necessary to bomb the synagogue when, by late 1950, a backlog of 80,000 Jews, who had already registered to leave for Israel, were stranded in Iraq. Indeed, the Iraqi government toyed with the idea of dumping these Jews on Israel’s border with Jordan or in the Kuwaiti desert because Israel was not shipping them out fast enough.
Three of the five bombings would appear irrelevant, as they occurred three months after the March emigration deadline had passed and caused no casualties.
To make the facts fit his thesis that “the Zionists” were to blame for the Jews’ flight, Shlaim brazenly writes that the Iraqi government “had extended the deadline for registration from March until the end of July” to encompass the last three bombings.
How does Shlaim’s hypothesis of Zionist culpability square with an amply documented history of anti-Jewish persecution? It is a history to which Shlaim’s own family bears witness. In the late 1940s, persecution of the Jewish population intensified in response to the imminent establishment of the Jewish state. But Shlaim claims that were it not for the “Zionist” bombs, “less than a fifth” of the community would have left Iraq.
Iraqi Jews already had reason enough to seek a haven in Israel—rising pro-Nazi sentiment in the 1930s; the memory of a vicious Baghdad pogrom in 1941; the execution of the wealthy non-Zionist businessman Shafik Ades in 1948; and the arrests, extortion and racist laws persecuting and dispossessing them.
Why is all this important? Because Shlaim is trading on his reputation as a distinguished and prominent historian to spread his falsehoods.
Mostly far-left and Arab-propaganda sites have been platforming him. For instance, Jewish Voice for Peace is propagating a revisionist history of the Iraqi Jews based on Shlaim’s distorted claims.
But the plaudits have also been flowing from “respectable,” mainstream reviewers of Shlaim’s book. Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs, called Three Worlds the best book he had read all year.
Max Hastings had this to say in the Sunday Times: “This remarkable upside-down tale. … A personal story, not a polemic … provocative … His personal odyssey confers on Shlaim an exceptional authority for his words; he can say things that others of us cannot … his thesis deserves to be considered with respect.”
Even the atrocities of Oct. 7 have not attenuated Shaim’s hostility to Israel. He lazily bandies about the propaganda terms “settler colonial,” “genocide,” “second Nakba” and “apartheid,” advocating a one-state, secular democratic state in place of the Jewish state—without pausing to examine whether Hamas wants such a political solution.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the twilight of his long career, Shlaim has transitioned from bona-fide scholar to Israel-bashing propagandist.