On July 19, 1948, Iraq amended
penal code Law 51, making Zionism
itself a crime punishable by up to
seven years in prison. Hundreds of
Jews were arrested, tortured until
they "confessed" and sentenced to
long jail terms.
By October 1948, all Jews — an
estimated 1,500 — were summarily
dismissed from their government
positions. Soon, the familiar
sequence of Nazi-style pauperization
began, with an organized boycott
and systematic expulsion from Iraq's
commercial and cultural main-
stream.
An estimated 130,000 Jews lived
in the Iraq of 1949, half of them in
Baghdad. The Baghdad Chamber of
Commerce listed 2,430 member
companies; a third were Jewish and,
in fact, a third of the chamber's
board and almost all its employees
were Jewish. Over the centuries,
Jews had become essential to the
economy.
Now, Jews began fleeing to any-
where, mainly neighboring Iran. In
the process, they smuggled out what-
ever valuables they could to rebuild
their lives. On March 3, 1950, to
halt the uncontrolled flight of assets
and people, Iraq passed a one-year
amendment to Law 1, the
Denaturalization Act. This statute
revoked the citizenship of any Jew
who willingly left the country. Upon
exit, their assets were frozen, but
were still available to the emigrants
for use within Iraq.
Thousands of Jews seized the
opportunity to leave, believing at
least that their assets, while frozen,
would still be viable within Iraq
until a better day. But when the one-
year law expired, a successor anti-
Jewish statute was secretly enacted
on March 10, 1951. That law per-
manently seized all the assets of Jews
who had been denaturalized by the
previous law, and any others who
would be pressured to leave the
country. The day the law was secret-
ly passed, the phones went down all
over Baghdad to prevent panicked
Jews from swiftly transferring their
assets to safety. What's more, the
banks were closed for three days.
With Jewish assets prone and vul-
nerable, another law empowered
Iraq's custodian general "to lay hands
on all property belonging to the per-
son who has forfeited Iraqi national-
ity and to administer, dispose of and
liquidate it."
Impact On Israel
From 1951 to 1952, approximately
120,000 desperate Jews were airlifted
from Iraq to Israel in Operation Ezra
and Nehemiah. The speed and heart-
lessness of the exodus was part of a
calculated Iraqi government plan to
flood the fledgling Israeli state with
destitute Jews. The idea was to crack
Israel's already strained infrastruc-
ture. The forlorn, airlifted emigrants
all arrived at Lod Airport bewil-
dered, with little more than the
clothes on their bodies.
Israeli and Jewish officials vocifer-
ously vowed to one day seek justice
and to hold their compensation of
Palestinian claimants in the balance,
a determination that faded over the
years.
After Saddam Hussein was top-
pled, hopes of compensation revived,
not only among the Iraqi Jews, but
also among many groups. Indeed, to
address the many compensation
claims by any number of minorities,
Iraq's Governing Council has created
the Iraqi Property Claims
Commission (IPCC), with offices in
10 cities. The IPCC intends to
review claims by any Iraqi of any
ethnicity or religion — Kurd,
Assyrian, Christian or Shiite —
unfairly deprived of his property by
the Ba'athist regimes.
However, the Ba'ath movement
first came to power in 1968, more
than 15 years after the 1951 law that
rapidly liquidated 2,600 years of
Jewish existence in Iraq. Hence, the
massive confiscations inflicted on
Iraqi Jewry will be unaddressed by
the existing mechanism, a fact not
lost upon those seeking alternative
avenues of restitution.
Whether or not giant sums are
won in any court of law or claims
tribunal, no sum of dollars or dinars
can make amends for the tornadic
expulsion of Iraqi Jewry from a cra-
dle of civilization that they helped
nurture. ❑
Edwin Black will speak on the
topic "The Mufti, Hitler and
Iraq" at Shabbat services at 7:30
p.m. Friday, Oct. 22, at Temple
Israel in West Bloomfield. At 9
p.m., he will speak on
"Understanding the Middle East"
at the temple's Shabbat
Unplugged program for young
adults.
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