US President Donald Trump’s proposal to relocate the population of Gaza has already sparked renewed discussion of past population transfers, such as those between Turkey and Greece, Pakistan and India, and Germany and the Soviet Union.
Largely forgotten is the uprooting and relocation of hundreds of thousands of Jews around the same time as those other mass migrations.
In the 1950s and 1960s, some 135,000 Jewish citizens of Iraq emigrated to Israel and other places around the world. This was significant not only due to the scale of the migration, but also in that is marked the end of a storied 2,500-year Jewish history in Mesopotamia, dating back to the late Babylonian period.
The departure of the Jews of Iraq was initially part of a planned population exchange negotiated by the British, Americans and Iraqi authorities. The agreement was never finalized, but the Jews of Iraq left anyway due to rising antisemitism. The corresponding transfer of “Palestinian” Arabs to Iraq did not materialize beyond the migration of a few thousand individuals.
The turning point came in 1950–1951 when between 120,000 to 130,000 Jews emigrated in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah after the Iraqi government allowed
them to leave under the condition they renounce their Iraqi citizenship. The remaining Jews faced increasing oppression under the Baath regime, culminating in public executions in 1969. By the early 1970s, nearly all Iraqi Jews had fled.
This stunning historical event is documented in the much-anticipated report on the Jews of Iraq released this week by Jews for Justice from Arab Countries (JJAC), an advocacy and historical preservation group. The far-ranging report—the product of six years of intricate research, and the second in a series of eleven—details the rich life and culture that flourished in Iraq for two-and-a-half millennia, beginning in the year 586 BCE. Tragically, this important historic community was forced to leave Iraq beginning in 1941 owing to violence and persecution.
In addition to the loss of its Jewish citizens, forensic accounting work reveals that assets, institutions and property seized from Jews in Iraq total over $34 billion by today’s valuation.
JJAC sees as its mission the preservation of this history in the name of truth and justice.
The organization’s co-president, Sylvian Abitbol, explained: “To ignore the fact that the grand and impressive Jewish community in Iraq was persecuted, imprisoned, expelled and destroyed is not just to erase 2,500 years of Jewish life and culture; it is to deny reality. We compiled this Iraqi Jewish Community Report so that the Jews of Iraq will not be forgotten and their contributions to Iraq and that region are duly recorded.”
JJAC Executive Director Dr. Stanley Urman added that “the historic significance of the Iraqi Jewish community cannot be overstated. Over centuries, Babylonian Jews played a central role in Judaism, producing the Babylonian Talmud and influencing Jewish communities worldwide. The abrupt cancellation of this culture constitutes a tremendous loss to civilization.”
Not to be glib, but the same can hardly be said were the Palestinian Arabs to disappear from Gaza.
Like the aforementioned population transfers, the relocation of Iraq’s Jews, primarily to Israel, was entirely successful. They integrated into and became productive citizens of the Jewish state.
Trump’s is not a new idea. And it works. Nor did the world give much, if any weight to the right of Iraq’s Jews to stay put, so why insist that Gaza’s Arabs cannot and must not be moved?
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