Israel wants Iraq to compensate Jews

By: Ahmed Hammadi

TEL AVIV: The government of Israel is looking set to pursue a compensation claim on behalf of Jews who left Iraq over 50 years ago, despite no such similar consideration for Palestinian refugees.

Israel has sent copies of over 800 documents to Washington, not Baghdad, in a bid to claim compensation for Israeli citizens who abandoned their property.

According to a diaspora affairs ministry spokeswoman records have already been sent to the US State Department.

Comprising “a partial list of Jewish properties as well as hundreds of marriage and death certificates from between 1949 and 2001”, the papers were found by US-led occupation forces in Baghdad. They had been water-damaged and were difficult to decipher. Nevertheless, spokeswoman Rivka Kanarek said the documents “contribute to an evaluation of properties” in Baghdad.

On 31 March, Iraq's minister for reconstruction and planning Bayan Sulagh said that Jews who left en masse “after coming under massive pressure in the wake of Israel's creation” would be entitled to reclaim their property.

“Everyone knows there used to be Jews in Iraq and they owned property. Under the law, every Iraqi has the right to reclaim what belongs to them.”

But any compensation claim will necessarily have to look into the causes of the mass emigration. Why would a community of 120,000, settled for over 2000 years in Baghdad, suddenly abandon their homes?

The Jewish community was well integrated into Iraqi society, and generally prosperous. Yet during 1950 and 1951, more than 95% of the Jewish population left Iraq for Israel via airlifts known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

But historians are now questioning the traditional Zionist explanation for the exodus.

Today there are less than two dozen Jews left in Baghdad.

Earlier in this week, Israel's top court told the army to safeguard “the lives and dignity” of Palestinian civilians in combat operations, a ruling welcomed by human-rights groups alarmed by the bloodiest Gaza raid in years.

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