What Avi Shlaim gets wrong about the persecution of Jews in Iraq

In his Spectator review of Avi Shlaim’s memoir Three Worlds, Justin Marozzi refers to the author’s claims about the 1950-51 terrorist bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad: ‘Shlaim’s bombshell is to uncover what he terms “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks”, which helped terminate the millennial presence of Jews in Babylon’.

Marozzi calls these claims ‘controversial’ but he doesn’t delve into just how controversial. The charge is that Zionists attacked Iraqi Jews in order to encourage them to flee to Israel. 

There are several problems with this theory. As the investigative journalist David Collier has argued, ‘these explosions did not cause the exodus…the Iraqi Jews were persecuted, were offered a window to leave, and despite the fact they had to leave everything behind, they almost all left…’.

Nothing short of war would make an entire civilian population leave, Collier argues, not a few violent incidents. 

Take France, for example, where a number of deadly attacks have taken place over the past ten years. Yet the French Jewish population has not been uprooted — just 33,000 left for Israel over the ten year period, only about 8 per cent.