Naeim Giladi

Naeim Giladi (נעים גלעדי, نعيم جلعدي)

(18 March 1926 – 6 March 2010) was an anti-Zionist Iraqi Jew, and author of an autobiographical article and historical analysis titled "The Jews of Iraq".

The article later formed the basis for his originally self-published book Ben-Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.

Giladi was born Naeim Khalasch (נעים חלסצ׳י) on 18 March 1926 to an Iraqi Jewish family and later lived in Israel and the United States.

Giladi describes his family as, "a large and important" family named "Haroon" who had settled in Iraq after the Babylonian exile.

According to Giladi, his family had owned 50,000 acres (200 km2) devoted to rice, dates and Arabian horses.

They were later involved in gold purchase and purification, and were therefore given the name, 'Khalaschi', meaning 'Makers of Pure' by the Ottoman Turks who occupied Iraq at the time.

He states that he joined the underground Zionist movement at age 14, without his parents' knowledge and was involved in underground activities.

He was arrested and jailed by the Iraqi government in 1947, when he was 17 years old.

During his two years in Abu Ghraib prison, he expected to be sentenced to death for smuggling Iraqi Jews out of the country to Iran, where they were then taken to Israel.

He writes that, he "was disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben-Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948".

Giladi relates that he became politicized after an experience at the Socialist/Zionist Party headquarters.

He had received a letter asking for help with their Arabic newspaper, and when he showed up at the headquarters and tried to show them the letter, he was dismissively told to report to the "Department for Jews from Islamic Countries" by many people who had not even looked at his letter to see why he had been invited.

He says that he "was disgusted and angry. Either I am a member of the party or I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different politics because I am an Arab Jew? It's segregation, I thought, just like a Negroes' Department. I turned around and walked out. That was the start of my open protests. That same year I organized a demonstration in Ashkelon against Ben-Gurion's racist policies and 10,000 people turned out."

He managed to escape from prison and travel to Israel, arriving in May 1950.

Giladi reports that upon entering Israel in 1950, he was "asked where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do," and that he volunteered to go to Dafna, a farming kibbutz in the Galilee.

He relates that he lasted only a few weeks because, "the new immigrants were given the worst of everything…the food was the same, but that was the only thing everyone had in common. For the immigrants, bad cigarettes, even bad toothpaste. Everything. I left."

After leaving Dafna, Giladi went to the Jewish Agency to seek reassignment.

He says he was told to go to al-Mejdil, an Arab town about nine miles from Gaza, and now a part of Ashkelon, that was to be transformed into a farming community.

When the officials at the Labor Office there discovered that he was fluent in Arabic, he relates that they encouraged him to seek employment with the Military Governor's office.

He says he was assigned the task of procuring the signatures of the Palestinian inhabitants of al-Mejdil on a set of government forms that stated that they were willingly giving up their lands to go to Gaza, at the time under Egyptian occupation.

He relates how he realised in short time that those Palestinians signing such documents were doing so under duress.

He argues that they were denied the right to access their agricultural lands and penned up in a small area and so some signed simply to end their agony.

He wrote, "Those Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force – just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza."

He left the job disgusted and attempted to procure government work elsewhere.

Giladi states he subsequently had difficulty finding employment because of discrimination against Arab Jews.

He recalls that when he arrived in Israel, in May 1950, his Iraqi passport had his name as written in Arabic and transliterated using the Latin alphabet.

Giladi states that because, "the English couldn't capture the "kh" sound...it was rendered simply as Klaski."

At the border, Israeli immigration officials applied what he calls the "English" version of his name, which had an Eastern European, Ashkenazi sound to it.

Giladi writes that "in one way, this 'mistake' was my key to discovering very soon just how the Israeli caste system worked. After leaving al-Mejdil, he reports that he wrote letters trying to get a government job elsewhere and got many interviews, but when it was discovered that his face didn't match his Polish/Ashkenazi name, he was rebuffed, advised time and again that "we'll give you a call." Eventually, he changed his name to "Giladi", which he writes was "close to the code name, Gilad, that he had in the Zionist underground."

While living in Israel, his views of Zionism changed.

Giladi's position that the 1950–1951 Baghdad bombings were "perpetrated by Zionist agents in order to cause fear amongst the Jews, and so promote their exodus to Israel" is shared by a number of anti-Zionist authors, including the Israeli Black Panthers (1975), David Hirst (1977), Wilbur Crane Eveland (1980), Marion Wolfsohn (1980), Rafael Shapiro (1984), Ella Shohat (1986), Abbas Shiblak (1986), and Uri Avnery (1988).

In his article, Giladi notes that this was also the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who outlined that allegation in his book "Ropes of Sand".

In 2023, the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim cited detailed testimony from another Israeli survivor of the Iraqi Zionist underground which buttressed Giladi's claim in pointing to direct Israeli involvement, through the supervision of a Mossad agent, Meir Max Bineth who later committed suicide in prison while on trial for similar attempts in Egypt, in at least 3 of the 5 bombings

Historian Moshe Gat argued that there was little direct connection between the bombings and the exodus of Jewish refugees.

After serving in the Israeli Army between 1967 and 1970, Giladi was active in the Israeli Black Panthers movement.

In the 1980s, he left Israel for New York City.

In the U.S., he wrote about an autobiographical account and historical analysis of Zionist misdeeds in Iraq, Palestine, and later Israel in an article titled "The Jews of Iraq" The article later formed the basis for his originally self-published book Ben-Gurion's Scandal: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.

He died on 6 March 2010, in a rehabilitation center in New York City after battling a lengthy illness, and was buried in the Jewish tradition by the Hebrew Free Burial Association.

Giladi has strong views on Zionism and its negative effects and his article begins with the following passage: "I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called 'cruel Zionism'. I write about it because I was part of it."