Review Operation Babylon, The Story Of The Rescue Of The Jews Of Iraq

Hillel, Shlomo, Operation Babylon, The Story Of The Rescue Of The Jews Of Iraq, Doubleday, 1987

 

Shlomo Hillel was a Mossad agent in charge of getting Jews out of Iraq in the 1940s-50s. His book Operation Babylon, The Story Of The Rescue Of The Jews Of Iraq is a personal narrative of his experiences. Much of the time he writes about the difficulties he faced trying to smuggle people out. His account also raises questions about how much of his story was propaganda to justify his actions and how much he misconstrued Iraq.

 

Hillel was a worker on a kibbutz in Palestine when he volunteered to help Jews get to Israel. He was born in Iraq and his family left when he was ten so he was sent back to his home country in 1946. There he worked with a small Zionist underground that had formed after the 1941 Farhud when Baghdadis set upon the Jewish community after the country’s defeat in a war versus England killing hundreds and wounding more.

 

The vast majority of Operation Babylon is about the schemes Hillel worked on to get people out of Iraq. He contacted two sheikhs one from western Iraq and the other from eastern Syria who promised to smuggle people out through the desert. They failed on their first attempt and then walked off with a huge amount of money Hillel paid them. Another time he flew out a small group who had to sneak onto an airplane flown by two ex-American G.I.s at Baghdad Airport. His last idea which was the most successful was to get Jews to Iran and then have them fly to Europe and then onto Israel. The flood gates broke open when the Iraqi government allowed immigration to Israel in 1950. Each chapter is full of drama and helps keep the story moving. It is by far the best part of the author’s work.

 

Hillel’s descriptions of Iraq however raises questions about how much he knew about the country versus how much he was pushing a narrative to justify Iraqi Jews leaving. For one he wrote that the Iraqi Jews were Zionist almost by nature. The history books on Iraqi Jews would disagree with that as they note that the community was thoroughly integrated into their country, spoke Arabic and even embraced Arab nationalism early on and were therefore adamantly opposed to Zionism. There is even correspondence between the Zionist underground and the Haganah in Palestine saying they felt like failures because so few people were joining their group. In fact, the largest political organization Jews joined was the Iraqi Communist Party which formed an organization against Zionism.

 

Next the author seems to confuse the Iraqi government’s crackdown upon the opposition and persecution of Jews. In 1948 the Wathba/Great Leap occurred when mass protests and strikes began in Iraq against a new Anglo-Iraq Treaty which would keep the country under British Hegemony. The Communists were one of the main leaders of this movement and the authorities went after the party relentlessly. The government declared martial law after the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli War and used it as an excuse to try to suppress the Communists. The author portrays all this as directed at Jews. At the same time a movement did start against Jews led by pan-Arab parties after the outbreak of the 1948 war. Jewish government workers for instance were fired which was a huge hit as it was a major source of employment. There were calls for boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacks upon the community. Hillel presents this all as the government singling out Jews.

 

That’s distinctly shown when he said 4 Communist leaders were executed and one of them was a Jew. He goes on to say that pointed to Jews being targeted and facing the threat of death. There was plenty of anti-Jewish activity in Iraq in the late 1940s and if the author had just stuck to them that would be fine but the inclusion of the anti-Communist actions showed either Hillel didn’t really know what was going on or threw them together to present a stronger story of oppression and justify why Jews wanted out of their country.

 

The ending of Operation Babylon was also interesting. He makes a comparison of the plight of Iraqi Jews in Israel versus those that stayed in Iraq. He said initially Israel was swamped by new immigrants and Iraqi Jews lived in squalid conditions in camps with few services and high unemployment. That changed by the 1960s when most were integrated into Israel and became productive citizens. In contrast the few thousand Iraqi Jews who stayed in Iraq actually had good lives working and going to school but then after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and a 1968 coup the government went after them. What he failed to mention was that Iraqi Jews and all those that came from Arab countries were discriminated against for decades in Israel. In 1960 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for example said eastern Jews were backwards, corrupt, uneducated, lacked self-respect and would never change. He said only their children could be integrated into Israel and taught how to act properly. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said it would take 2-3 generations for Eastern Jews to act like European Jews. Again, this points to the book having a propaganda element to it to promote the immigration of Jews to Israel.

 

Shlomo Hillel’s book is best read as a personal story about one determined Mossad agent to get Jews out of his native country. All the ways he tried to smuggle people out are quite interesting and some even have little humorous and daring elements to them. What he says about Iraq and life there however needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because he either didn’t understand what was going on there at the time or more likely he wanted to paint it in the worst possible way to justify his actions.

 

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