Naeim Giladi

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.

For his 2006 book Occupied Minds, British journalist Arthur Neslen interviewed Yehuda Tajar, a Mossad agent who spent ten years of a 25-year prison sentence in Iraq, after being convicted for the explosions. Tajar insists that, although his undercover cell was prepared to carry out such acts, they did not in fact do so. The actual explosions, he claims, were the work of the Muslim Brotherhood. After several members of the cell were arrested, however, those still at liberty carried out other grenade attacks, in an attempt to show the innocence of those arrested.

In 2003, Dandelion Books published a second edition of Gilad's book. The book is marked with a banner that reads, "Banned in Israel and the United States". The press release accompanying the book reads, "Banned in Israel and the United States…Dandelion Books, rapidly becoming known for its 'uncensored books and unfettered fiction' has just released a revised edition of this highly controversial book. The details of a direct ban enacted by either the American or Israeli governments are not supplied by the author or publisher.

Giladi also mentions Mordechai Ben Porat, a former Israeli Member of the Knesset, and a Cabinet minister, who was a key figure in the Zionist underground, as having been cited as one of the figures responsible for the bombings by one of the Iraqi investigators into the bombings, in a book titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. Ben-Porat was one of several Israeli undercover Mossad agents arrested in Baghdad after the explosion; he was able to skip bail and flee to Israel. Mordechai Ben-Porat has vigorously denied this allegation, which he characterizes as akin to "blood libel", and which prompted him to write his 1998 book, "To Baghdad and Back". In it, Mordechai contends that the false charge against him was conceived at Iraq police headquarters. The affair has also been the subject of an anti-libel lawsuit by Ben Porat against a journalist who published Giladi's accusations. The lawsuit has been settled out of court with the journalist publishing an apology.

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.

Also in the foreword, Giladi writes that upon emigrating to the United States in 1980, he found several publishers interested in publishing his work. He says he declined to publish because all interested publishers wanted to reserve the right of editorial control over the finished manuscript and he did not want to agree to this. Twelve years after his arrival in the US, he self-published at a cost of $60,000, which he reports was almost all of the proceeds of the sale of his Israeli property.

There is however, little in the way of completely definitive evidence either way. Jewish studies scholar, Philip Mendes suggests that, "It therefore remains an open question as to who was responsible for the bombings," claiming that "memories and interpretations of the events have further been influenced and distorted by the unfortunate discrimination which many Iraqi Jews experienced on their arrival in Israel (Black Panthers 1975:132–133; Shohat 1988; Swirski 1989; Massad 1996)." He does say, however, that Gat argues "convincingly" that there was "little direct connection between the bombings and exodus.".

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

Contemporary Israeli officials and mainly Mordechai Ben Porat and Shlomo Hillel, prominent figures at the Iraqi Zionist underground, vehemently deny the charges. An internal investigation conducted in Israel in 1960 found no proof of an order to execute such an attack. More possible responsible parties have been suggested, such as the Iraqi CID and the Muslim Brotherhood.

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."

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."

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), Uri Avnery (1988), Ella Shohat (1986), Abbas Shiblak (1986), Marion Wolfsohn (1980), and Rafael Shapiro (1984). 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".

Historian Dr. Yosef Meir, an Iraqi Zionist underground operative, argues in a rebuttal article that while there is a direct connection, the culprits are the Iraqi government or Arab nationalists. He points to the fact that the bombings in question occurred after the Citizenship relinquishment act of 1950 had already expired and therefore no Jews could register for exit. He also notes that the two Zionist operatives hanged were never charged with the Masouda Shem-Tov bombing, but rather three unrelated bombings which occurred later. On the other hand, he lists the motives of the government and the pressure it exerted on "Near-East" (the company performing the airlifts). Yosef Meir's criticism points to circumstantial evidence that the Zionist movement had no motive while the Iraqi government and Arab nationalists did, and accuses Giladi of withholding this information on purpose, calling it "an obvious attempt to mislead readers."

While living in Israel, his views of Zionism changed. 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".

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

Naeim Giladi (Hebrew: נעים גלעדי, Arabic: 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 (Hebrew: 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.