Naeim Giladi

Cover of Naeim Giladi's Book

Naeim Giladi was born in Iraq as Naeim Khalaschi in 1929.

As a young Iraqi Jew, he joined up with the Zionist movement, becoming a Zionist activist involved in underground activities. He was arrested and jailed by the Iraqi government at the age of 17 in 1947.

During his two years in the prison of Abu Ghraib, he was expecting 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 and traveled to Israel, arriving in May 1950.

He gradually became disillusioned with Zionism after living in Israel, and became an anti-Zionist activist. In the 1980s, he left Israel for New York, renouncing his Israeli citizenship.

He wrote about his experiences in a biographical article entitled 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.

Experiences in Israel

Upon his arrival in Israel, immigration officials allegdly changed his surname from Khalaschi to Klaski. Naeim says that this was an "Ashkenization" of his name and has called this "Israeli caste system".

Naeim then tells that he volunteered to go the Dafna kibbutz in the Upper Galilee since his skills lay in farming. He says that he quickly got tired of the quality of the supplies provided by the government to new immigrants and went to the Jewish Agency to seek reassignment. He was allegdly told to go to al-Mejdil, an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, and now a part of Ashkelon, that was to be transformed into a farming community .

When the officials at the Labour Office there discovered that he was fluent in Arabic, they encouraged him to seek employment with the Military Governor's office. There, he was supposedly 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. In short time, he claims to have realized that those Palestinians that were 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 also argues that, "Those Palestinians who didn’t sign up for transfers were taken by force — just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza." He tells that he left the job disgusted and attempted to procure government work elsewhere.

Use by anti-Zionists

Naeim's article is often cited by anti-Zionists [1] to support a claim that Zionism has negative effects not only for Palestinians, but also for Jews themselves. Giladi attempts to outline a subversive history of Zionist sabotage in his article which 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."

Among the controversial claims made in the article are that the Zionist underground was responsible for a series of bombings that took place in Iraq in 1950 and 1951, and that pressure was exerted on the Iraqi parliament, including the use of bribes, to secure the passage of a bill allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel. Naeim 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", whose publication the CIA opposed.

Naeim also mentions the name of Mordechai Ben-Porat, a former Israeli Member of the Knesset and a key figure in the Zionist underground, as having been cited as one the figures responsible for the bombings by one of the Iraqi investigators into the bombings, in a book entitled "Venom of the Zionist Viper". Mordechai Ben-Porat has vigoursly 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 in at Iraq police headquarters.

Naeim's own book was originally self-published in the United States of America in 1992. It was subsequently banned from both the US and Israel. Dandelion Books released a revised edition of the book in 2003. Dandelion Books (7 May 2003). "Naeim Giladi's Banned Book - Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews". PR Web:Press Release Newswire.</ref> The book is listed for sale at Amazon Books in the UK [2], but is listed as 'not available' at Amazon Books in the US. [3]

Naiem's article is also regularly cited by neo-nazi web-sites such as stormfront.[4]