Forget Baghdad

After the proclamation of the Jewish State in 1948, more than half a million Jews migrated to Israel from all over the world. Nearly a quarter of them came from Iraq, the so-called Mizrahim, Oriental Jews who had been at home there for three thousand years. Many of them did not leave home for Zionist purposes, but as a result of pogroms and biased legislation. Samir, a son of Iraqi immigrants in Switzerland, visited a number of Iraqi Jews in Israel. His starting point was the Iraqi communist party - the strongest communist party in the Middle East – that his father used to be a member of in Iraq. The four men Samir meets explain how they grew up as Jews in Baghdad, where they lived in harmony next to Christians and Moslems until the government was overthrown by radical Moslems. In their new fatherland, they are not exactly welcomed with open arms, as ‘Arabs’ and communists. About this emigration period, Ben Gurion even lamented once: ‘We kicked out good Arabs and brought in bad Jews.’ In the interviews, the four men and sociologist and film historian Ella Shohat talk with the necessary sense of humour and perspective about issues like alienation and creating a new identity. ‘We had the wrong identity everywhere.’ On the other half of the split screen, their words are immediately sustained visually by photographs, archive footage and light-hearted fragments from one hundred years of cinema, including stereotypical Jews and Arabs.