Key Takeaways:
The 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad — where pro-Nazi mobs killed at least 128 Jews seven years before Israel's founding — exposes the claim that anti-Zionism is distinct from antisemitism as historically false.
Pro-Nazi Iraqi mobs killed at least 128 Jews, raped dozens and looted 586 businesses in Baghdad on June 1-2, 1941, in a pogrom known as the Farhud — seven years before Israel's establishment and before any Palestinian Arab refugees existed.
"The Farhud offers the ideological blueprint for modern antisemitism, showing how Jew-haters integrated anti-Zionism into their lethal bigotry before there were any Palestinian Arab refugees," said Gil Troy, senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem.
The violence displaced 12,311 people and injured 600 more, according to historian Edwin Black's 2010 book "The Farhud." Rioters targeted Jewish homes marked with red palm prints by the Nazi-inspired Al-Futuwa youth brigade — markings that anticipated the inverted red triangle used by Hamas today. The pogrom was cultivated by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who fled British-controlled Palestine and reached Iraq in 1939, later writing to Hitler "seeking recognition of the right of the Arabs to solve the Jewish question in accordance with Arab nationalist aspirations and in the same manner as in the Axis countries."
The Farhud triggered an exodus that saw 120,000 Iraqi Jews — 90% of the community — airlifted to Israel by 1950 under Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, part of the broader expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands. The anniversary challenges modern claims that anti-Zionism objects only to Israeli policy, Troy argues, tapping historic reservoirs of antisemitism that predate the Jewish state itself.
The Iraqi Jewish community's roots stretched back 2,600 years, and most Iraqi Jews opposed Zionism before the Farhud shattered their sense of security. The pogrom was enabled by the "Golden Square" — four pro-Nazi officers who seized power in a military coup on April 1, 1941. When British forces counterattacked in May, pro-Nazi Iraqis scapegoated Jews as "fifth columnists."
British soldiers camping outside Baghdad ignored pleas to intervene during the two-day rampage. Some Muslim residents sheltered Jews, but many Iraqi policemen and soldiers spearheaded the violence, Black documented. One soldier was recorded screaming "Stand still, you son of a Zionist dog!" before shooting a young Jew — a phrase that fused anti-Zionist rhetoric with lethal antisemitism years before Israel existed.
From Baghdad to the Present
The Farhud's ideological architecture — Nazi collaboration fused with Islamist anti-Zionism — has proven durable. Al-Husseini's February 1941 letter to Hitler seeking an Arab "solution to the Jewish question" prefigured the charter of Hamas, which calls for Israel's destruction. The red hamsa markings painted on Jewish homes in 1941 Baghdad find their modern equivalent in the inverted red triangle symbol used by Hamas to identify Israeli targets.
The broader expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands — a refugee crisis largely absent from Western political discourse — compares with the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who became refugees during Israel's 1948 War of Independence, though only the latter receives sustained international attention.
The Farhud's 85th anniversary arrives as anti-Zionist activism on Western campuses and in international forums intensifies, with critics of Israel increasingly facing accusations of antisemitism. The historical record — showing anti-Jewish violence fused with anti-Zionist rhetoric before the first Palestinian refugee existed — provides a factual anchor for a debate often conducted in abstract terms.
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