The Mossad? The historical consensus is that there is not serious evidence.

A unit of Aman (Israeli Military intelligence) carried out two 1954 bombings of British/American targets in Egypt which they tried to blame on Egyptian nationalists. These attacks resulted in no casualties and were intended to shape American and British diplomacy, rather than manipulate the Jewish diaspora.

In November 1940, operatives of the Haganah (Jewish paramilitary organization later folded into IDF) placed a bomb on the Patria, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Europe trying to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. The ship was held in Haifa harbor, barred entry, and the refugees slated for deportation.

The Haganah and Irgun made several attempts to disable/hold the vessel in Haifa to prevent deportation. But the operatives miscalculated and blew a large hole in the ship that sank the vessel. 267 people on the vessel died, including more than 200 refugees.

This bombing was done by a radical faction within the Haganah, bypassing regular decision-making processes. It remained highly controversial with the group and successor security organizations, shaping operational norms by discrediting tactics which risked similar death to Jewish civilians.

The bombing also fed a number of conspiracy theories, mostly involving the mass Jewish emigration to Israel following the Arab-Israeli War. This emigration is complex, with religious zeal being a factor. But the violence and precarity which drove much of this emigration are often downplayed or blamed on Zionists/Mossad.

Iraqi Bombings

Probably most prominent is the idea the Mossad orchestrated bombings of Jewish Iraqis in 1950-51 to pressure Jewish Iraqis into registering for the de-naturalization law, so they would emigrate to Israel in exchange for renouncing Iraqi citizenship.

Persecution of Jewish Iraqis has been rising since 1930, increasing in tandem with the pro-fascist Iraqi Golden Square movement. There were eleven bombings of Jewish businesses, synagogues, and community centers between 1936 and 1939. The Golden Square movement led a successful coup in March 1941. Although the pro-fascists were quickly removed from government by a British intervention. Antisemitism continued to flourish, exploding in the “Farhud” pogrom in June 1941, with 179 Jewish Iraqis killed and hundreds of businesses and homes looted/destroyed. The Farhud provoked the formation of an Iraqi Jewish underground for self-defense, and motivated 12,000 Jewish Iraqis to flee Iraq.

Antisemitism increased again in the mid-1940s, reaching a fever pitch following Israeli statehood and the 1949 Israeli victory in the Arab-Israeli War. Jewish doctors were denied licenses, Jewish merchants were forbidden to sell to non-jews, Jewish schools were closed, 1,500 Jewish government employees were summarily dismissed in 1949 and 1950, many denied pensions and severance pay.

The Iraqi newspaper al-Nahda and al-Yaqdha published a steady stream of anti-Jewish letters, editorials, and articles. This was matched by increasing physical violence, and by 1950 Jewish residents were “routinely pelted with stones” or receiving death threats from their neighbors. In September 1948, the only Jewish Iraqi Senator delivered a long speech enumerating the mounting discrimination, harassment, and extortion.

The British consul wrote in 1948 of the “sharply rising” anti-Semitism spurring the trial and execution of Shafik Ades, after a trial in which the defense lawyers resigned because the judge only permitted the prosecution to present witnesses. Ades was the wealthiest and most prominent member of the Iraqi Jewish community, and his show trial without due process was taken as a sign of things to come. Various ‘ex-post facto’ prosecutions followed, such as Jewish merchants convicted of trading with the Soviet Union years earlier, at a time when such trade was not illegal. No Muslim Iraqis who did the same were prosecuted. These merchants were released after paying large fines. But similar pretextual prosecutions were used to extort millions of dinars Jewish Iraqis by November 1948.

In 1949, Prime Minister Nuri as-Said raised the idea of expelling all Jewish Iraqis, and later the same year raised the possibility of a forced population exchange of Jewish Iraqis for Palestinians. By late 1949 the American embassy reported on the widespread fear of the Jewish community and speculating that “100,000 jews would be forced to leave Iraq.”

Amidst this backdrop, the government passed a denaturalization law permitting Jewish Iraqis to emigrate to Israel (which was previously illegal) if they gave up Iraqi citizenship. The conspiracy theory is that the Mossad, the Iraqi Jewish Underground, or some other Zionist group committed bombings to motivate emigration to Israel under the law.

The evidence offered for this theory is general statements by Israeli leaders which acknowledge that the greater the population of Israel, the greater chances for Israel’s survival. The other major piece of evidence are alleged confessions by two members of the Iraqi Jewish underground claiming responsibility for the bombings. But these two pieces of evidence do not really withstand basic scrutiny.

The “confessions” are generally regarded as falsities extracted using torture, both were recanted at trial. Among Iraqi Jewish refugees who reached Israel, witnesses identified one of the synagogue bombers as Major Jamil Mamo, Arab army officer and member of the antisemitic Istiqlal party. 3 of the 5 bombings of Jewish targets in 1950-51 took place after the March 10 deadline for registration. And the first bombing occurred while Zionist leaders were actively working to prevent Jewish Iraqis from registering, as the leaders sought certain government assurances and clarifications.

Nor does this bombing fit Israeli policy at the time. Israel was trying to focus its limited airlift resources of getting Jewish refugees out of Eastern Europe, believing that the window for such refugees was closing (a view proven correct as the Iron Curtain descended). Extracting Mizrahim from Iraq was seen as something that could wait.

I would note that a huge proportion of the Israeli population at this point were Jewish refugees living in refugee camps within Israel. The population more than doubled between 1948 and 1952 and many of these Jewish refugees spent years in displaced person’s camps before Israel was able to build enough homes to house them. Provoking the exodus of 105,000 Jewish Iraqis within the year was not high on the Israeli government’s priorities.

Banking law changes in January 1950 provoked widespread panic the Iraqi government intended to freeze all Jewish assets. This panic was borne out on March 10, 1951; the day the denaturalization deadline expired, when the Iraqi government froze and seized the assets of all 105,000 Jewish Iraqis who had registered for the denaturalization law. Depriving them of their savings, homes, land, and assets without warning, seizing an estimated 16-22 million dinars. The Istiqlal Party viewed this seizure and the denaturalization law as “over-liberal” and called for the remaining 5,000 Jewish Iraqis to be dispossessed and expelled from the country.

By mid-1951, 15,000 Jewish Iraqis had emigrated illegally, and 105,000 had registered under the denaturalization law, not knowing the Iraqi government would use this as an excuse to seize all their possessions; allowing them to keep only one suitcase of clothes and 50 dinars. The remaining Iraqi Jewish population numbered some 5,000 people, who mostly fled Iraq in the decades that followed.

There are sources which continue to ascribe the Iraqi bombings to members of the otherwise ineffectual local Jewish self-defense organization, on the basis of the two recanted “confessions” (which are widely regarded as false confessions resulting from torture). While dismissing the chronology of the bombings (which mostly took place after the registration deadline expired), witnesses tying one bombing to an antisemitic faction of the Iraqi military; and that the 1950-51 bombings are consistent with 20 years of violence and antisemitic animus in Iraq.

While the Patria bomb was intended to disable the engine or slowly scuttle the ship, the resulting loss of Jewish life discredited similar tactics within the Haganah, and later Mossad. I think there is also a distinction here between a bombing aimed at the logistical means of deportation, and terror bombings of one's own religious brethren to manipulate public opinion within the diaspora.