Ronan Tal, Haaretz, 13 December 2023

The October 7 Massacre Brings Back Horrific Memories for This Iraqi-Jewish Author

In January 1969, nine Jews were hanged in Baghdad after being convicted of espionage. A few minutes away, 15-year-old Mona Yahia hid in her home for fear of the crowd. Those sights remain fresh and are beautifully captured in her new semi-autobiographical novel

The October 7 massacre evoked a mass of associations for those watching the horrors unfold on TV screens – from children hiding in a pile of hay during the Holocaust, to Israeli soldiers being abandoned in outposts on the banks of the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War.

It transported Mona Yahia back to January 27, 1969 – the day when nine Jews convicted of spying for Israel were hanged in Baghdad (along with three Muslims and two Christians). Iraqi radio encouraged the citizens to visit Tahrir Square and celebrate the deaths of the traitors, who were seen as s responsible for the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War. Hundreds of thousands showed up.

Yahia, who was 15 at the time, wasn't there. She was hiding with her parents and siblings in their home, located a few minutes' walk away. "We didn't dare leave the house," she recounts, speaking by phone from her home in Cologne last month. "We locked the door and didn't watch the television. We barely spoke among ourselves."

She also has a Jewish teenager describe that day in her novel "When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad," which has just been published in Hebrew. Unlike her, he dares to venture out into the street and mingle with the celebrating masses.

This is his description: "The crowds were dancing under the corpses, swinging them, hitting them with sticks and palm branches. Boys my age were catapulting stones at them – the way they sling them at birds and pigeons. I saw men, city men in shirts and trousers – not barefoot shirgawis – jump in the air to touch the toe or to tickle the sole of a hanged man's foot. Just for fun, for the sake of boasting to their wives and amusing their children. ... The feet were swaying about my head."

Yahia admits that those images from Baghdad, which she later watched on television, are coming back to her nowadays. "That was the worst day of my life. Not only the cruelty itself, but the great joy in the face of cruelty. In Baghdad, it continued all day long – the shouting, the abuse of the bodies. In the following days, people we knew – Iraqi Muslims who lived in our neighborhood – were shocked by the fact that the world reacted critically to those pictures. Fifteen years later, I met an Iraqi student in Paris and we spoke about it. She didn't deny what had happened, but she really couldn't understand what was wrong with celebrating in front of hanged people. She said to me: 'But they were spies.'

"After the Hamas massacre," Yahia continues, "they handed out candies to children in the streets of Berlin. People expressed joy at the death of infants. I can't understand it. And I'm scared. I tell myself, 'You live here and nobody will attack you; why are you making such a big deal of it?' But it's hard to be a Jew at the moment."

She pauses briefly before adding: "It's even harder to be Israeli."

Yahia, who was born in 1954, is a prime example of a Jewish fate that has persisted through thousands of years of history: a person with a complex identity, the separate chapters of whose life are spread over three countries – Iraq, Israel and Germany – who doesn't really feel at home anywhere. She's been living in Cologne for almost 40 years, is in a relationship, but even now isn't certain that her wanderlust is completely exhausted. "Actually, I've always dreamed of living in Paris again – so maybe I'm still on my way back there," she smiles.

She believes that her difficulty, perhaps even deliberate avoidance, to embrace a single homeland is inherited. Both her parents were born to old Jewish families in Iraq, but her father was sent to study in England at age 14. "He forgot his mother tongue and went on to study at Oxford. He was more British than Iraqi, but in spite of that he decided not to stay there due to the antisemitism. That was in the 1930s. He was in Israel [then known as Mandatory Palestine] for a little while, but that didn't suit him either. He didn't know where to go, so returned to Iraq. In that sense, I'm his successor. I also feel that I can be in several places but none really appeal to me."

Yahia has a large family in Israel – a brother, three nieces, cousins – and, naturally, has been concerned about their welfare since the war began. Pro-Israel activity offers her some relief from the stress. "I'm now organizing, with a few other people, an evening of reading the names of those who were murdered [on October 7], and I've attended pro-Israel demonstrations," she says.

"Of course there are also hostile demonstrations, but I must say that the government and media are showing an empathetic attitude toward Israel – and that wasn't the case during previous events. I get the feeling that if you're going to be in Europe right now, the least unpleasant place is Germany, and definitely not London!

"It hurts to see antisemitism rearing its head," she adds. "I can understand that people support the Palestinians and their rights, but the inability to distinguish between that and Hamas, and the justification for the terrible things that were done – that I can't accept, and it doesn't allow for any dialogue."

Perennial scapegoat

The title "When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad" was inspired by the gray Volkswagen vehicles that were used by members of the secret police searching for opponents of the regime, or at least so the Jews believed. The novel, which is inspired by the author's own life, was originally published in 2000. Yahia says the Kinneret publishing house acquired the translation rights at the time, but for reasons unknown it was never translated into Hebrew.

Enter David Dangoor, a British-Jewish businessman and philanthropist of Iraqi origin who heads a foundation that supports a large number of initiatives, educational institutions and charitable organizations. He showed an interest in the book recently and decided to cover the translation costs. Its belated publication in Israel in the midst of the war – yet another war – gives it renewed relevance that the author could not have anticipated.

"To my parents, who gave me languages instead of roots," she writes in the book's dedication. Among all the languages she knows, Yahia opted to write the book in English. "We spoke Judeo-Arabic at home, but the Iraqi government's attack against the Jews, which was expressed on television and in the newspapers, caused me to reject that language," she explains. "I remember that at the age of 13-14, the Arabic teacher told us to write a composition – and I couldn't write a word. The atmosphere was so anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli that years later, I still couldn't write in Arabic about my life at the time."

It transpired that Hebrew wasn't a good match for a book revisiting Yahia's childhood and adolescence in Baghdad either. "I studied in a Jewish school and was familiar with Hebrew from our Jewish studies. But we didn't speak the language and didn't always understand what was written in the prayer books either. I was afraid of Hebrew when we made aliyah, but to my surprise I learned the language quite quickly. I discovered it has many words I knew from Arabic.

"I remember once going to the theater with an Israeli guy and opening the program from the left side, and he said: 'Will you open books from that side all your life?' There was pressure to read in Hebrew that concerned me a little. When I studied at university, I read in English a lot. I studied English and French at school in Baghdad, and unconsciously this language is a continuation of the life I left there."

Lina, Yahia's alter ego in the book, is an adolescent girl who's trying to live an ordinary life as the situation around her becomes increasingly complicated. The vast majority of Iraqi Jews, a community with ancient roots and a glorious culture, immigrated to Israel after the founding of the state in 1948. At the time of when the story is set, only about 3,000 Jews remained in Iraq. Throughout the '60s, there were several coups and each in turn worsened the situation for the local Jews.

"After the military coup of 1964, Jews weren't allowed to receive a passport and couldn't leave Iraq anymore," Yahia recalls. "They also froze Jews' bank accounts and didn't allow us to sell our property. During those years, I didn't feel my life was in danger on a daily basis – only when there were demonstrations – but I never knew when Jews would once again become a scapegoat. We grew up knowing that our future wasn't there, that we didn't belong."

The Six-Day War, which the Iraqi army was actively involved in, saw the lives of Iraqi Jews deteriorate still further and they began to suffer persecution. "Immediately after the war, they fired all the Jews from their places of work, including my father, and didn't accept Jewish students to the universities," Yahia says. "They ousted them from the English club of which we were members, and the army took over our Jewish sports center. The TV broadcasts became extremely hostile, and then 40 Jews were arrested and charged with espionage – including people we knew. They claimed these 'spies' caused the defeat of the Arabs. At the beginning of the war [in June 1967], they rushed to celebrate the 'victory,' but after six days didn't know how to tell the public what had really happened. They had to find scapegoats and hang them.

"You have to understand that for most of the population, the Jews were considered cowards, second-class citizens. The Iraqis couldn't accept the fact that these cowards defeated all the Arab countries in the war. To this day, I think that it's a huge problem for quite a few Arabs. They're incapable of explaining to themselves how Israelis are so different from how they are accustomed to thinking about them. Now it turns out the problem isn't limited only to Arabs."

Along with describing the arrests, the hostile demonstrations and the growing fear within her community, Yahia's novel also captures a normal adolescence that included swimming in the Tigris River, festive meals of kubba, sambusak and pomegranate sherbet, first loves and dances at parties to the strains of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's "Je t'aime... moi non plus."

"For three and a half years after the Six-Day War, until we fled Iraq, we tried to live a normal life," Yahia says of her childhood. "The government was aggressive and threatening, but we had Muslim friends and I didn't feel real danger in the street. I would walk home from school with girlfriends every day, and we weren't afraid of being attacked."

In the summer of 1968, the Ba'ath Party brought down the government and installed a pro-communist dictatorship with Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming president (11 years later, his cousin, Saddam Hussein, would forcibly replace him). The Jewish community's situation deteriorated once more: this time, they weren't allowed to travel more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) from their place of residence.

In the novel, Lina's older brother is arrested and jailed for 10 months after a classmate convinces him to draw a Star of David. In real life, Yahia's brother was arrested and held for a day for a different reason, but "the story about the Star of David is true, and happened to someone else who was imprisoned for a long time," she says. "Before the Ba'ath revolution, they arrested people but didn't torture them. Now we no longer knew where the detainees were being held and whether they were alive or dead. We were afraid that they would come for us some day too. We were most afraid when we saw the VW Beetles."

Help from the Iranians

On December 30, 1970, the Yahia family managed to flee Iraq to neighboring Iran. They were aided by Kurdish smugglers, who led them as they rode mules over the snowy slopes.

"The mules set out in one line," she writes in the novel. "I find myself riding last. The smuggler who has helped me mount is leading my mule with the halter. He is smoking, no longer muffled. His straggly goatee tells me he is in his teens, hardly older than me." Later on, the young man plies Lina with vodka and slides his hand up her leg, in an awkward and hopeless attempt at seduction.

"During that period, the Kurds had great empathy for Iraqi Jews and we also had empathy for them," says Yahia. "They opposed the government in Baghdad and the State of Israel supported them militarily: the attitude was that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. At a pro-Israel demonstration I attended recently, all kinds of organizations sent representatives – including a group of Kurdish exiles."

When Lina and her family cross the border in the book, they encounter two Iranian soldiers. "'Yahoud,' Jews, father says, with utmost precision. Yahoud. The word works like 'Open Sesame' on this side of the frontier. Without interrupting their torrent of loud speech, the soldiers motion us to follow them up the hill. They lead us to the spacious hut, gesture us to stay, then go off."

It's hard to believe Iraqi-Jewish refugees would receive a similar welcome these days, but at the time there were warm relations between the State of Israel and the Iranian government. "There was a specific order from the Shah to help the Jews fleeing Iraq," says Yahia. "Before the escape, we spoke to our Kurdish friends and they explained that they could also take us to Turkey. However, they said we shouldn't because [the Turks] would send us back. To this day, when I meet [diaspora] Iranians and tell them I'm Israeli, the reaction is always very positive."

Yahia barely remembers the three weeks the family spent in Tehran before flying to Israel. Her acclimatization in Israel, she says, was surprisingly easy. "My parents found an apartment in Haifa, but after two weeks in Israel I registered for a pre-army course and ulpan [language school] at Tel Aviv University. That was one of the best years of my life," she reflects.

"I learned Hebrew quickly. I fell in love with the country – for the first time in my life I felt truly free. To live in a place where everyone's Jewish and without ever being afraid, this was really exciting. Furthermore, I parted from my parents for a year and was independent, and that was good for me. It was also very important to me to join the army; I wanted to be Israeli."

Afterward, she studied psychology and French literature, did a master's degree in clinical psychology, and worked in an institute that specialized in leadership programs and training Israel Defense Forces commanders. But life led her to leave Israel. After a year in Paris, Yahia registered to study art in Germany and moved there permanently in 1985.

"I liked Europe's open borders and the pace of life. In Israel, everything was planned for members of my generation. People do the army, get married, study at university and get a mortgage. That wasn't for me. I manage with life in Germany. It's not a culture I can really connect to, but I cope with it."

"When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad" received favorable reviews when it was first published and was translated into several languages. "The war against Saddam Hussein made me popular in Germany," recounts Yahia, adding that she wrote two more books but was unable to find a publisher for them. She is currently working on another book.

The publication of the Hebrew version closes a circle for her and also serves as a kind of private tribute to the Israeli public – at a time when the country is fighting for its status internationally while some challenge its moral legitimacy.

Like many others, the thing that hurts Yahia most is the response of the global left, which she used to consider herself a part of.

"The ignorance of these people is frightening," she says. "And these are educated people, intellectuals, with advanced university degrees, people who are supposed to understand history. The situation in Israel is complex, but they're not interested in complexity. They prefer to stick to their opinion rather than checking what really happened."

The sad fate of Iraq, which barely survived a prolonged war led by the Americans, suffered mass terror attacks and has become a satellite of Iran, interests her less. "I have no special feelings for Iraq – and if I do, they aren't positive. When the Iraqis fired Scud missiles [at Israel] during the first Gulf war, I worried about my family in Israel. And when the Americans invaded the country, I thought that if they succeeded in bringing down Saddam Hussein and imposing democracy, then I was in favor.

"Whenever they talk about Baghdad on television and I'm in the kitchen, I don't go to look," she sums up. "It's not my homeland. I have no homeland. Not Israel either. But when they talk about Israel on television, I don't stay in the kitchen."