Britain and the jewish community of iraq, 1948–51: An aspect of british policy in the middle east

British policy after the Second World War was designed to maintain her influence in the Middle East. As a result, she worked to prevent any destabilization of the region's nations and especially to preserve the existent pro-British regimes. The Iraqi royal government was weak, depending mainly on its army. The riots of January 1948 proved how tenuous the government's position was. Here Britain invested great efforts in preventing conditions from damaging the regime or destroying it. This explains why the British were not active on behalf of the Jewish community, which at the time suffered from a policy of discrimination and persecution. The British assumed that the problem of the Jewish minority in Iraq could not be divorced from overall Jewish-Arab relations or those between Israel and the Arab states, and that the Iraqi Jewish community's fate was inevitable given the events in Palestine. Moreover, despite the pressure from extremist quarters in Iraq to banish all the Jews and expropriate their property, the Iraqi government's policy was not that extreme, and it sought at least to defend their lives and prevent a recurrence of the June 1941 pogrom. Despite this, Israel exploited the Iraqi Jewish community's situation to attain her own political and economic ends.