Lyn Julius's response to Rayyan Al-Shawaf's review of Abbas Shiblak's book Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus (Democratiya 7) is published in Democratiya's current issue.
"Rayyan Al-Shawaf's review of Abbas Shiblak's book starts off promisingly, by pointing out the discrepancies and errors in Shiblak's book. But instead of debunking Shiblak's assumption that Zionist agents set off bombs to 'cause' or 'speed up' the Jewish exodus during 1950 -51, he concludes that the bombs were the 'decisive' factor behind the Jewish exodus. (...)
"It is a pity that scholars expend an inordinate amount of time, energy - and (judging by the kilobytes devoted to this subject in Democratiya) cyberspace - discussing the futile 'bombs' issue whenever the exodus of the Iraqi Jews is debated. It is a bit like rearranging (or more like deconstructing) the deckchairs, when the Titanic of the Iraqi Jewish community had been on a fatal collision course with the iceberg of state repression and antisemitism almost as soon as Iraq became independent."
Read letter in full