OR YEHUDA, Israel - They talk about the good life they once had, with spacious homes perched on riverbanks in Baghdad, important jobs and sand so rich in oil that they could light a fire by digging a small hole and striking a match.
They are Iraqi and Jewish, and they came to Israel half a century ago to escape violent attacks and killings targeting Jews. Now, many eagerly await an American war. If Saddam Hussein is ousted from power, they say, they could visit their childhood homes once more.
Some remain bitter about the wealth and status they left behind in Iraq and complain that they have never become fully integrated into Israeli society. Others say that Israel is their true homeland and have purged memories of Iraq from their hearts and minds.
They tell harrowing tales of getting out of Baghdad - some rushing across runways for planes, others taking months to walk across deserts dressed as Arab Bedouins to reach Iran with the help of a Jewish underground run by the Israeli Mossad, the intelligence service.
About 450,000 Iraqi Jews live in Israel, which has a population of 6.5 million, making them the fourth-largest immigrant group, behind Russians, Moroccans and Romanians. Nearly a quarter came in the early 1950s as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, one of the largest Jewish population transfers ever undertaken. Israeli officials say only 38 Jews remain in Iraq.
Daily news accounts out of Iraq have rekindled old feelings and prompted debates about whether the exodus was as necessary as it seemed and whether their life in Or Yehuda and other Israeli cities is better than their life had been in Baghdad.
"It is a difficult question," said Shaul Ben-Hai, 67, a former member of the Jewish underground who was hiding grenades from Iraqi police when he was 11 and escaped across a desert two years later. "It depends on what you've become here."
Jews in Iraq enjoyed a special status as wealthy landowners, merchants, teachers, goldsmiths, spice dealers and tailors. They carved out their own existence with Jewish schools and synagogues, carrying on their religious traditions with an Arabic flavor. Most said they enjoyed warm relations with their Muslim neighbors.
Violence began in '40s
The violence against them began in the 1940s, they said, coinciding with the movement toward a Jewish state and the resentment that provoked in the Arab world.
Ben-Hai's father was a prominent store owner in Baghdad. The family's house stood three stories high, and date palm trees grew in an inner courtyard. He remembers hot summer nights sleeping on the roof to feel the breeze blowing off the Tigris River.
Upon arriving in Israel in 1949, Ben-Hai was sent to a kibbutz in the country's north, where, he said, he was forced to work as a laborer and farmhand. As a result, he did not receive a formal education in his early teens. He stayed in the army beyond his three years of required service and fought in three wars. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he crossed the Suez Canal with a division led by Ariel Sharon, now Israel's prime minister.
The retired truck driver spends his evenings with fellow Iraqis playing dominoes at an abandoned storefront in Or Yehuda, a dilapidated working-class city near the airport outside of Tel Aviv. They drink hot spiced tea and argue politics in a mixture of dialects that effortlessly shifts between Arabic and Hebrew.
Ben-Hai said he knows it was impossible to stay in Iraq, given his clandestine activities and the violence directed at Jews. Still, it was a shock for Jews from a traditional Arabic society to be suddenly thrust into a culture dominated by European immigrants.
'I gave more than I got'
Jews in Iraq, Ben-Hai said, had at one time been "treated like kings." In Israel, he said, "I gave more than I got."
A few blocks from where the gruff domino players gather is the Babylonian Jewry Museum, which tells the rich history of Iraqi Jews, recording how they came to Israel with the help of Mordechai Ben-Porat, the Mossad's chief undercover agent.
Ben-Porat was born in 1923 in Adhamiya, a town north of Baghdad, and was the eldest of 11 children. His father was a clothing and silk merchant. Most of his family fled Iraq in 1944 on a seaplane that landed on the Dead Sea. Ben-Porat stayed behind to finish his studies and got out a year later.
Ben-Porat, 79, fought in the 1948 War of Independence and commanded a platoon of soldiers in the fierce battle of Latrun, at the foothills of Jerusalem. A year later, he returned to Iraq as a Mossad agent to help tens of thousands of Iraqis escape. He was arrested four times and tortured. In 1955, he made it out a final time, barely eluding Iraqi authorities by climbing a rope dropped from a plane as it took off from a runway.
By then, Ben-Porat's six-year mission was over, and more than 120,000 Jews had fled, many of them in convoys of planes that Iraqi officials allowed to fly out. They had granted permission for Jews to leave, apparently believing that only a few would accept.
Ben-Porat's exploits are detailed in his book, To Baghdad and Back: The Miraculous 2,000 Year Homecoming of the Iraqi Jews. His fake passports and papers issued by the Mossad are on display at the museum, which he runs.
Like others from Iraq, Ben-Porat has a soft spot for the country, now regarded as an archenemy by Israel. "The first sign that Saddam Hussein is out, I will go back," he said in an interview at the museum. But he doesn't want to live there.
"I want to see the views," he said, referring to his family house, with plush gardens on the riverbank. "To live? I don't think so. But my dream is that Saddam is removed. Then, it will take a few years, but Israel can build an embassy in Iraq. Peace with the Iraqi people will be easier than peace with the Palestinians."
Some Iraqis in Israel accuse Ben-Porat of orchestrating bombings against fellow Jews in Baghdad in 1951 and blaming Muslim extremists to convince the Jewish population that their lives were in danger if they stayed.
In his book, Ben-Porat published previously top-secret transcripts of a government investigation into the allegations, which cleared him of the charges. But not everyone remains satisfied.
Regrets his decision
Anwar Katsav, 78, came to Israel from Iraq when he was 32 and said he regrets his decision every day. In Baghdad, he was a prominent butcher; in Israel, he could find work only as a day laborer. After living four decades in Israel, he speaks only a few words of Hebrew, preferring his native Arabic.
"I wish I could go to Iraq now," he said while sitting outside a small coffee shop in Or Yehuda and alleging that he and other Jews were scared into leaving by what he said was a fake bombing campaign. He gave up a four-story house in Baghdad for a two-room apartment in Or Yehuda, and he still is paying off the mortgage.
"Once Saddam is out, everything will be fine in Iraq," Katsav said. "The people there are very good. And we had a very good life."
Not everyone feels the same way. Yitzchak Basri, 68, is a successful lawyer who fled Basra in southern Iraq in 1949 at age 16. He barely made it out; most of his group was captured less than a mile from the Iranian border, but he and a friend managed to get away.
"Life was hard," he said of growing up in Iraq. "We were rich. We had everything, but it was a difficult way to live. ... My father was respectable, and we had a nice life. But as I remember, we couldn't live the way we wanted."
He, too, enjoyed a large house with spacious gardens, and he has fond memories of school outings in which the teacher would dig a small hole in the sand and light a fire from the oil that seeped up just below the surface. He also remembers being afraid to go out at night and once being beaten because of his religion.
One time Basri fought back, and Iraqi police were soon after him. He fled to Iran and stayed with a cousin who, he said, was later hanged for helping Jews. If Hussein is ousted from power, Basri said, he has no plans to return.
"I don't miss anything," he said over lunch of lamb skewers at Said's Restaurant in Or Yehuda, run by an Iraqi immigrant who left at age 7. "Israel is the only place in the world that I can live in as a Jew."