Sources: Iraqi denaturalization law records; Israeli and airline accounts of the 1950-1951 Iraqi airlift; memoirs from Baghdad, Basra, and Kurdish communities.

Operation Ali Baba is a popular name used for the early air movement of Iraqi Jews during the same historical setting as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. The core event was the mass departure of Iraq’s Jewish population after the 1950 Denaturalization Law allowed Jews to leave if they surrendered citizenship. Bombings, arrests, Zionist underground activity, anti-Jewish pressure after the 1948 war, and uncertainty under the Iraqi monarchy pushed a community with more than two millennia of Babylonian continuity toward departure.

The migration dismantled one of the oldest and most learned eastern Jewish centers in the world. Baghdad had produced merchants, musicians, jurists, printers, teachers, and public officials; within a short period most of that social world was gone. New arrivals in Israel faced transit camps, language barriers, occupational downgrading, and cultural marginalization, yet they also reshaped Israeli food, music, commerce, religious leadership, and politics. The event belongs to the wider Mizrahi exodus from Arab and Muslim-majority countries after 1948.