How France Took Over a Jewish Family’s Baghdad Residence for Its Embassy—Without Rent

By: Fern Sidman

Along the languid curves of the Tigris River, behind a guarded compound whose walls belie the domestic elegance within, stands a villa that seems to belong to another century. Columns frame shaded porticoes, fountains murmur into tiled basins, and a swimming pool glints beneath the Baghdad sun. The residence, constructed in the 1930s, today houses the French embassy in Iraq. Yet as FRANCE 24 has documented in a meticulous investigative report that appeared on Thursday, the building’s provenance tells a story of displacement, dispossession and a protracted legal contest that now casts an uncomfortable light on France’s avowed commitment to human rights and historical memory.

Known within one family as Beit Lawee, the sprawling house was built in 1935 by brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, members of Iraq’s once-flourishing Jewish community. At the time, FRANCE 24 reported, roughly 130,000 Jews lived in Iraq, contributing to the cultural and commercial life of Baghdad and other cities.

The Lawee brothers’ home, encompassing approximately 3,800 square feet and set within a 1,150-square-foot plot, was conceived not as a diplomatic outpost but as a familial sanctuary. Their descendants recall a place suffused with vitality: fresh dates plucked from the garden, tennis games on a neighboring court, children and cousins crisscrossing rooms animated by conversation, and summer nights spent sleeping on the roof to escape the heat.

“It was full of life,” Philip Khassam, the 66-year-old grandson of one of the original owners, told FRANCE 24. “There were parties, cousins everywhere.”

That world unraveled with dizzying speed as the political tectonics of the Middle East shifted after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. As the FRANCE 24 report recounted, regional tensions intensified, and Iraqi Jews found themselves increasingly vulnerable to discrimination and hostility. In March 1950, the Iraqi government offered Jews a stark ultimatum: depart the country within a year, provided they renounced their nationality. Nearly the entire Jewish population registered to leave, setting in motion the massive airlift known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Lawee brothers joined the exodus, resettling in Montreal, where they rebuilt their lives and acquired Canadian citizenship. Their Baghdad home, however, remained part of their estate, a material tether to a city they would never again inhabit as citizens.

For nearly a decade, Beit Lawee stood empty, watched over by a caretaker, its fountains silent witnesses to the city’s changing fortunes. In 1964, the French government, seeking a new site for its embassy, rented the property from the family. The report at FRANCE 24 noted that the arrangement was crafted with political delicacy: rent was paid partly in Iraqi dinars and partly in French francs, a dual-currency compromise intended to navigate sensitivities in a region already fraught with postcolonial resentments and Cold War alignments. For a time, the arrangement functioned, preserving a semblance of private property rights even as Iraq’s legal landscape for Jews grew increasingly hostile.

The rupture came after the 1967 Six-Day War, which saw Israel rout the armies of several Arab states and further inflamed anti-Israeli—and, by extension, anti-Jewish—sentiment in parts of the Arab world. Iraq informed the French embassy that rent payments should henceforth be directed to the Iraqi government, asserting state control over properties owned by Jews.

France initially adopted a bifurcated response: it redirected the dinar portion of the rent to Iraqi authorities while continuing to pay the Lawee family in francs, a gesture that implicitly acknowledged the family’s continued ownership. Yet in 1974, amid a recalibration of French foreign policy toward a more overtly pro-Arab posture, Paris ceased paying the Lawees altogether. From that point forward, France continued to occupy the villa without compensating its owners, paying Iraqi authorities only a fraction—around 10 percent—of the property’s market rent.

“For more than 50 years, France has saved roughly 90 percent of the market rent,” Khassam told FRANCE 24. “There is a legal term for that: unjust enrichment.” The family’s grievance is not merely financial. It is rooted in a sense that France, a republic that proclaims its devotion to universal rights, has benefited from a regime of discriminatory laws designed to punish Jews, and has done so with a complacency that borders on complicity. Even after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, FRANCE 24 reported, the family’s requests to resume rent payments or to sell the property went unanswered, as France continued to occupy the embassy compound without remuneration.

The dispute, long dormant, was rekindled in recent years when Khassam began investigating the current value of the property. Through cold calls to Baghdad and conversations with local real estate agents, he learned that land scarcity in the Iraqi capital could place the villa’s worth in the millions of dollars. In 2021, the family retained prominent French lawyers Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi to pursue their claim. Mignard, speaking to FRANCE 24, framed the case as a litmus test of democratic principle. “Property rights are a fundamental right in any democratic society,” he said. “And here, that right was denied for one simple reason: these people were Jewish and belonged to a religious community repudiated by today’s political Iraq.”

The family’s lawsuit sought $22 million in compensation, accusing France of unjustly profiting from Iraqi policies that stripped Jews of their property. Yet a Paris court rejected the claim, ruling that the embassy’s contract “is not governed by French law and that it therefore does not have jurisdiction to settle the matter,” and suggesting that Iraq would be the appropriate forum for resolution. FRANCE 24 reported that the court’s reasoning struck Mignard as both illogical and perilous. “I don’t even see how our clients could be authorized to enter Iraqi territory,” he said. “I don’t know what we could possibly argue before a court in Baghdad. This contract was governed by French law.”

The ruling has provoked a broader reckoning with France’s own historical entanglements with dispossession. Mignard pointedly invoked the country’s experience under German occupation, when Nazi authorities and the Vichy regime requisitioned “Jewish properties,” seizing apartments, hotels and artworks after their owners were expelled.

The FRANCE 24 report recalled that around 100,000 works of art were taken from France alone, according to the Ministry of Culture, and that in 2022 the French government passed a law to facilitate their restitution. “That France could lose its memory to this extent and behave so poorly, simply because this Jewish property is located thousands of kilometers away, is frankly disgraceful,” Mignard told FRANCE 24, drawing a line of continuity between past injustices and present evasions.

Khassam has been careful to disentangle the family’s claim from broader geopolitical rivalries. “This has nothing to do with regional politics,” he told FRANCE 24. “This is private property. Property rights are human rights.” He also rejected the notion that ordinary Iraqis harbor animosity toward the family’s claim. “The people are not the problem,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Iraqis in Baghdad. Jews were part of the fabric of that city. The issue is with governments, not people.” The distinction is crucial, underscoring that the grievance is directed not at a society but at state apparatuses that have, in Khassam’s view, instrumentalized discriminatory laws for their own convenience.

The French foreign ministry did not respond to FRANCE 24’s request for comment, but court filings acknowledge that Iraqi legislation deprived Jewish owners of their real estate even as France relied on those very laws to justify its continued occupation of the villa without paying the family. “France is using an Iraqi law passed specifically to punish Jews in order to justify not paying Jewish owners,” Khassam said. “That is shameless.” The moral paradox is stark: a nation that has enshrined restitution for victims of antisemitic expropriation within its own borders appears willing to shelter behind foreign statutes enacted to similar ends when the dispossession occurred elsewhere.

The symbolism of the moment was heightened by the timing of French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot’s visit to Baghdad, during which he stayed overnight at the French embassy—the very house at the center of the dispute. Lawyers for the Lawee family, in a statement obtained by FRANCE 24, asked whether Barrot felt that “the ground beneath the French Embassy in Baghdad is burning,” a rhetorical flourish that captured the family’s sense of moral urgency. The statement accused the French government of seeking refuge in protracted legal wrangling to deny the rights of individuals excluded from their property solely because they were Jewish.

The family plans to appeal the court’s ruling, framing the decision not as a terminal defeat but as the opening chapter of a longer struggle. “This is not a setback, it’s the beginning,” Khassam told FRANCE 24. “If we fail, then France has failed in the eyes of the world, because it has trampled on its own laws and its own human-rights principles.” The appeal will test not only the resilience of the family’s claim but also the willingness of French institutions to confront the uncomfortable implications of their historical and contemporary conduct.

The Beit Lawee saga resonates far beyond the confines of a single villa in Baghdad. It is emblematic of a broader, often neglected chapter in Middle Eastern history: the mass displacement of Jewish communities from Arab countries in the mid-twentieth century and the unresolved questions of property, restitution and recognition that linger in its wake. The case also exposes the asymmetries of power that shape such disputes. A private family, dispersed across continents, confronts a sovereign state whose diplomatic presence is literally built upon their dispossession. The imbalance is not merely material; it is institutional, legal and symbolic.

There is, too, a deeper irony in the embassy’s architecture itself. The villa’s columns and fountains, conceived as expressions of domestic comfort and cosmopolitan aspiration, now frame the rituals of diplomacy. FRANCE 24’s report invites readers to consider how spaces accrue layered meanings over time, becoming palimpsests of memory and power. What was once a family home animated by laughter has become a site where international relations are negotiated, even as the unresolved claims of its original owners haunt the ground beneath the negotiations.

As the appeal proceeds, the Lawee family’s struggle raises uncomfortable questions about the universality of human rights principles. If property rights are, as Khassam insists, human rights, then their selective application undermines the moral authority of the states that proclaim them. FRANCE 24’s chronicling of the case challenges France—and by extension other nations—to confront the possibility that commitments to restitution and justice lose their force when they are geographically or politically inconvenient.

In the end, the villa on the Tigris stands as both a monument and an indictment. It is a monument to a vanished Jewish Baghdad, to a community that once thrived along the river’s banks and whose traces now survive largely in memory. It is also an indictment of the ways in which states, in pursuit of diplomatic convenience, can become complicit in the afterlives of discriminatory policies. Whether the French courts will ultimately recognize this indictment remains uncertain. What is clear is that the ground beneath the French embassy in Baghdad is no longer merely diplomatic territory; it is contested moral terrain, where the past presses insistently upon the present, demanding an accounting that has been deferred for more than half a century.