Recent work on the identities of Jews who immigrated from the Middle East to Israel has found that they either arrived in Israel with a strong sense of identification with non-Jewish Arabs, or developed one soon after as a result of discrimination in Israel. This research suggests that there is a basis in Israeli Jewish identification for more peaceful relationships with Palestinians and the larger Middle Eastern area. However many Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin also express negative attitudes toward Arabs or claim nonidentification. While some scholars attribute these attitudes to 60 years of Israeli propaganda, others argue that they draw from earlier experiences in Arab societies. In this paper, I analyze life story interviews I collected from a group of Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and who experienced significant pressures to disidentify with Arabs both before and after immigration. These individuals were educated in the Francophile Alliance institutions in Iraq, and in Israel built on their ability to “perform” western – and distinguish themselves from Arabs – to integrate into the higher echelons of Israel’s occupational hierarchy. This group exerts an effect on Israeli collective memory as parents and through such organizations as the Babylonian Jewish heritage center. I find that the vast majority express little identification with Iraq as a society or with Iraqi Arabs. This lack of identification appears to originate from life in Iraq rather than from the effect of Israeli life on collective memory. Immigrants responding to Israeli life would be expected to report on positive or negative experiences with non-Jewish Arabs, but while some do, the more salient point is that Iraqi non-Jews are simply not present in respondents’ recollections of daily life in Iraq. The explanation for this pattern probably lies in the tendency among this group to socialize exclusively within the extended family (i.e. Jewish) networks. Probes on Mulsim/Jewish relations in Iraq do elicit information on parents’ experiences, as well as orientalist stereotypes, but these responses are normally vague, unrehearsed, and have few markers of emotional attachment. In general, then, the memory of Iraq appears to be a memory of an exclusively Jewish world. This suggests that despite a series of pressures across the life course that pushed toward animosity toward Arabs as a group, Alliance-educated Iraqi Jews in Israel have remained more blank slates than either sources of revolutionary identities or anti-Arab collective memories.