On 27 January 1969, the Ba’th Party in Iraq executed twelve alleged spies—nine of whom were Jews—and suspended their bodies from gallows in Baghdad and Basra following a televised show trial in which prosecutors presented fabricated evidence of their collusion with Israel to destabilize Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis gathered to celebrate what the state touted as the end of Zionist intervention in Iraq’s affairs. In fact, the fewer than ten thousand Jews remaining in Iraq at the time were isolated from world Jewry and from Iraqi national politics. Why, then, did the Ba’th Party, which faced many threats to its power in this period, devote so much public attention and state resources to the arrest, trial and execution of a fictitious spy ring supposedly led by Jews? Existing scholarship on Iraq mentions this incident only briefly as an example of the new Ba’th Party government’s brutality without investigating the role that anti-Israeli posturing played in the incident. This paper places the experiences of Iraqi Jews within the context of Iraqi social and political responses to the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, arguing that the Ba’th Party’s public targeting of Jews as spies manipulated anti-Israeli sentiments to justify new forms of state violence against Iraqi citizens and newly divisive notions of citizenship. This paper provides new insights into the development of Iraqi political culture during the first five years after its 1968 coup—a period for which documentary evidence remains scarce. Jewish school and administrative documents seized by the Ba’th state and taken from their security headquarters in 2003 illuminate exchanges between Jewish leaders and state bureaucrats, providing a rare glimpse into state policies toward one of Iraq’s ethno-religious communities. In addition, more than thirty interviews I have conducted with Iraqi Jews provide detailed testimony of their subjective experiences of Ba’th policy and the ways it affected their place in Iraqi society. I analyze these sources alongside rhetoric in Iraqi media and speeches to examine the ways in which the new Iraqi government manipulated anti-Israeli sentiments and anti-Semitic notions of conspiracy, justifying violent security policies against Jews that could then be turned on other sectors of Iraqi society to cow potential opposition and reinforce suspicion of ethno-sectarian groups which the party deemed potentially disloyal.