The (Jewish) Refugees That No One Cares About
Or so it seems.
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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
In 1948, there were more than a quarter of a million Jews in Morocco. Today it is estimated that there are about 2,000.
Over the same period, the Jewish population of Algeria fell from about 140,000 to fewer than than 50. Egypt: from 80,000 to 40 people. Iraq went from about 140,000 to an estimated five or seven people.
Across North Africa, the Jewish population plummeted from about a half-million in 1948 to some 3,500. Across the region of Muslim-majority countries, from Western Africa across the Middle East, to Turkey, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, places that counted about a million Jewish citizens approximately 70 years ago now have fewer than 30,000.
When Arab and Muslim leaders across the world turned ferociously against Israel at the moment of its inception circa 1948, they and their Muslim citizens, to a large extent and to varying degrees depending on place, turned similarly on their Jewish fellow citizens. Anti-Jewish violence erupted across the region. Jews (almost every last one, as these numbers testify) fled or were forced out.
What about those refugees?
Well, like refugees throughout history, if lucky, these ones found new homes. They put the past behind them, as much as one can, and made the best of their lives.
But ask the average “pro-Palestinian” activist and they probably haven’t even heard of these refugees — even as they pronounce Palestinian refugees and their descendants “the injustice” of our era.
An equivalent (or even larger) number of Jews were thrown out of their homes in the same era that 700,000 Arab Palestinians were displaced by the Arab-initiated war against Israel in 1948 a few hours after the State of Israel declared its independence from a building in Tel Aviv.
But the world’s approach to these two populations could not be starker.
Even among those who do know their history, it seems this, like every other issue involving Jews, is contested territory.
British writer Rahel Shabi, herself a child of Jewish parents from Iraq, rejected the idea that Jews from these countries should be considered refugees: “[T]hey left because they wanted to,” she (in)credulously wrote.1 “Broadly, you could say that any Middle Eastern Jew (‘Oriental’ or ‘Mizrahi’ Jew) who defines their migration to Israel as ‘Zionist’ cannot also be a refugee: the former label has agency and involves a desire to live in the Jewish state; the second suggests passivity and a lack of choice.”
This would be true if it was true. Just as the definition of “Palestinian refugee” includes people who fled for their lives, were expelled, or otherwise made to feel unwelcome enough that they emigrated, the 800,000-to-one-million Jews who fled countries across the Middle East and North Africa after 1948 have individual stories and motivations.
There were certainly some who thought the grass might be greener elsewhere. But the idea is preposterous that 97 percent of Jewish people living as minority populations across two-dozen countries just spontaneously upended their lives — in many or most cases leaving behind almost all their worldly possessions and what had been, until the 1940s, often a comfortable or at least tolerable existence. Again, this is preposterous.
Has there ever been a single instance in history when 97 percent of a particular population voluntarily emigrated from many different countries simply because “they wanted to”?
There were pogroms and second-class citizenships for Jews in almost every Arab and Muslim-majority country for centuries. After 1948, when the State of Israel declared its independence, life became far worse. To paper over this truth is barbaric. It is historical revisionism with a despicable political agenda. And these are actual human beings we are talking about. Rahel Shabi’s inhumanity is jaw-dropping.
I don’t know what her parents carried with them when they fled Iraq, but her inheritance seems to include a willingness to excuse ethnic cleansing when she decides the victims deserve it.
During the lead-up to the 1947 United Nations partition resolution to the burgeoning Jewish-Arab conflict, Arab leaders did not even hide the fact that they saw their own Jewish citizens as hostages.
An Egyptian official told the United Nations they should “not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries. Partition of (British-era) Palestine might create in those countries an antisemitism even more difficult to root out than the antisemitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany.… If the United Nations decides to partition (British-era) Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.”2
Translation: “We’ve got about a million Jews here. What a crying shame it would be if anything happened to them.”
Remember, these Jews were (ostensibly) citizens of the countries, like Egypt, where they had been living for generations. That their positions would be jeopardized if the United Nations voted for partition is a testament to the fragility of their social standing in every Arab and Muslim-majority country.
When the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews is excused as an understandable consequence of the creation of the State of Israel, it reminds us of how precarious the position of Jews can be in societies where they do not form a majority.
It is stunning how often, nowadays, anti-Israel voices wax nostalgic about the “harmonious” existence that Jews and Muslims (never really) had before Israel came along and ruined everything. Certainly, there were some societies where Jews were tolerated and thrived. Others where life was constantly clouded by threats, fears, and violence.
But all of that supposedly merry history is bunkum when we know how it ends. Jews survived and sometimes thrived in Muslim-majority lands — until they did not. And that’s the point. When generations, centuries or — in the case of Iraq — millennia of Jewish life in a country ends in ethnic cleansing, it kind of takes the luster off the supposedly awesome existence up to that tumultuous ending.
For instance, a representative of the Arab Higher Committee of (British-era) Palestine (formed in 1926) said to the United Nations General Assembly, in or around 1947:
“It must be remembered that there are as many Jews in the Arab world as there are in (British-era) Palestine whose positions … will become very precarious. Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob excitement and violence.”
Translation: “We’d love to prevent our people from attacking and murdering the Jews, but you know those crazy mobs once they get started. What can you do? And, of course, what do any of our governments know about putting down popular dissent?!”
Seven decades later, an imam and professor who is a leader in the Canadian-Muslim community has the audacity to blame the emptying of Jews from across the Arab world with the creation of the Jewish state, as if the Muslim-majority states innocently and with disappointment watched their Jews depart in mass.
“If it were not for the creation of Israel,” this imam and professor said, “the Muslim world would now claim the highest number of Jews outside the U.S.”3
True, if Muslim states from Morocco to Iraq had not ethnically cleansed their Jews, they would still be there. And, if we drained the Mediterranean of water, it would be dry.
There is also a weird perspective among activists that Libya or Egypt or Lebanon or Iraq was somehow justified in expelling their Jewish citizens, that there was no injustice in the situation, that it is what it is.
For instance, when I raised the issue of Jewish refugees with an “anti-Zionist” rabbi who is one of Canada’s leading “pro-Palestinian” voices, he responded by wagging his finger and shouting: “But that was after 1948!” In other words, his position, apparently, is that the creation of the State of Israel justified the destruction of Jewish civilizations across two continents.
It is akin to saying that, because Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were interned after Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor during World War Two, it is all just fine and dandy. He was arguing that the creation of a tiny Jewish state was reason enough for every Arab- and Muslim-majority country to commit ethnic cleansing of its Jewish citizens.
Even if we were to accept the ludicrous idea that Israel’s very existence justified the expulsion of almost every Jew from two dozen countries, what does that say about their status? If all it took was Jewish self-determination in the form of the tiny, struggling State of Israel to make life for Jews across the Muslim world intolerable, how tolerable or tolerant could it have been in the first place?
Thus, activists or journalists just add insult to injury by contending that 97 percent of Jewish people in those countries voluntarily and enthusiastically relocated out of some “Zionist idealism.”
In reality, far too many people ignore the genuine Jewish refugees while rewarding the Arab strategy of inventing the Palestinian “refugee” crisis and keeping displaced Palestinians in what amounts to a United Nations-operated captive breeding program for six million Palestinians and counting.
That is a double crime.
“Another side to the Jewish story.” The Guardian.
“The Question of Palestine.” United Nations.
“Do not blame Muslims for anti-Semitism.” The Canadian Charger.
This was really well written. Thank you!
While a majority of Mizrachi Jews forced from their homes in Arab countries went to Israel, not all did - suggesting that the move was anything but “voluntary.” For instance, many Jews who fled Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco did not go to Israel but relocated to France. Many Jews expelled from other Arab countries came to the U.S. But then, when you wish to present an ahistorical narrative, facts are likely to get in the way.