To understand Israel, remember the Jews of the Arab world.

You can’t talk about Palestinian refugees without talking about Jewish ones.

artwork by Future of Jewish

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The story the world tells about the Middle East has a missing chapter — one torn out, burned, and buried. It is the story of 850,000 Jews driven from their homes by the very regimes that now sermonize endlessly about Palestinian suffering.

For centuries, Jews lived in Arab and Muslim lands as dhimmis — a tolerated but subordinated class permitted to worship so long as they paid an extortionate tax. It was protection money wrapped in piety. They lived at the mercy of rulers, were often made to wear distinguishing badges, confined to ghettos, and periodically subjected to pogroms that punctured long stretches of uneasy coexistence.

Yet Jewish life was woven deeply into the fabric of the Arab world. Baghdad was a quarter Jewish in 1910. Cairo’s Jews ran its banks and its press. Aleppo’s Jews guarded the fabled Aleppo Codex. Yemen’s Jews preserved a Hebrew liturgy older than the Babylonian exile itself.

All of this vanished within a single generation of Israel’s rebirth in 1948, but it began before that.

In 1929, in the holy city of Hebron, Arab mobs slaughtered 67 Jews, mutilated bodies, and destroyed synagogues in a community that had existed for millennia. British police stood by as neighbors turned on neighbors. The irony was that the Haganah, the Jewish militia, had warned Hebron’s Jews to flee but they refused, insisting they have lived peacefully among the Arabs. The massacre was not an aberration, but a preview: a warning of the feral hatred that would later consume Jewish life across the Arab world.

In Iraq, the 1941 Farhud pogrom was the next grim rehearsal. Fueled by Nazi propaganda, mobs in Baghdad murdered nearly 200 Jews, looted 600 businesses, and desecrated synagogues. By 1948, anti-Jewish legislation made Jewish life untenable. The Iraqi Parliament’s Law Number 1 of 1950 stripped Jews of citizenship, forcing them to leave immediately and forfeit their property.

Prime Minister Tawfiq al-Suwaidi was blunt: “The Jews are not of Iraq. Let them go.” Within two years, 120,000 Iraqi Jews had been airlifted to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, leaving behind homes, shops, and synagogues that the state expropriated. Baghdad’s Great Synagogue became a warehouse.

In Egypt, after the nascent State of Israel’s victory in its 1948 War of Independence, Jews were denounced as “Zionist agents.” Following the Suez War in 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled thousands. His edict was chillingly direct: “We will expel the Jews. We will drive them out of Egypt.” Families were given mere days to depart, carrying no more than one suitcase and 20 Egyptian pounds. Everything else was “sequestered” by the state. In December 1956, the Ministry of Religious Endowments declared that Jewish synagogues would henceforth belong to Egypt.

In Yemen, where Jews had for centuries been treated as pariahs — forbidden to ride animals, forced to haul Muslim refuse, and subjected to the “orphans decree” that compelled Jewish orphans to be raised as Muslims — nearly the entire community of 49,000 was airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet from 1949 to 1950. They left barefoot, carrying little more than Torah scrolls. The Yemeni government seized their homes and declared all Jewish property state-owned.

In Libya, pogroms in Tripoli in 1945 and 1948 killed hundreds, destroyed synagogues, and shattered a 2,000-year-old community. By 1967, anti-Jewish riots — abetted by police — finished the work. When Muammar Gaddafi seized power in 1969, he decreed: “All property of the Jews is the property of the Libyan state.” The last Jews were deported in 1970.

In Syria, Jews were held hostage in their own land. A 1947 decree froze all Jewish bank accounts and barred the sale of Jewish property. Jews were forbidden to emigrate. Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm admitted the motive openly: “We cannot let them go; they are our bargaining chip.” Only in the 1990s were the final few hundred allowed to leave quietly.

From Casablanca to Tehran, the message was the same: You are Jews. You are no longer welcome. Leave or die. By the 1970s, the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab world — some predating Islam itself — had been extinguished.

The figures are not in dispute, though they are systematically ignored. The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries documented that 856,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and Muslim lands between 1948 and 1972. By comparison, the United Nations itself estimates that 711,000 Palestinians were displaced during the State of Israel’s War of Independence. The Jewish exodus was larger, yet it is scarcely spoken of.

The financial dimension is equally staggering. In 2008, Israel’s parliament estimated the value of confiscated Jewish property at $300 billion in today’s dollars. Jews left behind over 100,000 square kilometers of land — five times the size of the State of Israel. And yet only one refugee population is granted eternal visibility, institutionalized through a UN agency exclusively for Palestinians, while the other was consigned to oblivion.

The reason is not mysterious. The world could only stomach one refugee story — and it chose the Palestinians. Not because their suffering was greater (it was not), but because their suffering could be weaponized against the Jewish state.

The Arab regimes that expelled Jews also froze Palestinians in camps to use as political hostages. Lebanon barred them from dozens of professions. Syria denied them citizenship. Egypt confined them to squalor. Unlike any other refugees in history, their status was deliberately made hereditary.

Meanwhile, the Jews of Baghdad and Sana’a were absorbed into Israel. No UN agency to ossify their victimhood. No lachrymose resolutions. No theater of endless camps. They became citizens, soldiers, teachers, builders. They moved on. That dignity disqualified them from the pity-industrial complex.

Arab diplomats and Western progressives speak with pious solemnity about the Palestinian “right of return.” They never mention the rights of Jews to return to Cairo, Damascus, or Fez. The hypocrisy was baked into international law itself. In 1967, UN Resolution 242 called for “a just settlement of the refugee problem.” Note the singular noun — problem, not Palestinian refugees. At the time, diplomats understood it to mean both Arab and Jewish refugees.

British Ambassador Lord Caradon, who drafted the resolution, has clarified: “It referred both to the Arab refugees and to the Jewish refugees.” That understanding has since been memory-holed. Today, the “refugee problem” has been reimagined as a Palestinian-only affair.

The erasure of Jews from Arab lands is not just a historical crime; it is a present deception. It sustains the fiction that Israel is a colonial implant of European settlers. This is a phantasmagoria of lies. Half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from Middle Eastern and North African communities. They are not intruders; they are the children of Baghdad, Sana’a, Tripoli, Aleppo, and Hebron.

When Nasser expelled Egyptian Jews in 1956, when Iraq denaturalized its Jews in 1950, when Gaddafi seized their property in 1970 — those Jews did not vanish. They became Israelis. Their return to sovereignty is not colonialism; it is reclamation. To ignore them is to participate in historical amnesia.

Every time diplomats mutter platitudes about “1967 borders” or label Zionism as “settler colonialism,” they are erasing the Jews of the Middle East. This amnesia has a political cost: It feeds the intellectual fraud that paints Jews as alien to the region they once defined. It feeds violence.

The memory of these Jews must be restored — not only for justice, but for clarity. Without their story, the Middle East narrative collapses into caricature: Israelis as colonial usurpers, Palestinians as eternal victims, Arabs as innocent bystanders.

With their story restored, the picture sharpens: Arabs as both persecutors and victims, Jews as both refugees and returnees, the State of Israel as both sanctuary and reclamation. This is why the subject is taboo.

To acknowledge the Jews’ expulsion from Arab lands is to dismantle the mythology that underpins decades of failed diplomacy. It is to admit that the refugee problem was two-sided, that justice cannot mean indulging Palestinian fantasies of “return” while erasing the Jewish exodus.

The forgotten Jews of the Middle East were not forgotten by accident; they were buried to make room for a myth. A myth has poisoned international institutions, Western academia, and Arab political culture for decades. It is time to exhume the truth.

Memory is not passive. It is resistance. To remember the Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, and Sana’a is to resist the denial and falsification of history. To demand restitution for their stolen property is to puncture the sanctimony of Arab regimes. To tell their story alongside the Palestinians’ is to force a reckoning: This was a two-way displacement, and Israel’s survival is not an anomaly but an answer.

Israel is not the intruder in the Middle East. It is its memory, returned in flesh. To remember the Jews of the Arab world is to remember what the region once was, and what it chose to destroy. That truth will outlast every lie.

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