Many people know about the Palestinian nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), when some 600,000 Palestinians became refugees in surrounding Arab countries while the State of Israel was being established. Far less known is a Jewish nakba, during which an even greater number of mizrahi (eastern) Jews fled Arab countries, mainly under duress. The majority of those refugees settled in Israel. In the years that followed, an additional quarter-million Jews left countries such as Egypt and Iran — where there had been Jewish communities since ancient times — under similar circumstances.
Quote: “Another indication that Arab rulers coordinated the expulsion of Jews from their territories comes from a Beirut meeting, one-and-a-half years later, of senior diplomats from all the Arab States. By this time, March 1949, the Arab states had already lost the first Arab-Israeli war; they now used this defeat to justify an expulsion that had been officially proclaimed before the war even began.” — “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries” from the Middle East Quarterly/Middle East Forum
Sources: Wikipedia, Middle East Quarterly/Middle East Forum
Learn more about the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries after the establishment of the State of Israel, on Wikipedia. >>
Read “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries” from the Middle East Quarterly/Middle East Forum (September 1995). >>
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