The Palestinian Nakba and the Inconvenient Truth about Jews Forced to Flee from Arab Lands

At Slate, Saleem Haddad tells the story of how his grandmother experienced the Nakba, which is what Paletinians call the events in 1948 that resulted in 750,000 people leaving Israel. It’s a touching story of human suffering. However, what Haddad doesn’t say in his article, for obvious reasons, is that there were even more Jews forced to leave Arab lands at the same time.

In another article, published by Forward about a year ago, Nathan Weinstock explains how roughly one million Jews were expelled from Arab lands:

“I found out that the story we had been told—that the Jews left the Arab countries because they were Zionists—was for the most part wrong. True, they had an affinity for the Land of Israel—that is certainly correct—but the organised Zionist movement was very weak in the Arab countries. The great mass of Jews left under duress. They were expelled. They were subjected to such enormous pressure that they had no choice but to leave.”

At the Jewish Virtual Library, I found this data of Jewish refugees in the Arab World.

Year	1948	1958	1968	1978	2011	2014
Algeria	140,000	130,000	1,500	1,000	<50	<50
Egypt	75,000	40,000	1,000	400	100	<40
Iraq	135,000	6,000	2,500	350	7	5-7
Libya	38,000	3,750	100	40	0	0
Morocco	265,000	200,000	50,000	18,000	4,000	2,000
Syria	30,000	5,000	4,000	4,500	100	17
Tunisia	105,000	80,000	10,000	7,000	1,500	1,500
Yemen	63,000	4,300	500	500	250	<90
Total	851,000	469,060	69,600	31,790	∼6,200	3,704