The post-1948 Mizrahi and Sephardic Expulsions

If ever there is an example of the phoniness of virtue signalling then the contrast between the 75 year torrent of crocdile tears over the Palestinian Nakba and the lack of any international activism about the actual expulsion of 850,000 Jews from their centuries of residence in countries that were conquered by Islam is the paradigmatic instance. Their land, homes, possessions, bank accounts were stolen by governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt in 1956, Algeria in 1962, Iran in 1979. These people were not destitute peasants like the fellaheen of Palestine but they were destitute when they arrived penniless in Israel. Confiscated assets from the nearly 1 million Jews expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries are estimated between $150 billion and $263 billion in modern, conservative valuations, with unofficial estimates ranging as high as $1 trillion. Where are the demonstrations, the marches, the NGOs, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Jewish Refugees?

Arab governments and elites gained a short term financial advantage by these means but Israel gained a long term financial, social and military advantage. It's population doubled betwen 1948 and 1952, the major increase coming from those expelled. It's no surprise that the Mizrahi and Sephardi Israelis hold stronger negative views on Arabs and Islamic culture and are statistically more likely to vote for right-wing and religious political parties in Israel (such as Shas and Likud). These parties generally advocate for harder-line stances on Palestinian negotiations and national security. Over a century of continual attacks by Palestinians and other Arab countries on the Israelis has produced the IDF, a powerful army and the expulsion opf Middle East and North African Jews has helped produce a population with strong anti-Palestinian views.

There is no single universally accepted historical or political term for this event, as there is for the Nakba. However, historians, organizations, and community members generally refer to it using one of the following lacklustre non-judgemental expressions, as if they left of their own volition: the Jewish Exodus from the Muslim World / Arab Lands which is the most widely accepted academic and encyclopedic term. It encompasses the broader mid-century displacement, including the major 1950s events in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya.

The Mizrahi Exodus / The Arab Expulsion: "Mizrahi" refers to the Jews of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent. "Arab Expulsion" highlights the specific state-led denaturalizations and deportations. The Forgotten Exodus is Often used by scholars and activists to emphasize that this mass displacement is frequently overlooked in mainstream discussions of Middle Eastern history. Many of these relocations are frequently called by their airlift titles:

Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (1950-1952): The coordinated effort that evacuated the majority of the ancient Iraqi Jewish community.

The expulsion and mass exodus of Jews from Iraq took place primarily between 1950 and 1952 through a series of discriminatory laws, pogroms, and government policies. Following the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the Iraqi Denaturalization Law of 1950, approximately 120,000 to 130,000 Iraqi Jews-nearly the entire community-were airlifted to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

Operation Magic Carpet (1949-1950): The operation that airlifted tens of thousands of Jewish people out of Yemen was the most dramatic and romantic. The Joint Distribution Committee planned, organized, and financed the passage of 48,000 Yemenite Jews from the British Protectorate of Aden to Israel. Between December 1948 and September 19, 1950, close to 450 flights were chartered, airlifting nearly the entire Jewish community from Yemen to Israel. Yemenite Jews crossed deserts, mountains, and borders, often on foot, in order to arrive in Aden, from where they were taken on the "wings of eagles" to the newly formed State of Israel.

The Yemenite Jews lived as medieval "dhimmis" in the Arabian peninsular with little to no understanding of Western Society and technology though this is no longer the case as there are virtually no Jews left in Yemen but a thriving community of between 400,000 and 435,000 in Israel with another 140,000 in the USA. The women seem particularly beautiful, at least to my eyes. I have half a dozen CDs of Ofra Haza's though this is not because she was beautiful.

No doubt the Shlaim family was not the only family traumatised and broken by their expulsion.

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Absolute Repression - Prof. Shmuel Trigano

In this complex picture a critical historical element is always missing, even though it alone is a living challenge to the Palestinian manipulation of history. If around 600,000 Palestinians underwent displacement to Arab states (which had declared war on Israel), having left or having been driven out (in time of war!), about 900,000 Jews were despoiled and driven out of 11 Muslim countries. They do not have inferior rights to the Palestinians because they are Jews. They were part of the local populations during the Islamic invasions of the seventh century and were transformed into foreigners in the countries where they lived. Their departure and the shock of their displacement does not date from the establishment of Israel but well before, since the beginning of the 19^th century when the oppressed peoples of Islam (Greeks, Armenians, Christians in Lebanon, etc.) began to cultivate projects of national liberation in the declining Ottoman Empire. These ended in blood, except for the Greeks who already won independence in 1827 in the Ottoman-ruled Balkans. Zionism fit into these movements long before the creation of the state. It arose in the Sephardic world, where Rabbi Yehuda Alkalay of Sarajevo, who lived in the Balkans as they were achieving emancipation from the Turks, invented the Zionist endeavor before Herzl.

This history has remained the big secret of the Israeli narrative and, of course, the main concealment of the Palestinian narrative, since the latter cannot accurately claim that Israelis are foreigners who came from Europe because of a European genocide. No, the Sephardim, a majority of the Israeli population since the 1950s, come from the same world as the Palestinians by virtue of a persecution perpetrated by the Arab-Muslim states themselves.⁸ The Palestinians had been the active accomplices of these persecutions since the 1928 pogroms in Mandatory Palestine under the leadership of the Mufti of Jerusalem. Both in the Arab-Muslim world (as the leader of Arab, and not "Palestinian," nationalism) and in the European world - as a Nazi dignitary and founder of an SS corps of Muslims in the Balkans - the Mufti actively pursued the extermination of the Jews in Europe and actively prepared for that of the Jews of the Middle East. The latter enterprise failed because of the Nazi defeat at El Alamein in Egypt; the plans to build crematoria in the Dothan Valley in Samaria had been drawn up.

This main concealment, the "repressed" of the Middle Eastern conflict, poses a question that remains without an answer: Why did the Israeli leadership ban this history from the corpus of the legitimacy of the state of Israel? What does this reveal about its relationship to its own legitimacy? The question of the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, like that of the Jews of Europe, is a political and national question and not only one of victimhood. Why did the Israeli leadership exclude from the definition of the Israeli nation this population and this story? Was it to preserve the character of absolute victimhood that the Shoah imparted to its existence, thereby maintaining its nonpolitical character, which would imply that Israel is not a sovereign state sui generis even though that is the precondition of all sovereignty? The story of the liquidation of the Jews from the Arab-Muslim world confers a historical, political, regional, and national meaning, internal to the Arab-Muslim world, on the history of these same Jews, who have become the majority in the state of Israel and are therefore the true interlocutors of the Palestinians with respect to the controversy about the "original sin." They too have the keys to their houses from which they were driven out; they too were despoiled, and infinitely more than the Palestinians! The Palestinians' claims against Israel do not impress them; they reinforce all the more their own political, national, and financial claims. Those who find themselves accused of colonialism and of racism, of the "original sin," are the very people whom the Arab-Muslim world, with the complicity of the Palestinians, discriminated against, persecuted, and drove from their homes, and who found in Israel an opportunity to recover.⁹

That is the fundamental question to pose to the "Left" of the Jewish world and specifically to the Israeli Left. I do not tackle here the question to be posed to the West (where the Nakba has become the certificate of victimhood and of the "morality" of Western anti-Zionism and militant Islamism, the moral Trojan horse of the Islamic political intervention in democracies) and to the Arabs themselves (though it is now starting to be asked, it seems, in the Gulf states).

The concealment of what I propose to call the "liquidation" (Hisul) of the Sephardic world - besides the Shoah and the Nakba, two original terms conserved in a foreign language to give what they are designating a mysterious and unthinkable character - is the result of a repression, a structural blindness. The story of the Hisul indeed calls into question the interpretation of the Shoah as exclusively concerning victimhood, which is the one the European Union privileges, just as it destroys the myth of the Nakba. It also undermines the moral premise of postcolonialism, a late usufruct of the two narratives combined - turned, of course, against Israel, but mainly against the postcolonial West. The Hisul shatters the presumption of the innocence of the Arab-Muslim (namely, Palestinian) world and of the ex-colonies (starting with the fact that the ethnic cleansing, i.e., the expulsion and persecution of all of their Jews, constituted the new Arab nation-states following their decolonization). It shatters the nonpolitical, victimhood-based interpretation of the Shoah, the implicit source of the accusations against Israel (racism, apartheid, Nazism) that are made in its name.

Further Information

Al Jazeera have their own special phrase for this crime of the century: "Losing the Jews"