{"id":129,"date":"2023-11-03T20:47:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T19:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=129"},"modified":"2025-10-28T19:24:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T18:24:47","slug":"a-jewish-nakba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=129","title":{"rendered":"A Jewish Nakba?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In recent days I have seen people making arguments concerning the current war refering to the Jewish exodus from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Some argued that the fear of \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d of Palestinians in Gaza (based on a ministerial paper of very questionable importance) and the West Bank today and references to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs during the Nakba, with millions of Palestinians today living in both Israel and Palestine, <\/a>should be put in proportion to the Jewish exodus of more than a million people, which left only few Jews behind. A contrary argument made a comparison between a coresponsibility of Israeli unlawful military action today for the rise in antisemitic attacks around the world and the Palestine civil war and War of Independence from 1947 till 1949, when instead of Zionism making the world a safer place for Jews, warcrimes and eventually the Nakba supposedly contributed to Jews being forced to leave their Arab home countries, where they were no longer safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/span>
\n

How helpful are such graphics?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

At the moment I just want to point at the heterogenity of the Jewish exodus from the Middle East, which one should keep in mind, before engaging in such kinds of arguments carefully:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Morocco there were pogroms making Jews flee even before 1947\/1948. At least Egypt, Syria and Jordania refused to give citizenship to Jews. In Morocco however the conditions could be improved again during the decades and there is still a sizeable Jewish community today in Morocco and Morocco and Israel signed a peace agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Algeria the French played the Jews against the Muslims, giving Jews French citizenship and finally most wanted to leave or had to flee, although many had not so much to do with the French, were Arab speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Lebanon and Yemen many Jews still lived till the 70s and the civil wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Iran it was there was a large Jewish community (often speaking Aramaic languages) till the Islamic revolution, when the new regime launched repeated campaigns were Jewish community leaders etc. would be denounced as \u201cZionist spies\u201d and sometimes executed, when Jewish media would be shut down \u2026 hence many left after the revolution, yet there is still a sizeable population, which of course affected by the lack of political freedom in Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Sudan and Tunisia there were no big pogroms during the years preceeding 1948 of and Jews only fled from later persecution during the 1950s. From Ethiopia Jews were rescued to Israel following civil war and famine during the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerning Yemen it is an notable case for many Yemenite Jews already emigrated to Palestine in late 19th century when they first heard about Zionism and became the first sizeable Mizrachi community engaged in the Zionist project, which for them could be connected with their own religious traditions (so this was even much earlier than many Arab Palestinians who moved to mandate Palestine in the 30s from Egypt). We should not forget this when people come up with cheap dichotomies between Europe and the Arab world, claiming Zionism would have been only be about the situation and ambitions of European Jews, unrelated to the Arab world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the Jewish exodus is really multifaceted, it is a combination of voluntary migration, migration because economic conditions and being treated as second-class compared to Muslims, fleeing because of persecution and being denied basic rights, fleeing because of pogroms and fleeing because of civil war and related catastrophes. And sometimes the antisemitism has been legitimised with antizionism and by linking Jews to Israel, but that is not everything, for example the blood libels were imported from Europe into the Middle East (by Christians), at least from 1840 on, as well as modern antisemitic conspiratorial ideology as expressed for example in the \u201cProtocols of the Elders of Zion\u201d and in Nazism. And of course being nonzionist usually does not help against becoming a victim of antisemitism, as we also see today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the controversial term \u201cJewish Nakba\u201d can be a way to relate the painful historical experiences of Jews and Palestinians to each other, one should also be careful, especially when mixing up very different events like the exodus from Yemen and the displacement from Egypt, not to trivialise very specific traumatic historical experiences. At the same time the Nakba, too, has been a complex set of events, including people fleeing by themselves from the war with its changing frontlines, military evacuation orders and war crimes. In any case if one wants to use the term \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d it is not enough to look at some comparisons of population numbers, but one has to look at the specific causes for the displacement of people in each case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent days I have seen people making arguments concerning the current war refering to the Jewish exodus from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Some argued that the fear of \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d of Palestinians in Gaza (based on a ministerial paper of very questionable importance) and the West Bank today and references to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}