850,000 Jewish Refugees Fled and Expelled From Arab Communities in 1948

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

                Jews fleeing persecution arrived by the shipload, often having to evade blockades

Israel's population was created out of all the Jewish refugees that were expelled or fled for their lives from Arab communities after Israel declared their status as a free country on May 14, 1948.  That's never mentioned;  one only hears about the Arab refugees that have never changed their status as refugees.               

  Jewish refugees from Arab Countries

Over 850,000 Jews fled rising persecution or were expelled from Arab and Muslim lands after Israel's  War of independence.  Between 1949 and 1954, these Jews became homeless though some of the communities were over 2,000 years old.  Between 1948 and 2000, the Jewish population in Middle Eastern and North African countries dropped from around 900,000 to less than 50,000.                    

            Israel had only tents for the new immigrants from Arab countries 

       Declining Jewish Population in Middle East Counties

                   1948             2000                                         1948             2000

Algeria   140,000        -100                       Libya         38,000                  0

Egypt       75,000         200                       Morocco   265,000          5,800

Iran        100,000  12,000-40,000             Syria          30,000             200

Iraq       150,000         100                        Tunisia     105,000          1,500

Lebanon 20,000         100                        Yemen        55,000             200

New York times, May 16,1948 Headline: JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS... "Nine Hundred thousand Jews in Africa and Asia face wrath of their foes."

Jews living in Arab countries were not full citizens but were classed as Dhimmis, or 2nd class people along with the Christians.  

Riots in Oujda and Jerada and fear that Morocco's eventual independence from France would lead to the persecution of the country's Jews, led to a large-scale emigration. Approximately 28,000 Jews immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951.^[2] The initial enthusiasm quickly dampened as numerous Moroccans complained of the discrimination and contempt they encountered from other Israelis of European origin.  Israel is still doing the impossible, mixing their own Jewish Ashkenazis with Sephardim and Mizrachim from all corners of the world.  Other religious practices are also a part of the Israeli landscape.  Many Jews must learn new levels of technology.  All must learn to use conversational Hebrew for communication from Russians to Moroccans.  We had PhDs and primitive people, all Jews, learning to daven and work together.  This is a melting pot, a teeny melting pot trying the improbable and working and the outcome is happening. 

                                                             

    This group of refugees arrived 5 years before Israel was born 
   

On February 18, 1943, 861 Polish-Jewish refugee children – many of them orphans – who had made their way out of occupied Europe (The Holocaust) , arrived in Mandatory Palestine after a stay of several months in Iran. Dubbed the “Tehran Children,” they were received by the Jewish Agency and greeted warmly by the Jewish community in Palestine, grateful for some good news out of Europe.

  Palestinian Arabs were displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israel war.  Most fled to the Territories of Gaza and the West Bank as well as neighboring Arab counties.  Most still reside with backing of UNRWA in refugee camps at their own choice. .  

Joining the  48 Muslim majority countries of the world in 1948 was the one and only Jewish country of Israel.  A Palestine would make that 49 Muslim majority, set to copy Saudi Arabia and be exclusively  an Islamic only state.  

                                                                      

Israel resettled close to 600,000 Jews from Arab lands.  The new state, barely recovered from the devastation of the 1948 War, struggled to absorb both the now homeless Jews from Arab lands and 300,000 European refugees of World War II.  Israel's 1948 population of 650,000 more than doubled in 3 years as it fulfilled its mission of being a refuge for persecuted Jews.                                  

The transit camps of 1948–1952 were a temporary housing solution to accommodate Israel’s surge of immigrants following World War II. Over 300,000 immigrants lived in tents and tin huts in this controversial initiative, contributing to the divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Israel. The impact of the camps on the lives of immigrants resonates into contemporary Israeli culture, but has largely been forgotten in the public consciousness.

                                                            

Jews from Arab Countries
"No influx like it had been witnessed in modern times.  It was an [open door] from which older and vastly wealthier nations would have recoiled in dismay." noted historian Howard Sachar.  Yet, although the world community supported the rebirth of the Jewish State, no international aid agency assisted in the resettlement of homeless Jews.  

1949-1960s - Up to a million Jewish refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, plus 250,000 Holocaust survivors, settle in Israel and Israel  fulfilled a mission of being a refuge for persecuted Jews.  

These early Jewish refugees are no longer refugees.  Like the tens of millions of other refugees of the last century, the Jews resettled in other nations.  2/3s of them chose to live in Israel.  Today, these refugees from the Middle East and their descendants make up over half of Israel's Jewish population.                    

         These are Jewish refugees, not Arabs, but they are from an Arab country.  On May 14, 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed. Despite attack from six Arab armies dedicated to its extermination, waves of mass immigration brought hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel's shores, Holocaust survivors from Europe and nearly the entire Jewish communities of Libya, Yemen and Iraq. 

                                                                    

                                        Wars Create Refugees.  

If Arab leaders had accepted the UN Partition plan instead of launching a war to seize the whole British Mandate, today an Independent Palestinian-Arab state would exist alongside Israel.

There would have been no Palestinian refugees and no "Nakba" (catastrophe), the Arab term for their 1948 defeat. 

 If Arab countries had not expelled their  Jewish Dhimmis, there would have been no Jewish refugees from Arab countries, either.  

Remember, "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war;  not by design."---Historian Benny Morris

Resource: Israel 101 produced by StandwithUs  2010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_of_Moroccan_Jews_to_Israel