The Other
Nakba

Most people know the word Nakba. It refers to the displacement of approximately 700,000–750,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war — a foundational event in Palestinian identity and a real source of grief.

Far fewer people know that between 1948 and the 1970s, 850,000–900,000 Jews were expelled or pressured to leave countries across the Arab world. From Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere. These were ancient communities. Many predated Islam by centuries.

This is the parallel displacement that almost never enters the conversation.

Both these displacements were real and traumatic to those who suffered from them.

Jews in Arab Lands Before Arab Nationalism

These weren’t recent communities. They were among the oldest Jewish populations in the world.

Iraq. Jews had lived in Mesopotamia since the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE — roughly 2,500 years of continuous presence. The Jewish population of Baghdad in the early 20th century was around 25% of the city.

Egypt. A Jewish presence dates to the Persian period at least, probably earlier. The community of Alexandria was one of the largest in the ancient world. By 1948, around 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt.

Yemen. Jewish communities trace their presence to before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. By 1948, around 55,000 Jews lived in Yemen.

Morocco. Jewish communities predate the Arab conquest of the 7th century. By 1948, around 250,000 Jews lived in Morocco — the largest Jewish community in the Arab world.

These were not minorities that had just arrived. They were among the longest-standing populations in their countries.

Ethnic Cleansing Under Nationalism

The Jewish exodus from Arab lands didn’t happen in isolation. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nation-states across the region was hard on every non-Muslim minority.

Armenian Christians suffered what we now recognize as a genocide. Ethnic Greeks in Türkiye were “exchanged” for Turkish populations in Greece. The Christian population of the Middle East and North Africa fell from roughly 20% of the overall population in 1917 to around 4% today.

These ethnic cleansings were part of a wider regional transformation: the collapse of empires, and a jockeying for power in the vacuum that left. The new nation-builders didn’t invent Jewish vulnerability — they built on the thousand years of structural subordination already in place.

Selected Anti-Jewish Violence in the Muslim World, 8th–20th Centuries

Event	Date	Place	Description
Pact of Umar Codification	8th–9th c.	Across the Caliphate	The Pact of Umar codifies dhimmi status — legal subordination, distinctive dress, prohibitions on building or repairing synagogues
Almohad Persecutions	1146–1269	North Africa, Islamic Spain	Almohad forced conversions: convert, flee, or die. Communities across Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and southern Spain destroyed. Maimonides flees Córdoba
Fez Mellah Decree	1438	Fez, Morocco	Jews forced into the mellah — the first walled Jewish ghetto in the Muslim world
Mahallay Pogroms	1588–1629	Persia	Safavid Shi’ism declares Jews ritually impure. Forced conversions, expulsions from public life. Persecution continues under successive shahs through 1662
The Mawza Exile	1670	Yemen	The Imam orders all Jews expelled from their cities into the desert. Property seized. Many die of starvation, exposure, and disease
The Orphans’ Decree	17th–20th c.	Yemen	Any Jewish child whose father dies is seized by the state and forcibly converted to Islam. Enforced for over two centuries
The Allahdad	1839	Mashhad, Persia	Forced mass conversion of the entire Jewish community in a single day
The Blood Libel Wave	1840–1908	Across MENA	Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria, Aleppo, Beirut, Port Said, Damanhur. Each triggers arrests, torture, or violence
Marrakesh Pogroms	1864–1880	Marrakesh, Morocco	Recurring massacres of Jews
Tunis & Sfax Pogroms	1869	Tunis & Sfax, Tunisia	Massacres of Jews
Alexandria & Cairo Pogroms	1870–1882	Alexandria & Cairo, Egypt	Repeated waves of anti-Jewish violence
Tripolitania Pogrom	1897	Tripolitania, Libya	Anti-Jewish violence
Moroccan Pogroms	1903–1912	Morocco	Taza, Settat, Casablanca, and Fez pogroms

What Made the Jewish Case Different

The Jewish exodus had three features that distinguish it from the broader pattern.

The communities were targeted as Jews. The expulsions, riots, property seizures, and citizenship revocations were specifically anti-Jewish — not incidental to wider ethnic conflict. The 1941 Farhud in Baghdad killed around 180 Jews and wounded thousands. Egypt expelled its Jewish citizens after the 1956 Suez Crisis and again after 1967. Iraq publicly hanged Jews on charges of Zionism in 1969.

The Jews of Arab lands weren’t fighting a war. They were civilian populations in countries far from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their expulsion wasn’t a consequence of combat. It was deliberate state and street action against communities that had no role in the events being used to justify their displacement.

They had nowhere else to go. Most went to Israel — not because they were Zionist colonizers, but because no other country would take them in the numbers required.

What This Means for the “European Colonial Project”

The most common modern critique of Israel is that it’s a European colonial project — Western Jews displacing an indigenous Middle Eastern population.

The demographic reality tells a different story.

Today, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardic — descendants of the 850,000 expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, plus the continuous communities of the Old Yishuv that were always there. They are not European. They are Middle Eastern and North African Jews who were pushed out of the countries where they had lived for centuries, in some cases for millennia.

A country whose Jewish majority comes from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Iran is not a European colony of the Middle East. It is a refugee country built largely by people from the region itself.

Why This Story Is Missing

The Palestinian Nakba is taught in universities, named in UN resolutions, and central to international discourse. The Jewish exodus from Arab lands is largely invisible. There are no UN resolutions about it. There is no widely observed day of remembrance outside Israel.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the same selective attention that runs through all five of these facts. Jewish suffering gets edited out — not because it didn’t happen, but because acknowledging it complicates a story that only works when Jews are cast as the powerful and never as the displaced.