#arab world

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by Nachum Kaplan

When Nasser expelled Egyptian Jews in 1956, when Iraq denaturalized its Jews in 1950, when Gaddafi seized their property in 1970 — those Jews did not vanish. They became Israelis. Their return to sovereignty is not colonialism; it is reclamation. To ignore them is to participate in historical amnesia.

Every time diplomats mutter platitudes about “1967 borders” or label Zionism as “settler colonialism,” they are erasing the Jews of the Middle East. This amnesia has a political cost: It feeds the intellectual fraud that paints Jews as alien to the region they once defined. It feeds violence.

The memory of these Jews must be restored — not only for justice, but for clarity. Without their story, the Middle East narrative collapses into caricature: Israelis as colonial usurpers, Palestinians as eternal victims, Arabs as innocent bystanders.

With their story restored, the picture sharpens: Arabs as both persecutors and victims, Jews as both refugees and returnees, the State of Israel as both sanctuary and reclamation. This is why the subject is taboo.

To acknowledge the Jews’ expulsion from Arab lands is to dismantle the mythology that underpins decades of failed diplomacy. It is to admit that the refugee problem was two-sided, that justice cannot mean indulging Palestinian fantasies of “return” while erasing the Jewish exodus.

The forgotten Jews of the Middle East were not forgotten by accident; they were buried to make room for a myth. A myth has poisoned international institutions, Western academia, and Arab political culture for decades. It is time to exhume the truth.

Memory is not passive. It is resistance. To remember the Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, and Sana’a is to resist the denial and falsification of history. To demand restitution for their stolen property is to puncture the sanctimony of Arab regimes. To tell their story alongside the Palestinians’ is to force a reckoning: This was a two-way displacement, and Israel’s survival is not an anomaly but an answer.

View of Beirut

Artist: Jules Coignet (French, 1798–1860)

Date: 1844

Medium: Oil on paper, laid down on canvas