They Left Voluntarily

The canard

“Jews from Arab countries were never refugees — they left of their own free will.”

The receipts

Between 1948 and the early 1970s roughly 820,000 Jews left Arab countries, out of a pre-1948 population of about 851,000. Their departures followed pogroms, mass arrests, laws stripping citizenship, and decrees seizing property. Historians dispute the relative weight of the causes — state persecution, war, economic seizure, and Zionist encouragement all feature — but "they simply chose to go" is not among the serious accounts.

1. 1

   The violence came first, and in Iraq it predates the state of Israel. In the Farhud of 1-2 June 1941, Baghdad mobs killed at least 128 Jews according to the official report, and 150 to 180 by community estimates, seven years before Israel existed. As the US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, Jewish communities had lived in Iraq since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence there in the 7th century CE.

   [1]
2. 2

   Iraq then made departure a legal trap. Law 1 of March 1950 authorised stripping the citizenship of any Jew who left the country; the property-freezing law that followed in March 1951 rendered those already denaturalised penniless as well as stateless. More than 120,000 people, roughly 95% of Iraqi Jewry, left in 1950 and 1951, most airlifted out in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. A community of 2,600 years ended in about two.

   [5][3]
3. 3

   Egypt's 1956 expulsion was documented as it happened. On 15 November 1956 all Jews were ordered to report to the Ministry of the Interior regardless of citizenship; officials threatened internment if they did not leave within days; those departing were made to sign documents renouncing all claims, property and citizenship. Around 1,000 Jews were arrested across Cairo and some 450 Jewish-owned businesses were confiscated. Roughly 25,000 people left in 1956 alone. The historian Joel Beinin describes it as a systematic expulsion.

   [2]
4. 4

   Libya's community was broken by a pogrom before any of this. Over three days in November 1945, more than 140 Jews were killed in and around Tripoli, among them 36 children; rioters looted nearly every synagogue in the city and destroyed five, along with hundreds of homes and businesses, leaving about 4,000 people homeless and 2,400 destitute. Libya later sequestrated the property of Jews leaving for Israel (Law 6 of 1961) and confiscated Jewish property outright in 1970.

   [4][5]
5. 5

   The scale is the argument. Of roughly 851,000 Jews living in Arab countries before 1948, about 820,000 had gone by the early 1970s — Iraq from 135,000 to a few thousand, Libya from 38,000 to almost none, Yemen and Aden from 63,000 to almost none after some 50,000 people were airlifted out in 1949-1950. Nine countries, different regimes, different decades, the same outcome. Voluntary migrations do not empty every community at once and leave the property behind.

   [3]
6. 6

   Honest history does not need a single villain, and this one has genuine scholarly debate in it. Abbas Shiblak and others argue the Iraqi denaturalisation law owed much to British, American and Israeli pressure, and that Zionist emissaries actively encouraged emigration. Ian Black emphasises Iraqi state motives instead: departing Jews' property reverted to the treasury, and the government regarded the community as a troublesome minority it was better off without. Both can be true. Neither supports the claim that nothing was done to these communities and they simply felt like leaving.

   [5]

More canards to send