The Jewish Nakba, A Third Wave of Immigration

6 min readMar 25, 2024

The Claim That Israel Owes The Arabs A Right of Return

When the five armies of the Arab league attacked Israel in 1948, the Arabs announced their intentions thusly, This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades. –Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast.

The Israeli people who heard this declaration consisted of a large number of Holocaust survivors and survivors of previous Arab massacres of Jews in Arab lands and in Palestine. To their ears, there was no ambiguity: the Arabs intended to finish Hitler’s final solution.

At the time, there were no “Palestinians” as there are today. There were Arabs who lived in Palestine, a colonial land, widely regarded by Arabs outside of colonial circles as a part of southern Syria. Most Arabs in Palestine had spent the previous half-century articulating their nationalist dream as one of belonging to a great pan-Arabist nation, not of having a singular “Palestinian” nation.

In February, months before the Arab League’s external invasion even started, the Arabs of Palestine took up the cause in a siege of Jerusalem and through a variety of violent, civil uprisings against Jews across the territory. The Jewish militias from the 1930’s and 1940’s fought back. To the Arabs of Palestine, this was a war for a tiny piece of land where they lived inside a wider Arab world they belonged to. To the Jewish Israelis, this was a war to avoid extermination and it was a continuation of the recent nightmare in Europe under Hitler.

Go deeper: An Eye-Witness’s Diary to the Battle of Jerusalem and the Wiki on the Battle of Jerusalem

Unsurprisingly, the Israelis feared having the people who were loudly proclaiming they would finish the job Hitler started as their neighbors. Hence, after the war there were lots of Arab refugees. The Arabs of Palestine call this the “Nakba” or “catastrophe”.

When the Arabs lost Israel’s 1948 war for independence, they didn’t lay down their arms and proclaim peace. There was an armistice, which is a more fragile cessation in fighting. They kept their designs on Israel, licking their wounds until they could try again and they clearly believed Israel’s destruction was inevitable. Hence, Israel was launched into a permanent state of war which continues today. It has never stopped.

That is why Israel did not allow the Palestinian refugees who fled the war to return. The end of that war did not in any sense mean the beginning of peace. All sides knew it was just a pause until the next attempt to destroy Israel could be launched.

When they could not destroy Israel itself, the Muslim nations realized they could at least take it out on the Jewish people in their own countries. In the years that followed, a wave of Muslim pogroms and other hostile laws or activities made Jews in Muslim countries flee. This activity corresponded with an outreach program from Israel encouraging Jews in Muslim countries to migrate to Israel.

While some Jewish people from Muslim countries moved to Israel out of aspiration, the vast majority fled what they felt was an increasingly hostile atmosphere. Because of Israel’s outreach program, a few activists debate whether Jews fleeing Muslim lands were truly “refugees”, and a small number of Jewish Israelis feel the term disparages their journey. No one disputes the increasing hostility and violence in the Muslim world “encouraged” a great deal of Jewish migration from those lands, to the point where they are almost empty of Jews today.

The Jewish Nakba was so significant, a majority of Jews in Israel today are Mizrahi Jews, which is the name of those descended from the 800,000 immigrants fleeing hostility in Arab and other Muslim lands. Within Israel, Mizrahi Jews tend to advocate for the hardest line behavior towards the Palestinians, because they remember what it was like to live as a minority under Muslim rule and do not ever want to return to that situation they fled from. Think of this the next time you hear an anti-Zionist activist refer to Israel as a racist European colonialist project: Most Jewish Israelis are from Arab countries or from African Muslim lands.

Go deeper: The Wiki on the Jewish Exodus from Islamic lands

Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Lebanon?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Egypt?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Libya?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Syria?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Morocco?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Iraq?
Go deeper: What happened to the Jews of Algeria?

An Arab-Israeli War, not a Palestinian “struggle”

The attack of 1948 was followed by further attacks by Arab countries, or allied Muslim countries, seven times: the 1956 Suez War, Palestinian Fedayeen insurgency, the June 1967 Six-Day War, the 1969–70 War of Attrition, the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Lebanon war, and the 1991 Gulf war.

Go deeper: The Israeli War Wiki and Israel’s long war with the Arab/Muslim world

During the cold war, the Arabs ( including Palestinians ) sided with the Soviet Union, whose inherited history ( from the Russian Empire ) of pogroms, antisemitism, and Jew killing is long and bloody. Most of the original Zionists were fleeing from pogroms in what became the Soviet countries, so the significance of an alliance with the Soviets was not lost on their descendants, and constituted a significant and deep racial threat to them.

Today the Palestinians are allied with the Islamic fundamentalist Mullahs of Iran.

The current Gaza war is the eighth major war Israel has had to have with the Arab/Muslim world in 75 years, as Israel has been attacked not just by Hamas but also by Hezbollah from Lebanon and Syria and the Houthis from Yemen, all Iranian proxies or allies. The official slogan of the Houthis attacking Israel from Yemen is, “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

I wish that last sentence was a joke. It’s not.

When it comes to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israelis know them by their friends.

For Israelis, this history is not just a list of eight separate wars, simply unfortunate hostilities in an otherwise peaceful co-existence. These are eight major flare ups in one long war occasioned by the insult Muslims feel about Israel’s mere existence. To Israelis, the Palestinians are the forward army stationed on Israel’s borders as a destabilizing force, as other Muslim nations bide their time and wait for weakness, trying to use the Palestinian issue to drive a wedge between Israel and its western support.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

10. The 1920’s And The Spread of Hate