To date, international concern with Middle East refugees has focused primarily on the approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who left Israel during the 1947–48 war. Far less attention has been paid to the nearly one million Jews — known as mizrahim — who left Arab countries in the decade or so following that war.
Most moved to the newly created Jewish State of Israel where today they constitute the majority of the Jewish population, and often lean towards the hawkish side of the political spectrum.
As with the Palestinian Arab exodus, explanations of the causes of the Jewish exodus are highly contentious given their links with contemporary political agendas. Historically, two polarised views have prevailed. The Zionist or Israeli position attributes the Jewish exodus almost solely to Arab violence or threats of violence, and the Arab or anti-Zionist position assigns responsibility to a malicious Zionist conspiracy.
In my opinion, the Jewish exodus is best explained as a complex combination of push and pull factors. The pull factor was the growing influence of Zionism, and the attraction of many Mizrahi Jews after 1948 to the idea of living in Israel.
Another factor, which was not specifically about Arab-Jewish relations, was the general Arab post-colonialist resentment of foreigners which led to their gradual exclusion from social and economic life as the Arab countries attained their independence. For example, many Jews appear to have left Egypt because of economic factors such as loss of jobs and livelihood, rather than specific anti-Jewish persecution.
Nevertheless, a considerable number of Jews — perhaps the majority — seem to have left as a result of either systematic harassment, or direct expulsion. Some communities felt obliged to leave over time due to ongoing government discrimination and popular hostility. Others were expelled en masse as in the expulsion of 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1951. Many experienced outbreaks of serious anti-Jewish violence.
It can reasonably be concluded that Jews in the Arab world were driven out as a direct and unapologetic retaliation for Jewish actions in Israel/Palestine.
But one of the most serious outbreaks of racist violence took place in Iraq in June 1941. The Farhud (or pogrom) resulted in the deaths of 179 Jews and several hundred injuries. In addition, numerous Jewish properties and religious institutions were damaged and looted.
A newly edited book by the Israeli academics Shmuel Moreh and Zvi Yehuda (Al-Farhud: the 1941 pogrom in Iraq,