My Word: UN Solidarity Day ignores Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries - opinion

This isn’t just a perversion of history. It’s perverted, period.

Choosing to commemorate one side of the conflict – the side that launched the war – and on that particular date, is more than cynical. It’s manipulative; a reframing of the narrative. It also deliberately ignores the other half of the story. Hence on November 30, Israel commemorates the expulsion of more than 800,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands who came to Israel. These are the Middle East’s most overlooked refugees.

Thanks to the UN granting the Palestinians “perpetual refugee status,” the number of Palestinian refugees has risen in the past 70-plus years from some 750,000 to more than five million. So much for the charges of “genocide” by Israel.

The Jews who once lived in the Muslim world have all but disappeared. In places like Algeria and Libya, once the homes of vibrant Jewish communities, not one Jew is left. In Yemen, the Jewish population dropped from more than 55,000 in 1948 to less than a handful today – and that includes poor Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, who has been languishing in a Houthi prison since 2016 for helping to smuggle a Torah scroll out to Israel.

In other words, the Jews have been the victims of ethnic cleansing. And when the Jews disappeared, thousands of years of Jewish heritage, history, and culture were wiped out with them.

Jews first settled in future Arab lands following the Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judea. That’s “Judea” – more than 2,500 years before the term “the West Bank” came into use. Many Sephardi, Mizrahi, Persian, and Yemenite families lived in the Land of Israel for centuries, but the majority arrived after 1948, with most Iranian Jews fleeing after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Thousands of missiles and killer drones were launched in the recent war from Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria – all countries that once had thriving Jewish communities.

International attention focused almost exclusively on the plight of the Palestinians displaced in Gaza and Lebanon. The tens of thousands of Israelis – Jews and non-Jews – who were forced to flee their homes because of the rockets and threats of invasion were scarcely mentioned.

That Israelis are traumatized by two years of having to run for shelter in rocket attacks does not seem to interest the international press. Or maybe it’s something editors deliberately prefer to ignore, as it does not fit in with the accepted narrative in which only the Palestinians are victims (of the war their leaders launched and an assault they widely celebrated).

Israeli children – of all religions – still have nightmares. This week’s heavy thunder caused many to wake up with their hearts pounding, as if under rocket attack. When Israelis talk of finding safe spaces, they don’t mean looking for a place to hide from some kind of micro-aggression or perceived upset. We need trigger warnings for the real thing – photos and stories of those raped, mutilated, massacred, burned to death, or abducted. And perversely, Jews outside of Israel feel particularly under threat on university campuses, where their rights to feel safe are routinely violated.

When I read reports this week from Nigeria, where more than 200 schoolchildren and staff were abducted from a Catholic school and worshippers killed and kidnapped from a church, I took it personally. We all should. If October 7 taught us anything, it’s that marauding jihadists descending on entire communities in a frenzy of murder, arson, and abduction is not something that happens “somewhere else” to “someone else.”

The Islamic State and its ilk have not disappeared from the world. On the contrary. Boko Haram, the Houthis, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Abu Sayyaf, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, and similar jihadist organizations are active; others are biding their time.

The stories from Nigeria received most coverage, but similar atrocities are taking place in Sudan, Mozambique, Chad, Mali, and elsewhere – and they are not restricted to just the African continent.

Reading the reports was often doubly distressing – not only for what they said but what they too frequently left out. A CNN report, for example, carried the headline: “Armed bandits kidnap more than 300 students from Catholic school in Nigeria.” Nowhere in the report did it mention even a possibility that these were jihadists targeting Christians. The term “armed bandits” is commonly used in certain areas in Nigeria, but to Western ears it made the attackers sound like some kind of modern Robin Hood, shouting “Your money or your life!” rather than “Allahu akbar.”

If you can’t name the problem, you can’t tackle it.

That’s why it’s a welcome development that US President Donald Trump is reportedly considering declaring the Muslim Brotherhood an illegal movement. This is not Islamophobia. The Muslim Brotherhood (including its Hamas offshoot) have been banned with good reason in many Arab countries.

The rise in antisemitic attacks around the world following October 7, 2023, has been frightening, and in many cases, literally unsettling. Jews, including in English-speaking countries, are weighing their options and having “should I stay or should I go”-type discussions.

Under the headline, “Extremist persecution: The rest of us come next,” Nils A. Haug wrote a perceptive piece this week for the Gatestone Institute: “A small reminder: Jews were expelled from England during the decade of 1290; from France in the 1390s; from Spain in the 1490s; from Sicily in the late 1400s; from Portugal in the 1500s; Ukraine in the 1640s; Russia in the 1880s; Germany in the 1930s; and various Arab countries in the 1940s to 1960s.

“Now, in the decade of 2020, when ‘statistical data shows the doubling and trebling of antisemitic incidents on America’s streets,’ where are Jews to go? The only place that welcomes them with open arms is their ancestral home of Israel.”

Two pro-Palestinian protests this week underscore that point. In New York City, demonstrators rallied outside the Park East Synagogue, where Nefesh B’Nefesh, which facilitates immigration to Israel, was holding an event. The protesters, screaming slogans glorifying the Intifada and cursing Jews, described it as a “settler recruiting fair,” furthering the “colonization of Palestinian people and land.”

Infamously, New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, failed to fully condemn the protesters who tried to block people from entering. He reportedly said the synagogue “should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

Perhaps he considers Israel’s very existence – “From the river to the sea” – to be illegal.

Meanwhile, in London, demonstrators protested outside St. John’s Wood United Synagogue, where a World Zionist Organization Aliyah Day event was being held, also providing information for those who are considering moving to Israel. Similar protests have been held at Israeli real estate and immigration information events in Canada and elsewhere.

But last month, more than 100 doctors attended events in Australia with the view to making aliyah and working in the medical sector, which is suffering from serious staff shortages.

Perhaps that’s the greatest irony of all. Every antisemitic attack, every time the word “Zionist” is thrown around as a slur, every piece of rabid graffiti, causes more Jews to consider “making aliyah.” The antisemites are contributing to the biblical “Ingathering of the Exiles.”

It’s less a story of modern Jewish refugees and more a story of a historic return.