New documentary reveals forgotten history of how Jews were expelled from Arab lands

Since the deadliest day the Jewish community has experienced since the Holocaust, protesters have filled streets across the West. Intertwined within these protests have been activists who denounce Israel as an imperialist state, a foreign entity planted by European empires that needs to be uprooted.

“They are trying to destroy you,” Osama Abuirshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, told students at George Washington University in April. “Before you succeed in bringing this imperialism to an end…. Before we bring this poison of Zionism to an end.”

A new film by VisionTV, The Forgotten Expulsion: Jews from Arab Lands, aims to dispel such notions. The forty-five-minute documentary, airing on the one-year anniversary of October 7, shows a rich Jewish history throughout the Middle East that existed longer than Islam or Christianity. Rampant antisemitism throughout the twentieth century led to these communities being cleansed from their historic homelands, as most Jews fled to Israel, France or the United States.

Executive producer Moses Znaimer, founder of ZoomerMedia Limited, told National Post that his interest in the subject grew once he “began to understand more fully the extent of it and the nature of the lies that it unveiled.”

“I was amazed that nobody had done anything about it; that the (Jewish) community itself was not talking about it; that even the Israelis weren’t talking about it,” he said.

The documentary opens up with graphic images of the Hamas atrocities spliced with English-speaking activists justifying the attacks because Jews are not indigenous to the region.

“It is the cradle of Jewish civilization. It’s where all the stories of the Bible took place and where Jews in antiquity exercised sovereignty. It is literally where we are from,” former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy says in the film’s opening minutes. “The argument that Jews are indigenous to Europe would certainly come as a surprise to two of my grandparents born in Iraq.”

His statement serves as the jumping-off point for the film to explore the deep roots of Jewish history in the Middle East, and how the people disappeared. The region was home to nearly one million Jewish people, often referred to as Mizrahi Jews, before they were ethnically cleansed throughout the twentieth century. Many were forcibly expelled or fled following the establishment of Israel in 1948, when surrounding Arab nations invaded and sought to destroy the newborn country.

“Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, your Jews fled as refugees after suffering persecution and deadly pogroms,” Hillel Neuer, the leader of UN Watch, a group that scrutinizes the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, is shown saying, at one point in the film, as part of his now-famous “Where Are Your Jews?” speech that was delivered before the UN Human Rights Council seven years ago.

Jewish life throughout the region was often precarious prior to the emergence of a Jewish state. Many fled pogroms reminiscent of October 7, such as the Farhud in Iraq, where nearly two hundred Jews were killed and thousands more injured in Baghdad in 1941. A similar pogrom in Aleppo six years later killed almost one hundred people and led to most of the community fleeing in its wake.

“These are Judenrein countries now where they (once) had big Jewish communities,” Judy Feld Carr, a community leader in Toronto, told National Post, referring to the Nazi term for towns that were cleansed of their Jews.

Since the 1970s, Carr helped thousands of Syrian Jews seeking to flee their country by paying ransoms or bribery deals to officials in the country. The dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad used the historic Jewish community as a bargaining chip to extract wealth.

Many of these events have been lost to history, Carr said, because Jewish refugees became well-integrated and successful in their newly adopted homes and cared for by co-religionists.

The emptying of historic communities in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus and Casablanca remain largely forgotten episodes both inside and outside the Jewish community. This history is eclipsed in the popular imagination by Palestinian refugees, who have a dedicated UN body overseeing them: the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency (UNRWA).

“That’s what astonished me, that not only the world at large had forgotten this, if ever it had taken note, but that within the Jewish community itself, it was not something that was talked about,” Znaimer told the Post.

“I had become, over the years, you know, aware that in the lead up to the (Israeli) Declaration of Independence, there had been a lot of turmoil in Palestine itself, but really had no real comprehension of the depth of the histories and the nature of the communities that were displaced on the other side.”

A second theme of the documentary touches upon UNRWA, a group accused by critics of perpetuating the conflict by opposing the integration of Palestinians into their host countries, sharing antisemitic material in classrooms and having Hamas members within their ranks.

“Every refugee population in the world goes down over time. Because you’re a refugee, but if your kid is born in the United States or Canada or somewhere and has nationality, they’re not refugees anymore,” documentarian Simcha Jacobovici says near the end of the documentary.

Following the 1948 war, the population of Palestinian refugees has grown almost tenfold from around 700,000 to nearly seven million today.

“You had 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands, they don’t exist as refugees, their children and grandchildren are not refugees. And none of the Jewish refugees, the Jewish Arabs, have ever counted as refugees.”

While other refugee populations that have fled following protracted conflicts are capable of passing along their status, most recently survivors of the Syrian Civil War, descendants of Palestinian refugees, have a unique status within the international community.

The film seeks to balance this narrative, acknowledging the reality of Palestinian refugees who either fled or were expelled by Israel during the 1948 conflict alongside a similar number of Jews depopulated from Arab countries throughout the Middle East.

“I believe that Jews have to know their history,” Carr said. “That what’s happening now is also part of our history.”

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