Today I noticed this at Legal Insurrection:

Today Israel marks a national day to remember the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.

The commemorative day, which was designated by Israel’s legislative body three years ago, comes as a belated recognition of the collective traumas experienced by between 850,000 to 1 million Jews who were expelled or who fled from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa over a span of three decades (from the 1940s until the 1970s).

Most people are not even aware of what happened, because for the most part these Jews were assimilated into Israel (or countries such as the US; I personally know someone whose family emigrated from Iraq in the 1949s) without the world having to hear all that much about them.

I’ve long had a link in my blogroll to a blog that’s dedicated to the subject of the Jewish expulsion from Arab lands. If you want to read more about it, take a look. An excerpt:

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been ‘ethnically cleansed’ from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.

This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were – even if they wanted to.