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The Ethnic Cleansing No One Mentions When Talking About Israel

Summarizing Matt Field in Future of Jewish · Published Tuesday, April 28, 2026
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JL;DR SUMMARY The article by Matt Field challenges the pervasive narrative of Israel as a European settler state by highlighting the largely overlooked ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish History  Zionism  Arab Countries  Ethnic Cleansing  Displacement  Persecution  Mizrahi Jews  Narrative  Middle Eastern Jews 

Places mentioned

Tunisia
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."
Syria
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."
Iran
"The same pattern completed itself across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran sometimes through mob violence, sometimes through bureaucratic suffocation."
Lebanon
"The same pattern completed itself across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran sometimes through mob violence, sometimes through bureaucratic suffocation."
Cairo, Egypt
"The Jews of Baghdad, of Sanaa, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else; they were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across 2,000 years."
Alexandria, Egypt
"The homes were confiscated in 1956, when the Egyptian government declared, in a proclamation read aloud from the minarets of Cairo and Alexandria, that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state."
Germany
"The German ambassador to Egypt works out of a house that used to belong to a Jewish family."
Switzerland
"So does the Swiss ambassador."
United States
"So does the American one."
Israel
"A famous photo of Yemenite Jews traveling by foot to Israel in 1949 (photo: Zoltan Kluger/Wikipedia)"
Baghdad, Iraq
"The Jews of Baghdad, of Sanaa, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else; they were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across 2,000 years."
Iraq
"The Talmud, the central text of Jewish law and life that has governed Jewish practice for 15 centuries, was composed in Babylon, in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, on the soil of what is now modern Iraq."
Sanaa, Amanat Al Asimah, Yemen
"The Jews of Baghdad, of Sanaa, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else; they were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across 2,000 years."
Tripoli, Libya
"The Jews of Baghdad, of Sanaa, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else; they were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across 2,000 years."
Yemen
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."
Libya
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."
Morocco
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."
Algeria
"And those Arab states bear direct responsibility for the demographic reality they then spent decades condemning. Nearly 900,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, driven by persecution, pogrom, and state-sponsored dispossession."

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This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 81071
Cairo Source ID 36
Retrieved 2026-04-29 05:30:43 UTC
Curated 2026-04-29 08:30:51 UTC