The New York Times recently published a moving essay about an 82-year-old Palestinian woman displaced first in 1948, then in 1967, and again in 2023. Her suffering is real. Her story deserves compassion. But her story, like so many others used as moral leverage against Israel, is incomplete—and the omissions are telling.
Nowhere in the piece is there mention of the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab lands in the years following Israel’s birth. Jews who lost their homes, their wealth, their cemeteries, their citizenships—and were never offered the right of return. Consider the scale: 150,000 Jews were exiled from Iraq, nearly all airlifted out in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Today, fewer than five remain. In Egypt, 80,000 Jews were stripped of citizenship, imprisoned, and driven out—especially after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Libya’s 38,000 Jews fled pogroms in 1945 and 1948; by 1967, they were gone. Yemen’s ancient community of over 50,000 was rescued in Operation Magic Carpet, following escalating violence and persecution. Syria’s 30,000 Jews lived under surveillance and repression until their final departure in the late 20th century. Morocco, once home to a vibrant community of 250,000 Jews, saw a mass exodus following riots and rising hostility. Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon—the pattern is the same. Silence, erasure, exile.
None of these Jews was offered the right to return. None received reparations. Their synagogues are shuttered. Their homes are occupied or razed. No international movements demand their justice. No op-eds call for their return to Fez, Sana’a, or Aleppo. If those expelled from Isdud are owed not only moral sympathy but a legal claim to Ashdod, does the same logic not apply to Jews from Baghdad, Cairo, and Tripoli? Would Saudi Arabia welcome back Yemeni Jews and grant them citizenship? Would Lebanon allow Jews to repopulate Beirut’s Jewish quarter? Would Egypt restore the property and community rights of Alexandrian Jews? Of course not. Because this is not a universal argument about justice and rights. It is a selectively deployed narrative, one that weaponizes Palestinian displacement while erasing Jewish exile.
The New York Times piece cites UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which affirms a right of return—but conveniently omits the condition embedded in the resolution: return was predicated on peace. That peace was rejected outright by every Arab state in 1948, and by Palestinian leadership repeatedly since. Today, the so-called “right of return” is not a humanitarian demand but a political stratagem—a mechanism to undo Jewish sovereignty by demographic overwhelm. No other refugee population in the world is treated this way. Refugee status is not normally passed down through generations. No one demands that Pakistan accept the return of every Hindu displaced in the 1947 Partition. No one insists that Poland return land to descendants of post-WWII German expellees. And yet, uniquely, Israel is expected to commit national suicide in the name of moral purity.
The article accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing. This is not only historically inaccurate but grotesquely ironic. Gaza is not being emptied to make room for settlers—it is a war zone governed by a death cult that murdered over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, raped women, burned families alive, and dragged hostages into tunnels. Israel did not choose this war. Hamas did. The destruction in Gaza is not the result of racism. It is the consequence of Jewish heartbreak, of a people forced to choose between moral clarity and moral survival. And unlike 1948, we have no second homeland. There is no refuge left but here.
The piece ends on a poetic note: a stone taken from the ruins of a mosque in Isdud, a symbol of loss returned to an aging grandmother. But beneath the poetry lies a more disturbing vision. The dream of return described is not one of reconciliation or shared existence. It is a dream of reversal—of undoing 1948, of replacing the Jewish State with something else entirely. It is not a vision of two peoples in two homelands, but of one people reclaiming both.
This is the tragic irony: a better future is imaginable. A future in which Palestinians build a nation beside, not in place of, Israel. A future in which the exile of Jews from Arab lands is acknowledged, and Palestinian suffering is addressed with integrity, not as political cudgel. A future in which we are all permitted to remember—and to build—without demanding the erasure of someone else’s survival.
To raise the next generation of Jews with moral clarity, we must tell the full story. Not just the Shoah, but the silenced expulsion of Arab Jewry. Not just the high-tech miracles of the Start-Up Nation, but the soul-deep yearning for Jewish sovereignty. Not just the wars we have fought, but the peace we still pray for. Israel is not perfect. No state is. But unlike the ruins of Baghdad’s Jewish quarter or the synagogues of Cairo turned into garbage depots, it lives. And we will not apologize for its survival.