It was the Arabs who expelled Arab Jews from their countries after 1948.

The exodus of Arab Jews cannot be understood without Zionism. For centuries, Jewish communities lived across the Arab world as integral parts of their societies, sharing language, culture, and history with their neighbors. The rupture emerged during the 1940s as Zionism sought to colonize Palestine while encouraging many Arab Jews to redefine themselves through a European settler-colonial project, separating them from the Arab societies in which they had lived for centuries. Reducing this history erases Zionism's role in instrumentalizing Arab Jewish life to serve its settler-colonial goal of establishing a Jewish state.

Israel's instrumentalization of Arab Jews was accompanied by an organized state project to encourage their immigration to Israel. Through propaganda, recruitment, organized immigration campaigns, and operations such as Operation Magic Carpet from Yemen and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah from Iraq, Israel actively promoted Jewish migration to Israel. These state-sponsored efforts demonstrate that Israel was not merely receiving refugees. It was actively engineering the demographic foundations of its Jewish-majority settler-colonial state.

This organized Jewish immigration project did not begin in 1948 either. Decades before Israel's establishment, the Zionist movement had already sent emissaries across the Arab world encouraging Jewish settlement in Palestine. In Yemen, for example, Zionist emissaries arrived as early as 1911, culminating in Operation Magic Carpet (1949-1950), which brought nearly the entire Yemeni Jewish community to Israel under inhumane conditions. After arriving in Israel, Yemenite Jews encountered widespread discrimination. Thousands of Yemenite families later reported that their children had disappeared after being taken by Israeli authorities in what became known as the Yemenite Children Affair.

Many Arab Jews themselves reject the claim that Jews were expelled by Arabs after 1948. Drawing on his experience and archival research, historian Avi Shlaim narrates the history of his Jewish Iraqi community and argues that the Zionist movement played an active role in the uprooting of Iraqi Jews, including through involvement in bomb attacks targeting Jewish Iraqis that accelerated their mass emigration to Israel. As he concludes, "Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the Jews of the East into strangers in their own land."

This claim erases the diverse factors that shaped Jewish migration from Arab countries over several decades, including the distinct political and socio-economic conditions in each country, the role of Zionism, and the Arab region's experience under colonial rule. For example, during World War II, the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime imposed anti-Jewish laws and racial policies in North Africa. Yet many Arab responses were the opposite. Morocco's King Mohammed V affirmed Jews as equal citizens, and Tunisian Muslims hid Jewish neighbors to protect them from Nazi deportation.

The claim that "Arabs expelled the Jews" became a central pillar of Israeli propaganda following Israel's establishment, portraying Arab Jewish migration as equivalent to the Nakba. This serves several political purposes: absolving Israel of responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and undermining the Palestinian right of return.