By Sam Azoory | Winnipeg Free Press | Friday, Dec. 12, 2025

As the debate continues about whether the Canadian Museum for Human Rights should include an exhibit about the Nakba, showing the displacement and plight of the Palestinians following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, I urge those involved to take a closer and more balanced look at the history.

There is no question that 500,000 to 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948 and suffered trauma that remains central to Palestinian identity to this day. While the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 was a tragic consequence of a war of annihilation declared on Israel by the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, the prolonged suffering of those refugees has been caused by those same Arab states who caused the displacement to begin with.

Rather than settle and integrate Palestinian refugees, Arab governments used them as political weapons in the conflict with Israel, deliberately keeping them in a legal limbo and violating their human rights for decades, refusing to give them citizenship that would end their refugee status for decades.

I would like to draw your attention to another tragedy that resulted from the 1948 war, and one that is often ignored in discussions of the Nakba. Approximately 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or were expelled from Arab countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In retaliation for Israel’s creation and its survival against five invading Arab armies, Arab governments turned on their Jewish communities who had lived on these lands for centuries and had no connection to the fighting in Israel. Their communities were ethnically cleansed from these Arab countries.

You may be interested in hearing my personal story, as I lived through this history myself. I was born in Baghdad in 1941 and lived to witness the tragedy that befell the Iraqi Jewish community, then numbering 135,000, following the defeat of the Iraqi army in 1948. In an effort to distract rising public anger from Iraq’s military defeat by Israel, the Iraqi government enacted a law in 1950 that allowed the Jews to leave the country for Israel, but only if they gave up their Iraqi citizenship and renounced their right of return. Over 110,000 registered in good faith, but just a year later, the government enacted another law freezing the assets of all those who registered. It was a cynical and treacherous move, punishing people for leaving — profiting from their suffering.

These people ended up penniless and stateless, and Israel, at the time, had very limited resources to absorb so many people in such a short period. They were housed in tents in Orr Yehuda near Tel Aviv, and endured terrible conditions for years before being slowly absorbed and integrated into Israeli society. My brother, who was nine years older than me, registered to leave, but my father decided to stay in Baghdad due to his age and health condition.

Out of 135,000 Iraqi Jews who had lived in Babylon (modern-day Iraq) for almost 2,500 years after the destruction of the first temple, 110,000 registered to leave for Israel, while 16,000 already left the country illegally during the 1940s to escape persecution. The remaining 7,000 to 8,000 hoped the storm would pass or simply didn’t want to abandon their lives, but over time they too escaped and by the 1980s, only a handful of elderly Jews remained.

Some of the Palestinian refugees who arrived in Iraq following the war of 1948 were housed in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad, filling the homes left vacant by Jews forced to flee. Overnight they became our neighbours and to me, it felt like a population exchange had taken place. The sad part was that these Palestinian refugees were often mistreated and abused by their Arab brethren, the very societies that claimed to defend their cause.

In 1953, the Iraqi government mandated that we leave the Jewish quarter. They offered my father a token payment which he could not refuse, because he knew what the consequences would be if he declined.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the remaining Iraqi Jews lived through wars, revolutions and a dictatorial regime (Baath party) which made life unbearable. I left in 1959, during a brief period of peace following the fall of the monarchy and moved to England.

But not everyone was so fortunate. My sister, her husband and their young children were forced to escape illegally in 1972, crossing into Iran through Iraqi Kurdistan, abandoning a modern and successful farming business. My friend from school named Asad, now living in Toronto, fled Iraq illegally in the mid-’60s after the government confiscated his father’s successful brick factory. I could tell many other stories of friends scattered around the world, and of some who never made it out alive.

As we reflect on 1948, we must ensure that we tell the full story. Any education about the Arab-Israeli conflict must be credible and nuanced. The recent question of whether the Canadian Museum for Human Rights should include a Nakba exhibit, must acknowledge the war started by Arab nations which led to the displacement of Palestinians, and contend with the stories of the 850,000 Jews who were forced out of Arab lands, if the goal is education and truth.

My story is one of many.

There are thousands of Jews across Canada and the world whose families in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Morocco and beyond endured expulsion and exile, because they were Jews.

Sam Azoory writes from Toronto, and is currently the chair of Stand With Us Canada.

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