Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by starik36 3445 days ago
That maybe true. But nearly 99% of the Jews did leave Tunisia, according to the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Mu....

In 1948, there were 105,000 Jews in Tunisia. Now there are 1,500.

How do you explain that?

2 comments

With the creation of an affluent Jewish state that grants them automatic citizenship?
You can't get 99% of a population to leave their homes where they grew up without hard push factors.

Especially since their assets were confiscated...

That was a dark time and was fueled by politics rather than the respect of the local population. A large percentage of the Jewish population left for France and Israel - I believe it was an almost 50/50 split between the two.

More notably, this was a move by the Tunisian government, in "solidarity" with Palestine and in agreement with the rest of the Muslim world. This does not mean it was right of course. From my conversations with my paternal grandfather (b. 1927), Jews were treated like regular Tunisians.

So, on one side you have the Nakba in a burning civil war when populations were thrown out (both Jews and Palestinians). Civil wars are horrible.

The other side is when the Jews were thrown out of the Muslim countries and their property stolen. Not in a civil war, but just from racism -- because they had the same religion as in some other country.

Note here that more Jews fled from the Muslim world than Palestinians in the Nakba. And in the fleeing Jews' stolen property there were more land than multiple times the size of Israel.

Contrast this with that not every Palestinian fled from Israel. They are still a large part of the population today -- the Israeli Palestinians were NOT thrown out as a reaction to when the Muslims threw out their Jews.

And you are really, really upset about Israel -- but dismiss the worse things happening in e.g. your home country Tunisia...

I have to stop here -- any further comment on your opinions, moral and intellectual integrity can't be polite. Let me just say that as a Westerner, I think you should judge yourself harder than you judge others.