This is excellent.
Kudos to Ha'aretz and also to the Sephardi Voices project. I am really impressed.
Not a lot of people know about the forced exodus of Jews from Arab lands. That was the real "nakba".
My in-laws were forced out of Iran.
One of my best friends in Israel (hi Vera, I love you) is an Iraqi Jew. She has memories of her happy childhood, her father was a lawyer and very high ranking policy-maker and legal advisor in the government. They had a large house with a courtyard fountain, and several domestic servants.
When the pogroms against the Jews began, she remembers the police coming in and screaming at her family that they could take one suitcase of stuff with them. They were then thrown in jail. She was around four or five years old at the time. Miraculously, they made it to Israel, but were not able to take any valuables, sell their house or take any money or jewelry out of Iraq. They got out with their one suitcase each and their lives. They were lucky because the Iraqis were absolute savages toward the Jews. Their blood-lust was really rabid and they had a sadistic, murderous rage that was very Nazi in spirit and practice.
Her father never really recovered from the trauma of being catapulted into Israel and demoted socially and economically.
I know a lot of Jews from Muslim countries and the stories are all kind of different but all the same. Whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi the Jews were hunted. Hunted like animals. Now we have a state of our own. Times have changed. The former hunters cannot exterminate us as they did before. They can cause local damage to many families but they have no genocidal possibilities anymore, no matter their genocidal aspirations. The lesson of the Farhud and the Holocaust is that Jews need their own state, army and superior weaponry and firepower to match their superior brainpower.
It's also a good time to note that the countries that murdered and chased out their Jews are not exactly bastions of freedom and happiness and prosperity. They are disgusting Third World crapholes festering with jihad. The lesson unlearned by Muslim countries is currently being unlearned once again by Europe. Enjoy your post-Jewish existence.
Neither of these places deserves Jews.
They will reap what they have sown and it's going to get much worse before anything gets better-if that's even possible (I doubt it).