Jewish refugees

Normally I don't have a lot of respect for arguments of the form, "Yeah, but look what they did." but David Bernstein's post at The Volokh Conspiracy was worthwhile as new information to me. I simply had no idea.

I mention this because of the consistent blindness of the news media and punditocracy, especially left-wing sources like the Guardian, to the fact that Israel's War of Independence created two groups of refugees, one Jewish, one Arab, of approximately the same size. The Jewish refugees were forced out by their governments in many Arab countries simply because they were Jews, and this was a politically expedient response to local anger about the establishment of Israel. The Arab refugees were forced out, orin many cases fled voluntarily, because their community was engaged in a war of annihilation against the emerging Jewish state. The Middle Eastern Jewish refugees were resettled by an Israel dominated by Ashkenazim, who had a different linguistic and cultural background, at great economic sacrifice to both the Ashkenazim and the Middle Eastern Jews, who were almost as numerous as the Jews already in Israel. The Arab refugees, who mostly fled only a few miles and were linguistically and culturally largely indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors, were herded by Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt into refugee camps, and forced to remain there to serve as political tools to use against Israel. The Jewish refugees received a bit of charity from the world Jewish community, and were otherwise left to their own devices (my wife's late mother went from living in a mansion in Iraq to living in a tent for several years in Israel).