Everyone is taught about the Palestinian refugees. Almost no one is taught that as many Jews were driven from Arab lands in the very same years, their communities older than Islam itself, gone almost overnight.
When Israel was reborn in 1948, the Arab world turned on the Jews who had lived among them for two and a half thousand years, since before the fall of the First Temple. Through pogroms, expulsion orders, frozen bank accounts and revoked citizenship, roughly 850,000 Jews were forced from a dozen countries. They lost homes, synagogues, businesses and graveyards. This is one of the great erasures of the twentieth century, and it is barely mentioned.
Jewish population, 1948 versus today.
Here is the part that reframes the whole argument. Both peoples produced refugees in 1948, in comparable numbers. But the endings could not be more different. Israel absorbed its 850,000 as full citizens; today roughly half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, the children and grandchildren of those exiles, woven into the same tree of return as the rest. The Arab states, with vastly more land and resources, kept their Palestinians stateless for generations, in camps, under a special UN agency built to pass refugee status down the bloodline rather than resolve it. One side turned refugees into citizens. The other turned them into a permanent grievance.