18/06/2026
On World Refugee Day (June 20), let us remember the forgotten refugees. While global awareness often centers on contemporary crises, history has largely obscured the forced displacement of nearly one million Jews who were uprooted from their ancestral homes across North Africa, the Middle East, and Iran.
In 1948, the same year Israel was established, over 850,000 Jews were expelled from the Arab world. Their property was seized. Their communities, some dating back 2,500 years, were erased. Libya had 38,000 Jews in 1948. Today: zero. Iraq had 150,000. Today: three. This is the story almost no one tells.
Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices and professor at the University of Miami, has spent 15 years racing to record the last testimonies of these forgotten refugees before the witnesses disappear forever. He’s testified before Congress, presented at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, and his forthcoming book puts a forensic dollar figure on what was lost: an estimated $250 to $260 billion in seized assets.
In this episode of The Honest Take, Ben Chertoff sits down with Dr. Green to discuss:
▪️Why the Jewish exodus from Arab lands has been erased from the history books
▪️The Farhud, the Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 that most people have never heard of
▪️Operations Magic Carpet and Ezra and Nehemiah, the secret Mossad airlifts that rescued tens of thousands
▪️How Jews went from being ministers of finance in Baghdad to being stripped of citizenship overnight
▪️The $250+ billion in stolen assets and the case for reparations
▪️Why you cannot honestly discuss one refugee story of 1948 without telling the other
▪️What the Abraham Accords could mean for recognition and reconciliation
To stream the full episode, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtGpuoJEYco
Learn more and access hundreds of free testimonies:
Sephardi Voices at the National Library of Israel:
https://www.nli.org.il
