Which is exactly what happened to the Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews.
These are people whose families lived for centuries in countries like Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. They didn’t come to Israel from Europe after the Holocaust; many were expelled or fled violent persecution.
These Jewish communities had been part of the Middle East for generations. Yet after 1948, more than 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab and Muslim-majority countries. They had their property confiscated, faced mob violence, arrests, and sometimes killings. Most of these countries will not take them back, and many have effectively erased their Jewish histories.
Israel became the only place they could go. It wasn’t a matter of “stealing land”, for many Mizrahi Jews, it was life and death after being made stateless by the nations they had been their home, just as much as it was the Arab residents.
There’s a narrative that Israel is just a colonial project of European Jews, but that ignores the lived experience of half the country’s Jewish population who are indigenous to the region, whose roots in the Middle East go just as deep as any other group there.
It’s absolutely right to care about Palestinian suffering, but we also need to understand the full, complicated history of this region, including the trauma and displacement of Middle Eastern Jews that rarely gets acknowledged in these conversations.
The justified anger that many people have is hypocritical if it isn't acknowledging that the crimes, the kicking out of their homes and the land stealing goes (and has gone) both ways.
Except Arab people are still welcome in the surrounding countries... Mizrahi Jews quite literally had/have nowhere else to go. They would be slaughtered if they stepped foot outside of Israel and tried to return to the homes of their grandparents and ancestors.