(An edited version of this article, “The Post erases nearly 1 million Jews from history,” appeared as an Feb. 3, 2016 online Op-ed in The Washington Jewish Week)

In an act more reminiscent of magician Harry Houdini than a major U.S. newspaper, The Washington Post omitted—and refused to correct—nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab lands in its infographic “A visual guide to 75 years of major refugee crises around the world” (Dec. 21, 2015).

The graphic, claiming to provide a “brief guide to the major refugee events in recent history,” offers short descriptions of various refugee crises throughout the last 75 years. The displacement of persons from World War II to the ongoing Syrian civil war are noted as “major” events. Inexplicably, the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees who fled Arab lands in the Middle East and North Africa in the period following Israel’s War for Independence seemingly does not qualify.

No mention is made of the plight of Jews forced to flee countries or territories, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Aden (now part of Yemen).

Ron Prosor, Israel’s immediate past ambassador to the United Nations, has written, “At the end of World War II, 850,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. Just 8,500 remain today. Their departure was no accident. After Arab leaders failed to annihilate Israel militarily in 1948, they launched a war of terror, incitement, and expulsion to decimate their ancient Jewish communities.”

“In Iraq [,] Jewish businessman Shafiq Adas, then the country’s wealthiest citizen, was immediately arrested on trumped-up charges and publicly lynched. This was followed by bombings targeting Jewish institutions, arbitrary arrest of Jewish leaders, and massive government seizures of property. Within years virtually all of Iraq’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community had fled….Similar scenes played out across the region, from Egypt to Syria to Libya to Yemen…. The total area of land confiscated from Jews in Arab countries amounts to nearly 40,000 square miles—about five times the size of Israel’s entire land mass (“The Middle East’s Greatest Untold Story,” Huffington Post, July 5, 2012).”

An estimated 586,000 of these Jewish refugees settled in Israel, at great expense to the Jewish state and without any offer of recompensation by the Arab countries who, like Nazi Germany less than a decade before, seized not only their real estate but their businesses and personal belongings as well (Myths and Facts, Mitchell Bard, 2006).

The Post claims to examine. For example, Iraqi Jews fled after the June 1, 1941 Farhud (Arabic for violent dispossession) that left an estimated 700 Jews in Baghdad The Jerusalem Post, June 6, 2011). As a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report noted, prior to the expulsion “Jews made up about one in three” of Baghdad’s population—but by 1952 only 2,000 of the city’s 150,000 Jews were left. Some large-scale Jewish immigration from some Middle Eastern countries even predated Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—but still falls under the periodclaims to examine. For example, Iraqi Jews fled after the June 1, 1941 Nazi-inspired pogrom known as the(Arabic for violent dispossession) that left an estimated 700 Jews in Baghdad dead (“Recounting ‘Farhud’ that ended 2,400 years of Iraqi Jewry,”, June 6, 2011). As a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report noted, prior to the expulsion “Jews made up about one in three” of Baghdad’s population—but by 1952 only 2,000 of the city’s 150,000 Jews were left.

If Post doesn’t report it, it didn’t happen?

None of this appears in The Post’s infographic—which manages to note other crises of similarly tragic but smaller proportions, such as the displacement of 150,000 Tutsis from Rwanda to Burundi, Congo and Uganda between 1960-64.

In March 2014, the government of Canada officially recognized “the experience of Jewish refugees who were displaced from states in the Middle East and North Africa” after the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development compiled an investigatory report on the subject. Information about the Jewish expulsion from Arab lands has been and is widely available. Just not in The Washington Post.

While the Jewish flight from Arab countries is erased by The Post’s infographic, an inflated figure for Palestinian Arab refugees from what became Israel is given to readers. The paper claims that 750,000 “Palestinians from newly established Israel” went to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon between 1948 and 1950.

However, the difference between the last census by the British, the ruling power in the U.N.’s Palestine Mandate, in 1945 and the first official census by Israel in 1949 leaves an estimated figure of 650,000 Arabs who became refugees after Arab states rejected the 1947 U.N. Palestine partition plan and declared war on the fledgling Jewish state in 1948. A 1949 report by the U.N. Mediator on Palestine reached an even lower figure: 472,000.

Although the United Nations Refugee Works Administration (UNRWA), the agency tasked with Palestinian Arab refugee management, provided much larger figures of Palestinian Arab refugees in subsequent years, it also includes the descendants of refugees in its classification. This runs counter to the U.N.’s own definition of the term, as expressed in its 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. UNRWA has also admitted that its own figures are unreliable.

In his Huffington Post commentary written before the current Syrian refugee crisis, Amb. Prosor said that “forging a peaceful future in the Middle East will require Arab governments to finally learn the lessons of their past. They must build inclusive societies that protect minorities….The first steps towards true pluralism will come when Arab countries acknowledge the history of persecution and intolerance in their own lands.”

By omitting the story of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, displaced as victims of intolerance and persecution and spurning two requests from CAMERA for correction, The Washington Post helps push a narrative that erases the history, and possible future, of a more pluralistic Middle East.