His father had died before he was born, and his mother owned a small hotel in Midelt. No one was touched. Despite such acts of support and a history of tolerance by Morocco's monarchy, fear of Arab reprisals over the Arab-Israeli conflict was in the air. Jews began to sell their property and to emigrate, Attias said. Historians have argued over whether the Jews of Morocco and other Arab countries jumped to Israel or were pushed.
Evidence supports both views.
There's no question that David Ben Gurion and other Israeli leaders in those days felt a great urgent need to bring in more people to increase the Jewish population in Israel, and that happened as a result of the Holocaust, said Tom Segev, a leading Israeli historian. Prior to the Holocaust, no one thought of the Jews of Arab countries. They were merely the subject of folkloristic interest. As a result of the Holocaust, the potential of the population which the founding fathers of the Zionist movement looked to was gone. There is a page in Ben Gurion's diary that looks like the page of some accountant on which he calculates where are the Jews, what countries they are in, and can we bring them in.