Many Israelis, or members of their families, arrived in modern Israel under terrible, complicated, or what must have felt like impossible circumstances. Tens of thousands of Teimanim, Yemenite Jews, were brought to Israel through Operation On Wings of Eagles, commonly called Operation Magic Carpet, in 1949 and 1950 after a period that had included the 1947 Aden pogrom and longstanding pressure upon Jewish communities in Yemen. 

Thousands of Beta Israel came from Ethiopia through Operation Moses in the 1980s, followed by more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews airlifted during Operation Solomon in 1991 as the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam collapsed. Other Israeli families had lived in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine long before the establishment of the modern state. Others came from places where forced conversion, antisemitism, pogroms or political violence made Israel a place of safety, while still others made aliyah from the enormous global Jewish diaspora for reasons that were less immediately desperate.

And, of course, there are the descendants of victims and survivors of the Shoah, the Holocaust, a genocide with no past or present equivalent.

Historians have to care about the why of migration because movement on a map tells only part of the story. Passenger lists and immigration records are exceptionally useful for establishing who went where, on what date, aboard which ship, and occasionally with how much luggage or money. They are much less useful for telling us what made somebody leave home. A person fleeing a pogrom or genocide and another seeking a university education might both appear under the same bureaucratic category of immigrant. 

An Ethiopian Jew carried out through an Israeli rescue operation and an American Jew making voluntary aliyah decades later have both moved to Israel, and a Palestinian refugee to Syria and Ukrainian Jew moving to New York City may be immigrants, but their histories must not be conflated and cannot be equally understood by treating the movement itself as the interesting fact.

America250 makes the same problem difficult to avoid in the United States. Americans have arrived because of religious persecution, war, poverty, political repression, educational opportunity, economic ambition and restrictions imposed upon women in societies from which they wanted to escape. Millions of other Americans descend from people who were transported into the country against their will as enslaved human beings in a vicious transatlantic trade that sold humans for centuries. 

Before any European power could issue a land grant, negotiate a treaty or draw a territorial boundary, North America was already inhabited by complex Indigenous societies whose populations, landholdings, languages and political independence were devastated by conquest, disease, forced removal and the expansionist ideology later called Manifest Destiny.

National stories usually become easier to tell when some of that is edited out.

Fiction can participate in the editing. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is an obvious example of a novel built so thoroughly around an ideological worldview that treating........

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