Exile & Diaspora

Saffuriyya: One Village, One Record

FALASTEEN editorial desk · 2026-08-08

A village is not a pin or a ruin. It is a population, a working landscape, a night whose accounts conflict, a sequence of expulsions, and a record that its people kept open.

Founding of the PLO

1964

The Palestine Liberation Organization is established in Jerusalem, creating an umbrella body that comes to represent Palestinians in exile and under occupation.

Sabra and Shatila Massacre

1982

During Israel's occupation of West Beirut, a Lebanese Phalangist militia massacres Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps over three days.

The Battle of Jenin

2002

The fiercest battle of Operation Defensive Shield leaves the heart of Jenin refugee camp in ruins — and a bitter dispute over the death toll.

The Battle of Karameh

1968

Palestinian fedayeen and the Jordanian army fight a full Israeli armored incursion at the Karameh refugee camp. The costly stand transforms Fatah into a mass movement almost overnight.

The BDS Call

2005

Over 170 Palestinian unions, refugee networks, and civil society organizations call on the world to impose boycotts, divestment, and sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law.

The Founding of Fatah

1959

A core of Palestinian refugees in Kuwait, among them Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, launches the Palestinian National Liberation Movement — announced to the world in the Beirut magazine Filastinuna.

The Great March of Return

2018

Tens of thousands of Gazans join weekly protests at the boundary fence demanding the right of return; Israeli snipers kill more than 180 demonstrators.

The Shooting of Naji al-Ali

1987

The cartoonist who drew Handala — the barefoot refugee child with his back turned — is shot in a London street. He dies five weeks before the intifada his child witness seemed to foretell.

UN General Assembly Resolution 194

1948

Adopted on 11 December 1948, resolution 194 (III) established the Conciliation Commission for Palestine and, in paragraph 11, resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, with compensation for those choosing not to return.

UN Security Council Resolution 242

1967

Adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, resolution 242 emphasised the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and called for withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent conflict. It mentioned Palestinians only once, as a refugee problem.

Al-Damun

Acre · 1948

Al-Damun was a village on the Na'amin River southeast of Acre, home of the Zayadina clan before they rose to rule the Galilee. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and razed, its people became mostly internal refugees in nearby Tamra and Kabul; its cemetery and ruined waterworks remain in the undergrowth.

Al-Ghabisiyya

Acre · 1948

Al-Ghabisiyya was a village northeast of Acre that had a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbors — yet the Carmeli Brigade attacked it anyway in May 1948. Its people fought for years in Israel's courts to return, and lost; only the mosque and cemetery remain, and villagers still pray outside the sealed mosque.

Bayt Darras

Gaza · 1948

Bayt Darras was a farming town northeast of Gaza, defended by Sudanese troops and local militiamen until the Givati Brigade overran it in May 1948. Its people fled south into the Gaza Strip, where their descendants live in refugee camps to this day.

Bayt Jibrin

Hebron · 1948

Bayt Jibrin, the Roman city of Eleutheropolis, dominated the crossroads of the southern hills until October 1948, when it was captured during Operation Yoav. Its people fled to the Hebron hills and refugee camps such as al-Fawwar and Aida; kibbutz Beit Guvrin rose on its lands.

Bayt Naqquba

Jerusalem · 1948

Bayt Naqquba was a village of 240 people on a hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway, taken early in April 1948 during Operation Nachshon. It is the one case among the depopulated villages where a new Arab village of the same name was later built nearby, and some of the refugees were allowed to live in it.

Hamama

Gaza · 1948

Hamama — 'dove' in Arabic — was one of the largest villages of the Gaza district, over five thousand people spread in a star pattern along the roads north of Gaza. Harassed from neighboring Nitzanim through early 1948 and swollen with refugees, it was occupied in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; no trace of its houses remains.

Hittin

Tiberias · 1948

Hittin stood below the Horns of Hattin, where Salah al-Din defeated the Crusader armies in 1187, eight kilometres from Tiberias. Its 1,190 Muslim inhabitants held 22,764 dunums in 1944/45. The Seventh Brigade took the village on 17 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; those who tried to return were fired on, and most ended in Lebanon. The mosque and the shrine of al-Nabi Shu'ayb still stand.

Huj

Gaza · 1948

Huj, on the northern edge of the Negev, was founded in the early nineteenth century when the governor of Gaza gave the land away free and built a police post to draw settlers to it. Many Zionist officials counted the village friendly; the Negev Brigade ordered its people out on 31 May 1948 all the same, and Benny Morris records that they were expelled westward and their houses looted and blown up. Their appeal to return that September was refused.

Iqrit

Acre · 1948

Iqrit was a Greek Catholic village in the northern Galilee whose residents left in November 1948 on the army's promise that they could return within weeks. Israel's Supreme Court ruled their evacuation illegal — but on Christmas Eve 1951 the village was demolished, and the people of Iqrit have been fighting to go home ever since.

Kafr Bir'im

Safad · 1948

Kafr Bir'im was a Maronite stone-built village in the Upper Galilee, surrounded by gardens, olive groves, and vineyards. Its people were ordered out in November 1948 on a promise of return; instead the village was bombed in 1953, and only its church and bell tower still stand above the ruins.

Khirbat al-Lawz

Jerusalem · 1948

Khirbat al-Lawz was a village of 450 people on a ridge eleven kilometres west of Jerusalem, its vineyards, olives and almonds terraced down the slope below. The Har'el Brigade took it on 13–14 July 1948 and went on turning refugees back for months afterwards. The forest planted over it is dedicated to Moshe Dayan.

Lifta

Jerusalem · 1948

Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.

Lubya

Tiberias · 1948

Lubya, one of the largest villages of the Tiberias district, stood on a rocky hill over the Nazareth road and twice beat back attacks before its people fled the fall of Nazareth in July 1948. Its ruins lie under the JNF's Lavi and South Africa pine forests — a landscape of erasure that refugee historians have made one of the best-documented of any village.

Mi'ar

Acre · 1948

Mi'ar stood on a rocky hill at the eastern tip of the Acre plain, seventeen and a half kilometres from the city, and had already been dynamited once — by two British battalions on 26 October 1938, during the Great Revolt. It was rebuilt. Ilan Pappé records that on 20 June 1948 Israeli troops entered the village, shot at its people as they worked their fields and killed forty; the survivors returned and stayed until the Seventh Brigade reoccupied Mi'ar in mid-July during Operation Dekel. Its refugees live in Kabul, Sha'ab and 'Arraba in quarters named Mi'ari after the village.

Saffuriyya

Nazareth · 1948

Saffuriyya was the largest village of the Nazareth district — a place layered over ancient Sepphoris — until it was bombed and occupied in July 1948. Its people scattered to Nazareth and to refugee camps in Lebanon; the moshav of Zippori and an archaeological park now occupy its lands.

Sha'ab

Acre · 1948

Sha'ab's buildings survived 1948, but that did not mean its people simply remained. The 1945 village statistics estimated 1,740 residents. Israeli forces entered on 18 July; Palestinian fighters retook the village within two days, and it lay between the front lines until Operation Hiram at the end of October. Israeli authorities then blocked most villagers' return and declared Sha'ab a closed military area in 1951. Some returned over time, but most remained refugees inside and outside the country.

Tall al-Safi

Hebron · 1948

Tall al-Safi stood on a mound above the plain that had been inhabited since the third millennium BC and was still inhabited in 1948, when 1,290 people lived there. The Giv'ati Brigade was ordered to take it and to expel the refugees camped around it; the order was carried out on 9–10 July 1948.

Balata Camp

Nablus, West Bank

Laid out in 1950 on rented farmland east of Nablus for 4,484 refugees, Balata became the most crowded refugee camp in the West Bank — a quarter square kilometre holding the descendants of some 111 destroyed towns and villages, and the place where organised refugee-rights politics in the West Bank began.

Bir al-Saba

Naqab (Negev)

Bir al-Saba — Beersheba, the 'well of the seven' — was the Ottomans' planned capital of the Naqab and the market town of its Bedouin tribes until October 1948, when the town fell and most of the Naqab's people were driven into exile. The wells remain; so does the Bedouin struggle for the land around them.

Deir al-Balah

Gaza Strip

Deir al-Balah — the 'Monastery of Dates' — grew around a fourth-century monastery on the ancient coast road, hid a Bronze Age cemetery beneath its soil, and after 1948 became town and refugee camp together in the narrow heart of the Gaza Strip.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

Haifa

Haifa Bay, northern coast

Haifa grew under the Mandate into Palestine's great industrial port, a mixed Arab-Jewish city climbing Mount Carmel — until April 1948 emptied most of its Palestinian neighborhoods by sea. Kanafani's Returning to Haifa made it the literature's city of return.

Jabalia

Gaza Strip

Jabalia, the market town on the rise northeast of Gaza City, became after 1948 the site of the largest refugee camp in the Strip; the first intifada began in its alleys in December 1987, and the war since 2023 has returned to it again and again.

Jenin

Northern West Bank

Jenin guarded the pass to the Jezreel plain for millennia, defied the British in the 1936 revolt, and held off Israel in June 1948; its refugee camp, born of the Nakba, fought the army for ten days in April 2002. The raids still come. The memory holds.

Jerash Camp (Gaza Camp)

Jerash, Jordan

Built in March 1968 for 11,500 Palestinians driven out of Gaza in the June war, Jerash camp is known in Jordan simply as the Gaza Camp. Nearly nine in ten of its residents come from the Gaza Strip — and unlike other Palestinians in Jordan, they hold no citizenship, which has made it the poorest camp in the kingdom.

Jericho

Jordan Valley, West Bank

Jericho — Ariha, the city of palms, some 250 metres below the sea — has lived beside its spring for roughly ten thousand years, longer perhaps than any city on earth. In living memory its valley twice filled with refugees; the camps of 1948, Aqabat Jabr and Ein as-Sultan, are still there.

Khan Younis

Gaza Strip

Khan Younis began in 1387 as a Mamluk caravanserai on the Egypt road and grew into the Gaza district's second town; 1948 made its refugee camp one of the Strip's largest, November 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the war since 2023 has left much of the city in ruins.

Nablus

Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank

Nablus — Roman Flavia Neapolis, nestled between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal — is the northern West Bank's proud commercial heart, famed for its Old City, its olive-oil soap and its knafeh, and shadowed by Balata, the West Bank's most populous refugee camp.

Nahr el-Bared Camp

North Lebanon

Lebanon's second-largest Palestinian camp, founded in December 1949 for refugees from the Galilee, was destroyed in 2007 in four months of fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. Nearly 6,000 homes and businesses were wrecked or badly damaged, and the camp has still not been fully rebuilt.

Qalandiya

Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank

One name, four things: a village of about a thousand people, a refugee camp of 16,344 registered refugees, an airport that was Jerusalem's and is now a military camp, and the busiest checkpoint in the West Bank. Ninety-eight per cent of the village's land is Area C; the wall isolates 59 per cent of it.

Rafah

Gaza Strip

Rafah is ancient Raphia, the border town where armies have met since the pharaohs; 1948 filled it with refugees, 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the 2024 assault on the city — then sheltering over a million displaced people — was ordered halted by the International Court of Justice.

Safed

Upper Galilee

Safed — Safad, the city on the hill — was a Galilee town of mystics, weavers and rebels until May 1948, when nearly all of its roughly ten thousand Palestinians fled or were driven out as the town fell. Its stone Arab quarter survives as an artists' colony, and its refugees carry Safad with them still.

Shatila Camp

Beirut, Lebanon

A tent pitched on Beirut's outskirts by one man from Majd al-Kroum in 1949 became the camp whose name the world learned in September 1982. Shatila is the densest Palestinian camp in Lebanon: barely 70,000 square metres, destroyed twice, rebuilt vertically, and now shared with Syrians, Lebanese and migrant workers.

Sheikh Jarrah

Occupied East Jerusalem

Two kilometres north of the Old City, on the road that becomes the road to Ramallah: the quarter of Jerusalem's Muslim notables, and the place where refugee families rehoused by Jordan and UNRWA in 1956 have been evicted a second time — under an Israeli law that lets Jews reclaim pre-1948 property in East Jerusalem while denying Palestinians the equivalent right inside Israel.

Shu'fat

Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem

A village on the ridge north of Jerusalem, on the Ramallah road, swept inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967 — and then cut in half by the wall. Shu'fat holds the only refugee camp inside that boundary: 16,419 registered refugees on 0.203 square kilometres, holding Jerusalem residency, paying Jerusalem taxes, and crossing a checkpoint to reach the city they legally live in.

Tulkarm

West Bank

Tulkarm — the 'Mount of the Vineyard' — was the market town where the Samarian hills meet the coastal plain, until the 1949 armistice line took most of its fields; its refugee camp is among the largest in the West Bank, and its streets have known every army of the last century.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Dalal Nassar

Julis

An 84-year-old refugee from Julis recalls walking to Gaza as a girl during the 1948 exodus and the humiliation of the first years in tents at Deir al-Balah.

Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif

Julis

A 91-year-old survivor from Julis, in the Gaza district, recalls his family's expulsion in 1948 and a lifetime in the refugee camps of Bureij and Nuseirat.

Omar Abedelal

Burayr

A nine-year-old when Burayr was besieged and depopulated in 1948, he recalls the farmland his family had worked for generations and the return they never stopped expecting.

Ouda Salem Ouda Abu Haddaf

A village near Beer al-Sabe, Naqab

A Bedouin survivor from the Naqab, born in 1936, describes the 1948 attack on his village and the chain of displacements that ended in the refugee camps of Gaza.

Salwa Naser

Jaffa

Six years old when her family left Jaffa by boat in 1948, and a refugee for the second time in 2012 when the war in Syria destroyed her home in Damascus.

Umm Omar

Jusayr, Gaza district

Eight years old when her family was expelled from Jusayr in 1948; she has lived in Jabaliya refugee camp ever since.

Wajiha al-Harsh

Jaffa

An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.

Zakaria Elnatour

al-Sumayriyya

A refugee from al-Sumayriyya, between Acre and Nahariya, describes the 1948 capture of his village and his family's flight to Lebanon and Syria, in a letter to a Jewish student.

Fadi al-Wahidi

Al Jazeera cameraman

Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by Israeli fire while filming near Jabalia refugee camp, leaving him paralyzed; Israel blocked his medical evacuation for 122 days despite appeals from UN experts, before he was finally evacuated to Egypt on February 8, 2025.

Khaled Nabhan

Grandfather whose farewell to his slain granddaughter became a symbol of Gaza's grief

Khaled Nabhan, 54, known worldwide as the grandfather who cradled his granddaughter Reem Ali Khalil Badwan and called her 'the soul of my soul,' was himself killed in an Israeli strike on Nuseirat refugee camp on 16 December 2024.

Razan al-Najjar

Volunteer paramedic during Gaza's Great March of Return

Razan al-Najjar, 21, a volunteer medic treating protesters at the Gaza boundary fence, was fatally shot by Israeli fire as she stood with fellow medics about 25 meters from the fence in her medical uniform; a B'Tselem investigation concluded she was deliberately targeted, and spatial analysis commissioned by The New York Times traced the shot to a sniper's position at the fence.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi

Pediatrician and co-founder of Hamas, killed three weeks after succeeding Ahmed Yassin · 1947–2004

The pediatrician from Yibna, a refugee at six months old, who was one of the seven founders of Hamas in 1987, spokesman of the Marj al-Zuhur deportees, and was killed by Israeli missiles on 17 April 2004, twenty-six days after succeeding Ahmed Yassin.

Abu Ali Mustafa

Secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine · 1938–2001

Mustafa al-Zabri, the peasant's son who spent five years in a desert prison and thirty-two in exile, returned in 1999 to lead the PFLP and was killed by an Israeli missile in his Ramallah office.

Edward W. Said

Literary critic and public intellectual · 1935–2003

The Jerusalem-born critic whose Orientalism remade the study of empire, and who spent three decades arguing that Palestinians were owed what he called permission to narrate.

Elias Sanbar

Historian, translator, and diplomat · 1947–

Carried out of Haifa as an infant in 1948, he became the historian of Palestinian photography, Darwish's French translator, and Palestine's ambassador to UNESCO.

Emily Jacir

Artist · 1970–

Artist who used her American passport to carry out the errands Palestinians were not permitted to make themselves, and who sewed the names of 418 destroyed villages into a refugee tent.

Fathi Shaqaqi

Physician and founder of the Islamic Jihad Movement, assassinated in Malta in 1995 · 1951–1995

The physician from Rafah refugee camp, son of a family expelled from Zarnuqa, who founded the Islamic Jihad Movement and was shot dead by Mossad agents on the island of Malta on 26 October 1995.

Ghassan Kanafani

Novelist, editor of al-Hadaf, and spokesman of the PFLP · 1936–1972

One of the great Arabic novelists of the century and the Popular Front's spokesman, killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 with his niece Lamis.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

Political scientist · 1929–2001

He left Jaffa on the last ship out of the port in May 1948, built Arab-American scholarship in the United States for four decades, then returned to teach at Birzeit and be buried at home.

Intissar al-Wazir (Umm Jihad)

First woman member of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority's first minister of social affairs · 1941–

The Gaza City militant who became Fatah's first woman member in 1959, built the PLO's institutions for the families of martyrs and prisoners, survived her husband Khalil al-Wazir's assassination beside her in Tunis, and returned from decades of exile as minister of social affairs.

Juliano Mer-Khamis

Actor and founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin · 1958–2011

Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.

Kamal Boullata

Painter and art historian · 1942–2019

A Jerusalem painter locked out of his city by the 1967 war, who built an abstraction out of Kufic script and the eight-pointed star, and wrote the first full history of Palestinian art.

Leila Khaled

PFLP political bureau member and hijacker of 1969 and 1970 · 1944–

Driven from Haifa at four, she hijacked two airliners for the PFLP in 1969 and 1970 and has sat on the front's political bureau since 2005.

Mona Hatoum

Installation and video artist · 1952–

Palestinian-British artist whose installations turn familiar objects into unsettling meditations on displacement, the body, and systems of control.

Naji al-Ali

Political cartoonist, creator of Handala · c. 1938–1987

The Arab world's most beloved political cartoonist, whose barefoot child Handala became the conscience of Palestine.

Omar Barghouti

Co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement

The human rights defender who co-founded the BDS movement in 2005 after a year of consultations across Palestinian society, and has lived under an Israeli travel ban and judicial harassment for leading its nonviolent campaign ever since.

Razan al-Najjar

Volunteer paramedic · 1996–2018

A 21-year-old volunteer paramedic from Khan Younis, shot dead by an Israeli sniper while tending to wounded protesters in Gaza in 2018.

Reem Kelani

Singer, music researcher, and broadcaster · 1963–

Palestinian-British singer and researcher who has spent three decades collecting, reviving, and performing traditional Palestinian song, blending it with jazz.

Rosemary Sayigh

Anthropologist and oral historian · 1927–

For half a century she recorded Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's camps in their own words, arguing that a people's history had to be built from below or it would not be built at all.

Salman Abu Sitta

Engineer and cartographer of the Nakba · 1937–

Civil engineer turned mapmaker, who spent decades reconstructing the villages, land holdings, and place names of pre-1948 Palestine into an atlas and a register of the depopulated.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

Founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, assassinated in Gaza in 2004 · 1936–2004

The quadriplegic refugee preacher from al-Jura who founded Hamas in December 1987 and was killed by Israeli helicopter missiles as he left dawn prayers in Gaza on 22 March 2004.

George Abraham

A Palestinian American poet of diaspora, queerness, and survival, Abraham writes in the space between languages — "for yesterday & her inherited traumas."

Ghassan Kanafani

1936–1972

A pioneering voice of Palestinian resistance literature, Kanafani wove journalism, fiction, and political commitment into a single moral project.

Ghayath al-Madhoun

1979–

A Palestinian poet of two exiles — his family fled Palestine for Syria, and war later drove him from Damascus to Stockholm — al-Madhoun writes prose poems of siege, asylum, and a longing with the mass of Einstein's equations.

Hala Alyan

1986–

Poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist, Alyan maps the Palestinian diaspora in verse and prose alike — inheritance, exile, and the daily work of rebuilding a self.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Poet, essayist, and translator whose "Running Orders" carried Gaza's summer of 2014 around the world — and whose later collections made her one of the most honored Palestinian poets writing in English.

Mahmoud Darwish

1941–2008

The national poet of Palestine, Darwish turned exile, memory, and resistance into some of the most widely read Arabic poetry of the modern era.

Mourid Barghouti

1944–2021

Poet of exile and return, Barghouti turned the absurdities and griefs of displacement into luminous, ironic prose and verse.

Naomi Shihab Nye

1952–

A Palestinian-American poet of tenderness and attention, Nye writes of her father's lost Palestine and of the small exchanges that keep people human.

Rashid Hussein

1936–1977

Poet, journalist, and translator between Arabic and Hebrew, who wrote of a country turned into prisons and died alone in a New York apartment at forty.

Samih al-Qasim

1939–2014

A Druze Palestinian poet of resistance, al-Qasim wrote of steadfastness and belonging from his village in the Galilee, refusing both exile and conscription.

Suheir Hammad

1973–

Born to Palestinian refugee parents and raised on Brooklyn hip-hop, Hammad built a poetry of dispossession and defiance — from "First Writing Since" to the American Book Award–winning breaking poems.

I Can't Attend

Ghayath al-Madhoun · 2014

The exile's litany of excuses: a Palestinian poet safe in Stockholm explains — with black humor and survivor's guilt — why the road between his poem and Damascus is cut off.

Midnight

Mourid Barghouti · 2005

Barghouti's book-length poem keeps a man awake on New Year's Eve as memory, war, and grief pour through his window — and still insists that he was born for joy.

Without a Passport

Rashid Hussein

Born without a passport, the poet watches his country turn into prisons — and answers by planting a country, a sun, and wheat inside every house.

A Long Walk from Gaza

Asmaa Alatawna · 2024

A coming-of-age novel about a girl seeking freedom from occupation, patriarchy, and the estrangement of exile.

After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives

Edward W. Said · 1986

A meditative collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr — part essay, part portrait — on the fragmented everyday existence of Palestinians at home and in exile.

Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993

Yezid Sayigh · 1997

The standard history of the Palestinian national movement, built on the PLO's own archives and more than four hundred interviews — how a movement of exiles built a state before it had a country.

Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad · 2023

An actress returns to Palestine and joins a West Bank production of Hamlet — a novel about family, performance, and the work of making art under occupation.

I Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti · 1997

A poet crosses the Allenby Bridge home after thirty years of exile — the most beloved Palestinian memoir of return.

In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish · 2011

Darwish's late self-elegy — a prose-poetic autobiography in which the poet addresses his younger self across a life of exile and return.

Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir

Salman Abu Sitta · 2016

The engineer who mapped every depopulated village of Palestine, on how a ten-year-old expelled from the Beersheba district spent a lifetime turning loss into cartography.

Men in the Sun

Ghassan Kanafani · 1963

Three Palestinians suffocate in a water tanker crossing the desert toward Kuwait — the defining novella of Palestinian exile.

Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa · 2006

A multi-generational family saga from a village near Acre to the Jenin refugee camp — the novel that brought the Palestinian story to millions of readers worldwide.

Returning to Haifa

Ghassan Kanafani · 1969

A Palestinian couple return to their Haifa home after 1967 and find their son — raised as an Israeli soldier — behind its door.

Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 2017

A sweeping debut novel following three generations of a Palestinian family from Nablus to Kuwait, Beirut, Paris, and Boston — winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

Rosemary Sayigh · 1979

A people's history of the Nakba and the camps built out of the testimony of the people who lived it — the book that put Palestinian refugees in Lebanon on the record in their own words.

Water to Water: Gaza Renga

Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi · 2025

Two poets answer one another across distance in a book-length call-and-response shaped by Gaza, exile, and shared witness.

Edward Said: The Question of Palestine

Edward Said

Palestine is a state of mind, a place of exile and longing, and a territory that has been the site of successive dispossessions.

Malcolm X in Gaza and "Zionist Logic"

Malcolm X

Days after walking through the refugee camps of Gaza, Malcolm X set down his analysis of Zionism as a new form of colonialism.

The Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS

Palestinian civil society organizations

These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.

The Palestinian National Liberation Movement

Fatah · founded 1959 (core group formed in Kuwait, autumn 1957)

Founded by refugee engineers and teachers working in Kuwait on one inverted premise: that the liberation of Palestine is the road to Arab unity, and not the other way round. It took over the PLO in 1969, renounced armed struggle at Algiers in 1988, signed at Oslo in 1993, and has governed the Palestinian Authority ever since.

The Abu Ghazaleh family

Jaffa · 20th century to present

A Jaffa mercantile family scattered by 1948 — oil dealers and ice makers whose ten-year-old son Talal walked out of the city a refugee and built the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization in exile, spending a career insisting that the record show his birthplace as Jaffa.

The Abu Khdeir family

Shu'fat, Jerusalem · Documented in Shu'fat's own records; prominent since the 20th century

One of the principal hamayil of Shu'fat, the village on the ridge north of Jerusalem — named as such by the town's own services committee. In July 2014 two of its children, one from Shu'fat and one from Tampa, Florida, made the family's name known everywhere: Mohammed Abu Khdeir, sixteen, was seized near his home and burned alive; his cousin Tariq was beaten unconscious by Israeli police at a protest the next day.

The Khatib family

Jerusalem / Hebron · 20th century

A 'prominent land-owning Hebron and East Jerusalemite family' that gave East Jerusalem two Jordanian-era mayors: Anwar al-Khatib, who governed the Old City for seventeen years, and Ruhi al-Khatib, who never accepted his dismissal by Israel and carried the title of mayor in exile until his death.

Handala

symbol

Naji al-Ali's barefoot refugee child, back turned to the viewer, who has watched over Palestinian political cartoons since 1969.

Keys of Return

symbol

The house keys carried out of Palestine in 1948, passed down through refugee generations as deeds to homes and to memory.

Laylat al-Henna

tradition

The women's night before a Palestinian wedding — henna ground and mixed, patterns worked onto the bride's hands, and the songs that go with it.

Maftoul

cuisine

Palestinian couscous, rolled by hand between the palms from bulgur and wheat flour — a grain that has to be made by somebody, and so is made in kitchens from Jenin to Kuwait to Amman.

Nakba Day

tradition

Fifteen May: the day Palestinians everywhere stop and count what was lost. Marked informally from 1949, made national in 1998, and mandated by the UN General Assembly for the first time in 2022.

Palestinian Hip-Hop

music

Rap in Arabic, from Lydda to London — a generation that took the newest available form and used it to keep the oldest available thing, the language.

The Embroidery Cooperatives

craft

The societies — In'ash al-Usra in al-Bireh, In'aash al-Mukhayyam in Beirut — that turned tatreez from a village skill into paid work, and in doing so kept it being taught.

Absentees' Property Law (1950)

legal

An Israeli law that vested the homes, land, and assets of Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war in a state Custodian, becoming the main legal instrument by which Israel took possession of Palestinian refugee property.

Custodian of Absentee Property

legal

The Israeli office in which the property of Palestinian refugees vests under the Absentees' Property Law — an administrator rather than a decree, empowered to certify a person absent, to hold everything they owned, and to sell it on to a state Development Authority.

Fellahin

society

The peasant cultivators who made up the large majority of Palestine's population before 1948 — the class whose villages were destroyed in the Nakba, and whose dress, food, songs and calendar became, in exile, the national culture.

Infiltrator

legal

Mistanen — the Hebrew legal and military term applied from 1948 onward to Palestinians who crossed back toward the villages and towns they had been displaced from. The word converted a refugee's attempt to go home into a security offence, and the policy built on it was the practical bar to return in the years the question might still have been settled.

Nakba

history

The Nakba — Arabic for 'catastrophe' — is the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel, when more than 700,000 Palestinians, over half of Palestine's Arab population, fled or were expelled from their homes and were never permitted to return.

Other Registered Persons (UNRWA)

legal

The second of UNRWA's two registration categories: people the agency serves who do not meet all of its Palestine Refugee criteria and are therefore not counted in the official registered refugee figure — a bookkeeping line that is routinely misread as a statement about who is or is not a refugee.

Palestine Refugee

society

A Palestine refugee, in UNRWA's working definition, is a person whose normal place of residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war. Descendants are also eligible for registration; today some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are registered with the agency.

Right of Return

legal

The right of return is the principle that Palestinians displaced in 1948, and their descendants, are entitled to return to their homes — affirmed for the 1948 refugees by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed by the Assembly nearly every year since.

Arabs have 22 countries; Palestinians can just go live in one of them

rhetoric

Self-determination is the right of each people in its own country, not an interchangeable commodity by language group — the UN recognized the Palestinian people's inalienable rights, including return to their homes, in Resolution 3236 (XXIX) of 1974, and no state would accept the same argument for itself.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, with equal rights for all citizens

legal

Palestinian citizens of Israel do vote, but the state's own laws document a different structure: automatic immigration rights for Jews only (Law of Return, 1950), confiscation of refugee property (Absentees' Property Law, 1950), a 2018 Basic Law reserving national self-determination 'unique to the Jewish people,' and over 65 laws Adalah classifies as discriminatory.

The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity — they always reject peace

history

The Palestine National Council accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian statehood on 15 November 1988, an offer to settle on 22 per cent of historic Palestine; the Arab Peace Initiative of 28 March 2002 offered Israel, from every Arab state, an end to the conflict and 'normal relations' in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a 'just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 (III).' Both stood unanswered. Meanwhile the settler population Israel maintains in the occupied territory reached about 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem by 2023.

The refugees could have gone home after the war; nobody stopped them

history

Return was blocked by decision and by demolition. Major General Avraham Tamir described the policy in a recorded interview later sealed by Israel's Defence Ministry: 'Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won't have anywhere to return to... within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There's no place to return to.' The Absentees' Property Law of 1950 then vested the refugees' land, homes and bank accounts in a state Custodian, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, which resolved that refugees wishing to return 'should be permitted to do so,' has never been implemented.

There is no Palestinian right of return

legal

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace 'should be permitted to do so,' and the right to return to one's own country is also codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 13(2)) and the binding ICCPR (Art. 12(4)).

"Anyone else struggling with work-genocide balance?" — Gaza, and the people watching it from outside

Federica Cavazzoni, Ala' Mustafa, Cindy Sousa, Ola H Abuward, Mona Ameen Nofal and Guido Veronese, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

Thirty testimonies collected between November 2023 and June 2024 — fifteen from people in the Gaza Strip and fifteen from mental health professionals in Europe — in the only peer-reviewed study this archive has found that puts the experience of living the catastrophe and the experience of watching it in the same frame, in that order.

An Australian cohort, and how thin this evidence base still is

Susan J Rees, Tyson Whitten, Alvin Kuowei Tay, Aino Suomi, Batool Moussa, Fatima Hassoun, Nawal Nadar and Derrick Silove, The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific

A prospective cohort of 410 women in Australia, assessed before and during the war, finding significantly greater increases in panic-disorder symptoms, and poorer quality of life, among those connected to Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian territories. It is the only prospective before-and-after design this archive could locate — and the near-absence of anything measuring Palestinians specifically is itself the finding.

BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

BADIL

Founded in 1998 in Bethlehem, BADIL defends the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons, with a legal focus on residency, return, property restitution, and the right of return under international law.

Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest) — Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

A free, bilingual interactive encyclopedia from the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Palestinian Museum, tracing modern Palestinian history through thousands of chronology entries, biographies, documents, and village profiles rooted in refugee and Nakba memory.

Norwegian Refugee Council — Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance (ICLA), Palestine

Norwegian Refugee Council

NRC's legal-aid programme in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza: free information, counselling and representation on housing, land and property — demolition, eviction and confiscation orders, access restrictions, and documentation.

Palestine Remembered — Nakba Oral History Project and village memory

Palestine Remembered

A long-running, non-commercial website documenting Palestine's depopulated villages, whose Nakba Oral History Project publishes hundreds of recorded interviews with refugees who witnessed the events of 1948 firsthand.

Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) — Nakba testimony at the American University of Beirut

Palestinian Oral History Archive, American University of Beirut

A searchable digital archive at the American University of Beirut holding more than 1,000 hours of audio and video testimony recorded with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, drawn from over 150 uprooted villages and communities.

The Nakba Archive — filmed testimony of 1948 refugees in Lebanon

The Nakba Archive

A grassroots oral history collective founded in Lebanon in 2002 that has filmed more than 650 video interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees about life before 1948 and the expulsions that made them refugees.

The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive — a people's archive of memory and testimony

The Palestinian Museum

The open digital archive of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, preserving photographs, documents, film, and audio contributed by Palestinian families and institutions in Palestine and the diaspora — a bottom-up record spanning more than two centuries.

UNRWA — UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees

UNRWA

Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, UNRWA provides education, health care, and relief to millions of registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Zochrot — testimony and remembering projects on the Nakba

Zochrot

An Israeli organization, founded in 2002, that documents the Nakba for a Hebrew-speaking audience through refugee testimony, tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, and filmed interviews with both displaced Palestinians and Israeli veterans of 1948.

BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

BADIL Resource Center, Bethlehem · document

The reference source on Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons since 1998: the recurring worldwide survey that produces the standing global figures, position papers on forcible transfer and population policy, annual reports back to 1999, and a public library.

Eltaher.org — The Mohamed Ali Eltaher Archive

The Eltaher family and the website's editorial team · press

The surviving papers, newspapers, books, correspondence and photographs of the Palestinian journalist Mohamed Ali Eltaher, covering Near Eastern and North African politics from 1912 to 1974 — a single exile's archive, published by his family.

PalestineRemembered.com

PalestineRemembered.com, a volunteer-run diaspora project since 1999 · oral-history

Over 700 filmed Nakba oral history interviews and more than 3,500 hours of recording, organised village by village across the eighteen districts of Mandate Palestine, with photographs, maps and satellite placemarks for the destroyed towns.

The Nakba Archive

The Nakba Archive collective, founded in Lebanon in 2002 · oral-history

Over 500 video interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, from more than 150 villages and towns, recorded by refugees from the camps themselves; the Arabic originals are catalogued through the Palestinian Oral History Archive at AUB.

The UNRWA Photo and Film Archive

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East · photographic

More than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 videocassettes recording Palestine refugee life from 1948 onward — inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2009.

Zochrot

Zochrot Organization, Haifa · oral-history

An Israeli organisation that documents the Nakba in Hebrew for a Hebrew-reading public: an interactive Nakba map of destroyed localities, a testimonies archive, a refugee camp map, a historical map archive, and the iReturn app.

The Poets of Exile

A people carried by its poems

From Darwish's identity card to Alareer's kite — how Palestinian poets turned dispossession into some of the most enduring verse of the modern era.