Where were palestines expected to live when the land was taken away from them?
Executive summary
When Palestinian land was seized during the 1948 war, most Palestinians were expected—by circumstance, policy and contingency plans—to live as refugees in nearby Arab territory: the West Bank and Gaza, refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and in some cases remaining as Arab citizens inside the new Israeli state; proposals also existed to resettle Gaza Palestinians in Sinai or other third countries, though these plans were contested and largely failed [1] Palestine/Palestine-and-the-Palestinians-1948-67" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[2] [3]. Historians dispute whether that dispersal was the outcome of a pre‑planned transfer or the chaotic result of war and local expulsions, and those disagreements shape competing narratives about where Palestinians were “expected” to live [4] [5] [6].
1. The immediate destinations: West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab states
By the end of the 1948 conflict, roughly 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled and the bulk settled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or crossed into Jordan, Lebanon and Syria—often into hastily established refugee camps that remain politically central to the Palestinian question [7] [1] [2]. Contemporary accounts and UN records show many refugees clustered in camps near border crossings and cities in those neighbouring states, creating long‑term, transnational refugee populations administered in large part by UNRWA [1] [8].
2. Refugee camps as the de facto plan for displaced populations
Where “expected to live” becomes practical policy is visible in the creation of refugee camps and the international apparatus to manage them: UNRWA set up camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza to provide shelter, education and services—effectively institutionalizing exile rather than immediate integration or return [1] [8]. That institutionalization reflected both Arab states’ reluctance to permanently absorb the refugees—partly to preserve the refugees’ claim to return—and the international community’s ad hoc responses to a massive humanitarian crisis [2] [8].
3. Proposals to resettle Palestinians elsewhere, and their rejection
In the early 1950s and in later episodes, there were concrete proposals to relocate Palestinians away from Palestine proper—most notably UN schemes to move tens of thousands from Gaza into Sinai and later diplomatic suggestions to relocate Gaza populations to Egypt or Jordan—but these plans faced fierce Palestinian opposition and Arab state reluctance, and thus backfired or were blocked [3] [9]. Political leaders in Egypt and Jordan rejected relocation as tantamount to forfeiting the refugees’ right of return, and Palestinians mobilized against schemes seen as erasing their political claims [3] [9].
4. Contesting narratives: planned transfer versus chaotic war displacement
Scholars disagree over whether Palestinians were “expected” to be moved under an organized transfer or whether flight and expulsion were more episodic outcomes of military operations; some historians argue Plan Dalet and other Yishuv deliberations made expulsions likely, while others—most prominently Benny Morris’s early work—find no single centrally executed plan, describing instead waves of flight driven by local events and fear [4] [5] [10]. This historiographical divide matters because it frames whether the refugee geography was a designed outcome or the tragic byproduct of conflict [4] [6].
5. Long-term outcomes: statelessness, integration, and resettlement politics
Decades on, most descendants of 1948 refugees remained stateless or were hosted under precarious arrangements; Jordan granted citizenship to many Palestinians, but large numbers live in protracted refugee camps across the region—evidence that the “expectation” for Palestinians to live in neighbouring Arab lands hardened into an enduring, unresolved displacement [2] [1] [11]. Efforts to normalize relocation to third countries or fragile states have been criticized as political attempts to erase the right of return rather than solve refugees’ material insecurity [3] [11].
6. What the sources cannot prove here
The documentation assembled in these sources shows where Palestinians actually ended up and records multiple resettlement proposals, but the question of who officially “expected” them to live where—i.e., explicit centralized directives assigning destinations to displaced Palestinians—remains disputed in the historiography; some sources point to planning bodies and committees, others emphasize ad hoc military and political decisions, and no single source here offers an undisputed, authoritative blueprint that uniformly prescribed exact destinations for all refugees [4] [5] [10].