What Happened to the People

Count Folke Bernadotte was from Sweden, and his job was to travel between countries that were angry with each other and try to get them talking. He was very good at it, and he was a brave man.

In the last months of the Second World War he went and talked to the Nazis themselves, face to face, and got more than 30,000 people out of the death camps alive. Thousands of them were Jews. He drove them out in a line of white buses. There are people alive today whose grandparents came out on those buses.

In May 1948 the UN asked him to go to Palestine and try to make peace. He arranged the pauses in the fighting. He flew back and forth. He listened to everybody. And he went to see the refugee camps with his own eyes.

On 16 September 1948 he handed the UN his report.

He wrote that it would be an insult to the simplest idea of fairness if these refugees were not allowed to go back to their homes, while at the same time new Jewish settlers were arriving in Palestine, some of them moving into the very houses those refugees had just left.

And then he named exactly what he could see happening. There was a danger, he warned, that Arab families whose roots in this land went back hundreds of years were being permanently replaced. Swapped, for good, for somebody else.

Think about when that was written. September 1948. It was still happening. There was still time for somebody to stop it. And the man saying so was not a Palestinian or an Arab. He was a Swedish stranger who had gone and looked.

He asked that the refugees be allowed to go home.

That was one part of a whole plan he had put together. Borders agreed by talking, instead of simply kept by whoever grabbed them first. The two states tied together by trade, so that neither one could feed itself without the other. And the refugees’ right to go home.

His plan was rejected, and not politely.

He did not give up. Asked about it afterwards, he said the sort of thing any good peacemaker says in a bad week. They had started well. Things were low just now. He was not beaten. He still thought it could be done.

He had one day left.

17 September 1948

The next afternoon, Bernadotte’s car was driving through the Katamon district of Jerusalem, one of the Arab neighbourhoods emptied five months earlier.

A jeep pulled across the road and blocked it. A man walked up to the car window and fired a machine gun through it from an arm’s length away.

Bernadotte was killed instantly. So was the French officer sitting next to him, Colonel André Serot. Serot had asked to swap seats that day so that he could sit beside Bernadotte and thank him. Bernadotte had saved his wife from a camp.

UN soldiers carried the two coffins out. An ambulance took them slowly up the coast to Haifa, cameras filmed every mile of it, and governments all over the world said out loud that this was a disgrace.

A man who had pulled tens of thousands of people out of Nazi camps had been shot dead in a street in Jerusalem by men who did not want refugees going home.

The killers were from Lehi, the group the British called the Stern Gang. The order came from its three leaders, one of whom was Yitzhak Shamir. Thirty-five years later, Shamir was the Prime Minister of Israel.

Nobody was ever punished for the murder.

The man who took Bernadotte’s place, the American Ralph Bunche, went on to arrange the agreements that stopped the shooting, and was given the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

The part about letting the refugees go home died with the man who wrote it.

The resolution that is still quoted every year

Three months after Bernadotte was killed, on 11 December 1948, all the countries of the UN voted on a decision that is still being argued about today. They called it Resolution 194.

One paragraph in it made it famous. Stripped of the careful legal words, it says three things.

One. Refugees who want to go back to their homes and live peacefully with their neighbours should be allowed to go back, and as soon as possible.

Two. Anybody who chooses not to go back should be paid for what they lost.

Three. So should anybody whose house or land was wrecked.

Then, five months later, Israel asked to join the UN.

The countries with the most power at the UN said yes, and the words they used are worth knowing. They described Israel as a country that loved peace, and one that was willing to keep the UN’s rules.

On 11 May 1949, Israel was let in. And its membership came with a condition written into it. Israel was joining on the understanding that it accepted Resolution 194, the one about letting the refugees go home.

The Arab representatives stood up and walked out of the room.

Nobody went home.

Since then, the countries of the UN have voted to say Resolution 194 still stands more than a hundred times. It is the reason Palestinians talk about the right of return. And it is why, today, a Palestinian family in a camp in Lebanon will tell you quite calmly the name of a village in Galilee that none of them has ever seen.

Israel has always answered that if several million children and grandchildren of refugees came back, there would no longer be a Jewish majority, so there would no longer be a Jewish state. And that the refugees became refugees because Arab governments started a war. That is the argument, put as fairly as it can be put. You now know enough to weigh it up yourself.

There is also a much blunter version, and it came from Israel’s own representative at the UN, a man called Abba Eban.

Somebody asked him why Israel was in no hurry to sign a proper peace. Eban explained it plainly. Israel already had an agreement that stopped the shooting, and that agreement cost Israel nothing. A real peace would arrive with a price on it. The Arabs would want the borders moved, or the refugees allowed back, or both.

That is a man saying out loud what people in his position usually keep to themselves.

Avi Shlaim, an Israeli historian who spent years reading the governments’ own private papers, says Eban was not simply having a bad day. He was describing something that kept on happening. Shlaim’s conclusion is that Israel has always been very quick to reach for its army, and very slow to sit down and negotiate with the Arab countries around it.

That is one historian’s verdict, and other Israeli historians argue with him about it. It is worth knowing because he built it out of the documents, not out of a slogan.

The charge against Britain

Britain had gone home, and it spent the next fifty years being blamed for all of this. Sometimes for the wrong things.

Avi Shlaim sets out the accusation carefully, and being careful is the whole point of it.

The accusation against Britain is not that it tried to stop a Jewish state from being born. Britain has been blamed for that more often than the evidence supports, and anyway it did not manage it.

The accusation is that Britain set out to stop a Palestinian state from being born.

And that one, almost alone out of everything Britain tried to do in Palestine in thirty-one years, worked.

Where they went

By December 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians had no home to go to. The number usually given at the end is 750,000, and some historians say it was higher.

They went wherever the roads went.

Around 100,000 walked north into Lebanon. Somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 went into Syria. Several hundred thousand ended up in the West Bank, or crossed the river into Jordan.

And around 200,000 crowded into the Gaza Strip, a narrow piece of coast where about 80,000 people had been living. Work that out. The population nearly quadrupled in a matter of months, in a space nobody could leave. That is why Gaza became one of the most tightly packed places on earth, and it has been ever since.

They lived in tents. The first winters were terrible. Children died of the cold, and of measles, and of drinking dirty water.

In December 1949 the UN set up an organisation whose whole job was to feed these refugees, school their children, and treat them when they were ill. It is called UNRWA. It was only ever meant to last a few years.

It is still running today. It now looks after close to six million people, the great-grandchildren of the families who locked their doors in 1948. About a third of them still live in the camps. The camps stopped being tents long ago. They turned into crowded concrete towns with narrow alleyways and nowhere left to build.

The ones who stayed

Around 150,000 Palestinians ended up inside Israel’s new borders without ever leaving home. The border moved, not them.

They were made citizens of Israel. And then, for the next eighteen years, until 1966, they were ruled by the army rather than by the ordinary government.

That meant needing written permission just to travel from your own town to the next one. Nights when nobody was allowed outside. Land taken off them. Arrests without anybody having to say what you had done.

Then came a law with a very strange word in it.

In 1950 Israel passed a law saying that anybody who had left their property during the war was an absentee, which simply means somebody who is not there. And anything an absentee owned, their land, their house, their orchard, now belonged to the state.

On the face of it, in a war, that sounds almost reasonable.

Except look who it caught. A family from the village of Saffuriyya ran two kilometres down the road and stopped in Nazareth. They never left the country. They were living inside Israel, holding Israeli identity papers.

And by that law they were absentees, and their land belonged to somebody else.

There were tens of thousands of people in that position, and Israeli law invented a name for them that sounds like a joke and is not.

Present absentees.

Present, because they were standing right there. Absentee, because the state needed the land.

Erasing the map

Now the villages.

Somewhere between 400 and 530 Palestinian towns and villages were emptied, and most of them were then physically destroyed. Bulldozers and explosives, through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, so that there would be nothing to come back to.

The mosques went with them.

Some were flattened along with everything else in the village. Others were left standing, and given a new use. A few became storerooms. Some became sheds for animals. Some became museums.

And some were turned into bars, where people go to drink alcohol, which for Muslims is forbidden. A building where a village had prayed five times a day for centuries.

The graveyards were ploughed over and planted. So a family did not only lose the house it had lived in. It lost the ground its grandparents were buried in.

Over the ruins went pine forests. The Jewish National Fund planted millions of trees, and many of the parks Israelis picnic in today sit exactly on top of villages, which is why if you walk in certain woods you will find a cactus hedge in a straight line where no one planted a hedge, or the arch of a cistern, or a scatter of squared stones. Prickly pear cactus was what Palestinians planted to mark the edge of their land, and cactus is almost impossible to kill.

The map was rewritten too. Saffuriyya became Tzipori. Around 9,000 Arabic place names were replaced with Hebrew ones by a government naming committee.

Al-Quds got a version of its own, and that one has never stopped.

On the surface, new building and new street plans, all pushing the city towards one single identity. And underneath it, something stranger. Beneath the Old City, and beneath the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, there has been a huge programme of digging.

Digging up the past is called archaeology, and normally it is a wonderful thing. But these tunnels run directly underneath Palestinian houses. And the layers of the city’s history that get dug up, cleaned, lit and shown to visitors are the layers that support one story about who this city belongs to. The other layers are passed over quickly.

Archaeology stops being innocent when it is happening under somebody’s kitchen floor.

And all of it is going on beneath Al-Aqsa.

Remember what Al-Aqsa is, from the very first chapter. The first qiblah, the direction Muslims turned to pray before Makkah. One of the three sacred mosques. Muslims have prayed there for around fourteen hundred years.

Today, Israeli police stand at its gates and decide which Muslims are allowed to walk up and pray there, and on which days. A man can be turned away from Al-Aqsa because of how old he is.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé and others describe this as the second stage of the thing itself. First you remove the people. Then you remove the evidence that they were ever there. Then, if it works, the next generation grows up in a country where the question never comes up.

The pictures went too.

Palestinians had filmed their own lives through the 1930s and 1940s. Streets, weddings, markets, schools, harvests, football. All of it was kept together in one collection, and in the wars that followed, that collection was lost. Some of it was taken. Some was scattered. Most has never been found.

So when film makers later went looking for moving pictures of Palestine before 1948, they had to search in other countries. Some of it turned up in a library in London.

Almost every surviving film of Palestinian life was kept safe by the empire that helped bring that life to an end. Palestinians had to travel to London to watch their own grandparents.

It did not entirely work. The cactus is still growing.

Two ways of not knowing

Erasing the ground is only half the job. The other half happens in classrooms.

People who have studied how 1948 was taught inside Israel describe two separate mechanisms, and they work on two different sorts of person.

The first is denial. For decades the school curriculum simply left the Palestinians out. Not argued against. Left out. Children grew up on a version in which the country had been more or less empty and waiting, and 1948 was a war of survival against invading Arab armies and nothing else. If you never learn anybody was there, there is nothing to feel anything about.

One Israeli, describing his own schooling, put it about as starkly as it can be put. He was taught the old slogan, a people with no land looking for a land with no people. So what did that make the people who were obviously here? The lesson came out like this: perhaps they were here, but they were not a people.

Which means that 1.3 million human beings living in Palestine in 1948 were either not a people, or were not there.

That is what a curriculum can do to a child’s arithmetic.

The second is for the people who did know, because their father had been in one of those units and had said things at the kitchen table. For them the message was never that it did not happen. It was that it happened, that their fathers had good reasons, and that you do not discuss it outside the house because it embarrasses the country.

Denial for most people. Silence for the ones who could not be lied to.

That second rule is why, in the 1980s, a group of Israeli historians landed like a bomb.

You have been reading them all the way through this book. Ilan Pappé. Benny Morris. Avi Shlaim. People call them the new historians, and what they did was go into Israel’s own government files, which had just been opened up, and write down what was in them. They were Israelis, telling Israelis what their own country’s papers said.

And it is why Teddy Katz, the student you met in the last chapter, had his whole life taken apart over a piece of university work.

Katz did not break the first rule. Nobody was hiding Tantura from him. He broke the second one. He said it outside the house.

The sentence that says it best

In 1969 the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which she said that there was no such thing as Palestinians, that they did not exist.

She was not being sloppy. That claim is the whole argument in one line, and it is the reason this series had to begin in chapter one with olive trees and soap factories and Jaffa oranges and a market where three religions argued about lemons.

Because if those people never existed, nothing was taken.

The word did not stay in 1948

The Nakba is not remembered by Palestinians as a historical episode with a start and a finish. It is remembered as something that began and continued.

In 1967 there was another war, and it lasted six days. In those six days Israel took the West Bank, Gaza, the eastern half of Jerusalem including the Old City and Al-Aqsa, and land from Egypt and Syria as well.

Another 300,000 Palestinians lost their homes. For many of them it was the second time in one lifetime.

The West Bank and Gaza have been held by the Israeli army ever since. Across the West Bank, Israel has built towns for its own citizens on that land. Most countries in the world say those towns break international law, which is the set of rules countries have agreed to follow with each other. Around 700,000 Israelis now live in them.

Gaza has been sealed off since 2007. Very little goes in and very little comes out, and the people inside cannot simply leave.

Then, in October 2023, Hamas fighters attacked Israel and killed around 1,200 people there, most of them civilians. The war that followed went on for two years.

By the time a ceasefire was signed in October 2025, the health authorities in Gaza were counting more than 70,000 Palestinians killed, and more than 170,000 wounded. Most of the buildings in Gaza were destroyed. Almost the entire population, more than two million people, had been driven out of their homes, most of them over and over again.

And the ceasefire did not end it. Attacks have gone on, hundreds more people have been killed since it was signed, and almost nothing has been rebuilt. Palestinians in Gaza describe living in something that is neither a war nor a peace.

Palestinians look at that and use the same word their grandparents used. They have a name for it. al-Nakba al-mustamirra, the ongoing Nakba.

The argument, and Ilan Pappé makes it as directly as anybody, is that 1948 and now are one process running at two different speeds. 1948 was fast, enormous and impossible to miss, most of it done inside a year. What has come since is slow. A house demolished here. A permit refused there. Land taken in pieces, families cut apart by a wall, men held for months without charge. Different tempo. Same direction of travel, which is fewer Palestinians on the land.

The family resemblance shows in the methods, too.

Remember the Mista’arvim from chapter six, the fighters who dressed as Arabs and walked unnoticed through Arab streets. They did not disappear in 1948. Israeli soldiers in plain clothes still walk into crowds in West Bank towns today and make arrests, using exactly the same trick that was used in Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1948.

And the checkpoint has become the everyday machine. A checkpoint is a barrier across a road with soldiers on it, where you have to stop and show your papers and wait to be allowed through. There are hundreds of them across the West Bank. People queue in the cold before sunrise to get to work. The permission to pass can be taken away from you without anybody giving a reason.

There is film of soldiers sealing off a street in the city of Ramallah, and what is on it is not a queue.

Palestinian men are made to take their clothes off, in the road, with guns pointed at them, in front of whoever happens to be standing there.

That is not a search. A search does not need an audience.

Something done out in the open, in front of your neighbours, in front of your children, in front of your own sons, is doing a completely different job. It is teaching you what you are.

Israelis look at the same events and see a country that was attacked at birth and has been fighting for survival ever since, in a region where several of its neighbours spent decades refusing to recognise it exists. That fear is not invented either.

Both peoples are on that land. Neither is leaving. Every serious idea anyone has ever had about ending this starts from those two sentences.

The half that gets left out

There is a second half to all of this, and it is the half that a sad story usually leaves out.

If the pushing has never stopped, neither has the refusing.

Palestinians have a word for this, and it is one of the most important words in the whole book. Sumud. It means staying put. Holding on. Refusing to be moved, and refusing to stop being who you are, for as long as it takes.

Because the entire plan, from the very beginning, had assumed that Palestinians would quietly stop being a people. Spread out into the Arab countries around them, become Lebanese or Syrian or Jordanian, and in a generation or two forget.

They did not.

They rebuilt their lives in the camps. They kept the names of the villages and taught them to children who had never seen them. They wrote and they painted. They held school lessons in tents, and then they built universities. They went on strike. They marched. They took their case to courts and to the UN. They filmed what was being done to them and got the film out to the world.

Some picked up weapons. Many refused to, and went on refusing for decades while being told that refusing got you nowhere.

A people who were supposed to melt away into the countries around them within a single generation are still here. Still arguing with each other. Still, unmistakably, the same people who locked those doors.

So the story does not have an ending yet. Not because it is hopeful, and not because it is hopeless. It has no ending because both halves are still running at once. The pressure to get those people off that land, and the flat refusal of those people to go.

Why we told you all of it

We could have written this softer.

Skip the mosque at Lydda. Skip the road in July. Round the numbers down. Say “conflict” instead of “driven out”. Finish with something hopeful about the children of the future holding hands.

That version is much easier to read. It is also a lie, the kind of lie you tell by leaving things out. And leaving things out is exactly how 750,000 people get turned into a line in somebody’s footnote.

So we told you the massacres by their names, because they have names.

We told you about the arguments historians have not settled, because pretending they are settled would make us no better than the people who bulldozed the villages.

We told you why Jewish refugees were running towards that shore, because leaving that out would have turned this into propaganda instead of history.

And we told you in detail what was done to the people who were already living there, because that is the part the world agreed to look away from for about forty years.

You are old enough to hold two true things in your head at the same time. A people running from a genocide. A people losing everything they had. And a great power that lit the fuse and then caught a plane to Cyprus.

Here is the last thing, and it is the smallest.

The keys are real.

They are in drawers and on nails behind doors in camps in Lebanon and Jordan and Gaza, iron keys, longer than your hand, worn smooth where a thumb has held them. The houses they open are mostly gone. The people who locked those doors are mostly dead.

Their grandchildren still know the name of the village. Still know which valley. Still know the tree.

That is what happens when you tell a family they are going away for two weeks.