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The events of 1948 were a joyous celebration for Israelis who got their independence, but it was a time of despair for Palestinians who lost their homeland.  They call it the Nakhba or Catastrophe.  Perhaps 80 or 85% of all the Palestinians inside of what was Green Line Israel on January 1st of 1948  (i.e., internationally recognized boundaries) were in exile on December 31 of 1948.   The Palestinians had lost their lands, their businesses, their bank accounts and even the right to call themselves a people.   Their natural leaders had been pushed aside -- the doctors, the professors, the authors, the businessmen, the heads of the big families, the heads of the political organizations.   This is the story of how they struggled to adapt to that reality.

Those following this podcast series can see parallel analysis for looking at the Jews and the Palestinians.  Look at the objective conditions, i.e., what we can measure, and see how those conditions produced certain political outcomes that would not have been predictable before those objective conditions changed. 

You might want to google the UN  partition plan 181 of 1947, and especially look at a map of that plan.   You might also want to read the UN resolution 194 of 1949 which defines the rights of the Palestinian refugees.  We will discuss both of these but it helps to read in advance. 

You might also want to look at my briefing document on The Palestinian Refugees of 1948.  That is a very thorough discussion of the data and how different parties to the struggle describe what happened.   You will see in this that the idea of "transferring" the Palestinians to make room for a Jewish state was cooked into the thinking of the great powers, as well as into the thinking of many Zionist Jews.   That document is available free on Deep Blue .  If you missed it, there is a three minute podcast on how to get my Deep Blue documents free. 

Next we will have a podcast on the PLO Charter and the Hamas Charter.