Exile and military rule
The armistice lines of 1949 were never intended as permanent borders; they were meant to hold until a final settlement was reached. None came. For the next eighteen years, Palestinians lived the consequences of 1948 in four distinct and separated situations.
Refugee camps
The roughly 750,000 people displaced in 1947–49 settled where the fighting had pushed them or where they could find shelter: in Gaza, then under Egyptian administration; in the West Bank, annexed by Jordan in 1950 (a move only Britain and Pakistan recognised internationally); and across the borders in Lebanon, Syria and further into Jordan proper. UNRWA set up camps (tents at first, then increasingly permanent cinder-block housing) in places such as Jabalia and Rafah in Gaza, Balata near Nablus, and Shatila and Sabra outside Beirut. These camps, built for what everyone assumed would be a short exile, became multi-generational communities; several are still there today, three-quarters of a century on, now dense urban neighbourhoods rather than camps in any temporary sense.
Conditions for refugees varied enormously by host country. Jordan granted Palestinian refugees citizenship, integrating them (unevenly, and not without later tension) into national life. Lebanon and Syria did not, leaving generations of Palestinians born there without citizenship, and in Lebanon's case with restrictions on the professions they could work in that in some cases persist today. Gaza's refugees, under Egyptian military administration, were governed but not made Egyptian citizens, and the Strip's population roughly tripled in size as refugees packed into a territory of some 360 square kilometres, a density that has shaped Gaza's story ever since.
Military rule inside Israel
The roughly 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside the new state of Israel in 1948 became citizens, with the right to vote, but for eighteen years, from 1948 until 1966, they lived under a military government that restricted their movement, required permits to travel between towns, and gave Israeli authorities sweeping powers over their land, much of which was expropriated under laws such as the 1953 Land Acquisition Law. Political organising was tightly constrained. Historians and Israeli human rights groups have generally treated this period as one of second-class citizenship enforced through military administration, distinct from but related to the situation of refugees outside the state entirely. Military rule was lifted in December 1966, just months before a war that would bring a much larger Palestinian population under a harsher form of Israeli control.
A new Palestinian politics
The 1950s and early 1960s were, politically, a fragmented and often despairing period for Palestinians, scattered across host countries with little say over their own fate, and largely absorbed as a "refugee problem" into wider Arab-Israeli diplomacy conducted by the Arab states rather than by Palestinians themselves. That began to change with the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, established at Arab League initiative but soon reshaped into a genuinely Palestinian national movement, particularly after Fatah, the faction led by Yasser Arafat, rose to dominate it from 1969. For the first time since 1948, Palestinians had an organisation claiming to speak for them as a people.
That shift in Palestinian political identity, from dispersed refugees waiting on Arab state diplomacy to a self-organised national movement, was still gathering pace when, in June 1967, a six-day war between Israel and its neighbours redrew the map of the region once again, and brought every Palestinian living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean under a single authority for the first time since the Mandate: Israeli military occupation.