There is a word Palestinians use for the scattering — shatat, diaspora, the condition of being from a place you cannot reach. Today, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), roughly 14 million Palestinians live across the world. Approximately half of them — around 7 million people — live outside historic Palestine entirely, in countries that range from Jordan to Chile to the United States. They carry Palestinian identity across generations, organize politically from afar, and send remittances home to families in Gaza and the West Bank. Since October 2023, many of them have also been doing something else: taking to the streets, flooding elected representatives with calls, and demanding the world pay attention.
Understanding where Palestinians live, and why they ended up there, is essential context for understanding modern Palestinian politics, culture, and resistance.
How the Shatat Began: 1948 and Its Aftershocks
The Palestinian diaspora did not happen spontaneously. It was produced by specific historical events, the largest of which was the Nakba — the catastrophe — of 1948, when the establishment of the State of Israel was accompanied by the expulsion and flight of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, a figure documented by historians including Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris. More than 530 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed, according to research compiled by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi in All That Remains.
A second major wave of displacement followed the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and an estimated 300,000 additional Palestinians fled or were expelled, according to UN records. Further displacement followed Israeli military operations in Lebanon in 1982, the Oslo period’s failure to deliver a state, and the successive sieges of Gaza. Each rupture pushed more Palestinians further from home.
Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem, tracks these populations in detail. Its surveys consistently find that Palestinian refugees and displaced persons constitute one of the largest and longest-standing displaced populations in the world, with the right of return — enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) — still unimplemented more than seven decades later.
The Closest Neighbors: Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria
The largest concentrations of Palestinian diaspora populations remain in neighboring Arab states, a direct geographic consequence of 1948. Jordan hosts the largest number of Palestinian refugees anywhere — UNRWA registered more than 2.3 million Palestinian refugees there as of its most recent figures, though the broader Palestinian-origin population in Jordan, including those with Jordanian citizenship, is estimated by PCBS at well over 3 million. Jordan is unique in having granted citizenship to most Palestinian refugees, a policy other Arab states did not follow.
Lebanon hosts approximately 489,000 registered Palestinian refugees according to UNRWA, though the actual resident population is estimated to be lower — around 174,000 to 210,000 — because many have emigrated further. Those who remain live largely in camps like Shatila, Bourj al-Barajneh, and Ein el-Hilweh, legally barred from working in dozens of professions under Lebanese law. Syria, before its own civil war, hosted one of the most integrated Palestinian refugee communities in the Arab world; that war displaced the vast majority of Syria’s estimated 560,000 registered Palestinian refugees a second time, scattering them into Lebanon, Turkey, Europe, and elsewhere.
The Palestinian Chile Community: The Largest Outside the Arab World
The single largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East is not in the United States or Europe. It is in Chile. Estimates of the Palestinian-Chilean population vary, but community organizations and Chilean academics consistently cite figures around 500,000 people of Palestinian origin — a community large enough to have shaped Chilean culture, commerce, and politics in visible ways.
Palestinian migration to Chile began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily from the Bethlehem region and surrounding villages in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Many came as economic migrants, moving through ports in Argentina and Brazil before settling in Chile. They were often listed on Ottoman travel documents as subjects of the empire, which led to the misnomer “Turcos” — a label that stuck even as the community built a distinctly Palestinian identity in the Southern Cone.
The Chilean-Palestinian community established its own football club — Club Deportivo Palestino, founded in 1920 — its own cultural organizations, and sustained ties to Palestine across generations. Since October 7, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, Chilean Palestinians have been among the most publicly mobilized diaspora communities in the world, staging large protests in Santiago and pressing the Chilean government — which formally recognized the State of Palestine in 2011 — to take stronger positions at the United Nations.
Palestinian Americans and the Diaspora in the West
The United States is home to an estimated 250,000 Palestinians, according to figures cited by the Arab American Institute, though community groups argue the true number may be higher given undercounting in census data. Palestinian Americans are concentrated in cities including Chicago (particularly the suburb of Bridgeview), Detroit, New York, New Jersey, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Like their counterparts in Chile, many trace family roots to the Nakba, to the 1967 occupation, or to the successive crises that followed.
Brazil’s Palestinian community is estimated at around 50,000 people, concentrated in São Paulo, with roots similar to those of the Chilean community. Across Europe, Palestinian communities of significant size exist in Germany — home to tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom came as refugees from Lebanon — as well as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
Post-October 2023, diaspora organizing in the West has intensified sharply. Palestinian-led organizations including the Palestinian Youth Movement, with chapters across North America and Europe, have coordinated with broader coalitions to apply political pressure on Western governments. The visibility of that mobilization has made the diaspora a more prominent actor in international debates over Palestinian rights than at any point since the 1980s.
What Diaspora Palestinians Demand
Across Chile, the United States, Jordan, Lebanon, and everywhere else the shatat has carried them, Palestinian diaspora communities are not a monolith. They hold different passports, speak different languages, and occupy different positions in their host societies. But survey data and the stated positions of diaspora organizations consistently return to the same cluster of demands: an end to the occupation, accountability for violations of international humanitarian law, and the right of return — the right to go home, or at least to have that right acknowledged as real and not merely theoretical.
PCBS data projects that the global Palestinian population will continue to grow, passing 15 million in the coming years. The question of where Palestinians live is inseparable from the question of why — and from the unresolved political and legal status of a people that international law has never stopped recognizing as a people.
Sources
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), pcbs.gov.ps — population estimates
- Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, badil.org — refugee and displacement data
- UNRWA, Where We Work: Lebanon and Jordan registration figures
- UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948 — right of return
- Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)
- Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
- Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006)
- Arab American Institute, Palestinian American population estimates, aaiusa.org
