During the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from towns and villages in Mandatory Palestine. Many became refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, while hundreds of communities were depopulated. Palestinians remember this mass displacement as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Exile became central to Palestinian poetry through writers including Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan and Samih al-Qasim. Images of keys, abandoned villages, olive trees and interrupted return created a widely recognised poetic language of dispossession.