"Hundreds, Not Thousands": A Bongino Guest's 1948 Displacement Figure, Fact-Checked

A guest on The Dan Bongino Show (Ep. 2603, "What Is Really Happening Here?", 25 September 2026) said 1948 saw "the displacement of 100s of Palestinians, not 1000s, not 1000000s." Our verdict: false (truth score 0.02, confidence 0.95).

Every serious estimate of the 1948 displacement is in the hundreds of thousands. That includes figures from the Israeli government, the UN, Arab governments and pro-Israel scholars.

The transcript does not name the speaker, who is talking to Dan, so this is a guest or co-host and not Bongino himself. We start with the strongest case for them. About a minute earlier the same speaker said "let's just say hundreds of thousands," so "hundreds" may have been a slip. There is also a real scholarly argument about cause rather than size: Arab rejection of partition, the invasion by Arab armies, and the question of how many people fled versus how many were expelled. Benny Morris and Efraim Karsh still dispute this. But none of those arguments supports "hundreds," and the figure aired as a conclusion and was not retracted.

What the record shows: the UN Conciliation Commission counted about 711,000 refugees. Israel's government at the time put the number at about 500,000 to 600,000. Karsh is one of Morris's fiercest critics and consistently pro-Israel, and his village-by-village count still comes to 583,121 to 609,071. An IDF intelligence report from mid-1948, published in 2019, counted 391,000 by 1 June 1948 alone. The guest's own arithmetic doesn't hold up either. About 156,000 Arabs remained in Israel by November 1948. If that was "a third," the other two thirds would be roughly 300,000 or more.

We also look at the "zero Arabs in Tel Aviv" quiz. That is close to true for the pre-1950 municipality, whose boundary left out Jaffa. Jaffa had about 70,000 Arab residents in 1947, and only about 3,500 to 4,000 remained after it fell in May 1948. It was merged into Tel Aviv–Yafo in 1950. Finally, we place the claim in a cluster across our archive in late September: the same 1948 population count, pushed toward the same conclusion from both ends.