From the 1930s until the end of World War II, thousands of Jewish refugees fled to the multiethnic, multicultural state of Palestine to escape persecution and the Holocaust in Europe. The resulting population shifts in Palestine added to the tension between its Jewish and Arab residents. In November 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, a ruling that Palestine and the Arab world as a whole argued violated the UN’s Charter. Within Palestine, violence broke out between groups like the Arab Liberation Army and the Jewish militia. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence, and the neighboring Arab countries of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt responded with military force. 

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War led to “the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population,” known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Israeli forces attacked Palestinian Arab citizens and seized or destroyed their homes. Although the UN began calling for the return of these refugees and the restitution of their property in 1948, today “more than 5 million Palestine refugees are scattered throughout the Middle East,” and they “continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements, evictions, land confiscation and home demolitions” (“About the Nakba.” United Nations: The Question of Palestine, 2026).

The United States remained neutral in the war and sought to de-escalate the conflict by imposing an arms embargo on the region. A Gallup poll in March 1948 surveyed American citizens and found that “[t]wenty-eight percent said [they sympathized] with the Jewish people, 11% the Arabs, and 44% neither” (“The American Public and Israel,” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 16 Mar. 2025). Although the American public was aware of the war through newspaper coverage and radio broadcasts, most possessed little knowledge of the situation’s complexity. This is reflected in the young protagonist’s oversimplified understanding of the conflict in The Hero Two Doors Down; he hopes that everyone will come to get along without real knowledge of the scale of the violence being perpetrated against civilians.