Rob Rinder and Sarah Agha, along with four other families of Jewish and Palestinian heritage, as they explore how their families' histories were impacted by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. For Jews across the world, this represented a longed-for opportunity to find a place of safety. For Palestinians, the events of this period, which created over 700,000 refugees, are known as the Nakba, Arabic for 'catastrophe'. Through these profoundly moving and deeply personal stories, this series gets to the heart of what happened to people on both sides as the Middle East was reshaped.

As the presenters and participants investigate how this time of chaos and upheaval affected their relatives, they discover how their families' destinies were changed forever. Sarah Agha finds out about the circumstances under which her family fled their village in Galilee in 1948, and Rob follows his relative's journey to escape the horrors of the Holocaust and start a new life in the recently established state of Israel.

Chapter 1:
Rob and Sarah are joined by a father and son who follow in their father's and grandfather's footsteps from Hackney to becoming caught up in Israel's War of Independence, and meet a woman whose grandmother survived one of the most notorious episodes of the Nakba.

Chapter 2:
Rob and Sarah are joined by a woman who wants to find out why, when she was a child, her aunts left Egypt for the new state of Israel and a woman who wants to know what happened to her family as her grandfather struggled to hold on to his land and orange groves in Jaffa.