How do 1948 Palestinian refugees compare to others?

We are in the midst of two solid weeks of "nakba" commemorations, each one further removed from reality than the last.

Yesterday, during yet another "nakba" celebration, PA prime minister Fayyad stated that the Palestinian Arab flight in 1948 was the "biggest tragedy of displacement in the modern era." (Ma'an Arabic) So I decided to do a quick check of the numbers of people who have been displaced in various wars and other events in the modern era, and compare them to the 711,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in 1948. Most numbers are from Wikipedia.

Event	Year	Number of refugees	Notes
Armenian	1915-21	1,100,000
Russian revolution	1917-21	1,500,000
Greece/Turkey	1923	2,000,000	Population exchange
Spanish Civil War	1939	500,000	Spanish Republicans to France
World War II	1939-45	7,000,000
Poland/Ukraine	1944-46	2,600,000	Population exchange
Potsdam conference	1945	12,000,000	Forced repatriation of ethnic Germans to Germany
Soviet Union	1945-47	2,500,000	Forced repatriation of Russians to USSR
Germany	1945-61	560,000	Flight from East to West Germany
India/Pakistan partition	1947	18,000,000	Population exchange
Palestinian Arabs	1948	711,000	UN count
Middle East Jews	1948-60	700,000	Arab countries to Israel
Korean War	1950-53	1,000,000
Algerian independence	1954-62	2,000,000	To Morocco, Tunisia
Pieds-Noirs	1962	900,000	Algeria to Europe
Bangladeshi Liberation War	1971	10,000,000	Bengalis to India
Sahrawis in Western Sahara	1975	150,000
Salvadoran Civil War	1975-82	1,000,000
Lebanese civil war	1975-90	900,000	Displaced from their homes
Khmer Rouge	1978-79	300,000	To US, Canada, Australia
Afghan War	1978-92	6,000,000	To Pakistan and Iran
Sri Lanka Tamils	1983-2008	800,000	to Europe and Canada
Kurds from Turkey	1984-99	378,000
Al-Anfal campaign	1986-89	1,000,000	Iraqi Kurds
Nagorno Karabakh	1988-89	750,000
Kashmir	1990-	300,000
Sudan war	1990?	930,000
Burundi	1990?	485,000
Democratic Rep. of Congo	1990?	462,000
Somalia	1990?	389,000
Russian Jews	1990-95	700,000	USSR to Israel
Persian Gulf War	1991	1,400,000	Iraq to Iran
Balkans	1991	2,700,000
Kuwait Palestinians	1991	400,000	expelled from Kuwait
Chechnya	1991-	2,000,000
Tajikistan	1992-97	500,000	Russians, excluding Jews who went to Israel
Abkhazia	1993	250,000
Rwanda	1994	2,000,000
Serbia	1999	1,000,000	Albanians
Darfur	2003-	2,500,000
Current Gulf war	2003-8	2,200,000	Iraq to Arab countries

The problem is not that there were so many refugees in 1948, although it is a significant number by any yardstick. The problem is that Palestinian Arab leaders and other Arab leaders, together with the UNRWA and so-called "human rights" organizations, have conspired to not only perpetuate the issue but even to exacerbate it.

By uniquely defining descendants of original Palestinian Arab refugees as refugees themselves, the "refugee" problem grown from 700,000 to over four million. Therefore, we see such nonsensical statement as this one from Human Rights Watch:

Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees.

- a manifestly absurd statement, and one that serves to minimize the real refugee problems worldwide and give a single group preferred refugee status, generations after most of them are no longer refugees by any sane definition. The sheer number of displaced persons during the past hundred years is breathtaking, and in context the Palestinian Arab refugees from 1948 are barely a footnote.

Much larger refugee populations listed above have been forced to integrate and assimilate into the countries that they migrate to, but Arab countries who claim affinity with "Palestinians" have kept Palestinian Arabs separate and second-class.

No matter which historical narrative one believes, the 1948 refugee problem was indeed a disaster for Palestinian Arabs. But the fact that the problem still exists today is directly due to the conscious actions of their Arab neighbors and "supporters" for the past sixty years who want to see only one "solution" - destroying the State of Israel and replacing it with another giant refugee camp populated by people who mostly never lived there and who would be ecstatic to live as equals among their Arab brothers today.

Here's a nice litmus test to see whether people who claim to care about Palestinian Arabs: ask them if they would prefer to see millions of PalArabs in camps sixty years from now, or to have them become productive full members of the huge Arab world?