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?