Israeli forces routinely detain Palestinians throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, often on the pretext of perceived security threats, and Addameer estimates that 40 percent of the Palestinian male population has been arrested at some point.This has been quoted in mainstream media as well.
I have already debunked the Addameer claim that 800,000 Palestinian Arabs have been arrested by Israel a number of times. But I was curious if I could find any numbers that indicated the percentage of males that had been arrested.
I got pretty close.
In a survey of Arab women in 2011, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics asked a large sample of women "Has [sic] any of your family members been arrested/detained by the Israeli occupation" - within the previous 12 months or any time before that.
3.6% answered yes for the previous 12 months, and 20.8% said it had happened in the years before that.
For our purposes we will ignore the 3.6% because it can be assumed that a very high percentage of those had also been arrested previously.
So about 21% of Arab families in the territories had at least one arrest. Arab families tend to be large, so this survey covered the women's husbands grown sons and brothers. The average Arab household in the territories has about 6 members, but the question was for "family" and not "household" so I think we can assume 2 brothers and a father and/or a grown son, or an average of 3 adult men per woman's family. That means that a minimum of 7% of adult males have been arrested, assuming one arrest per family. We'll take a generous guess that one third of the families had more than one arrest, so no more than 10% of adult males have been arrested.
Now compare with this:
A large number of American men have already been arrested by the time they're in their early 20s, according to a new report.Things are far worse for American men than for Palestinian Arabs.
The study, published on Monday in the journal Crime & Delinquency, found that nearly half (49 percent) of African-American men and 40 percent of white men have been arrested by the age of 23, "which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities," according to a press release.
The research was based on an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults. The arrests included minor crimes like truancy as well as serious violent crimes. It excluded traffic offenses.