Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
One would think that if any Palestinian government agency is trustworthy, it would be the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. After all, they should be dealing with hard numbers and facts.
That is naive.
Every year, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics issues a population report on the anniversary of Israel's founding - what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
In 2006, it wrote. "The estimated number of Palestinians who were expelled as a result of the Nakba is about 750,000 persons in addition to approximately 350,000 persons in 1967. "
There are at least four lies in this sentence alone.
* Most of the Arabs who left in 1948 fled, they were not expelled.
* There were not 750,000 refugees in 1948 from areas won by Israel. Some 200,000 "refugees" were locals who took advantage of the free food offered by UNRWA and its precursor.
* None of the Arabs who left in 1967 were expelled; they fled to Jordan and Egypt because they didn't want to live under Jewish rule, although thousands of wanted terrorists fled to avoid prison in Israel. Israel did destroy three villages on the Latrun corridor because of their strategic position but it offered compensation to the residents; it did not force any to move to Jordan. Israel gave the people who fled a number of months to voluntarily return, as well.
* There were not close to 350,000 who fled in 1967; the UN estimated 200,000.
If you look at this year's Nakba report, you see something else that is interesting:
Nakba in Palestine describes a process of ethnic cleansing in which an unarmed nation was destroyed and its population displaced systematically by gangs and individuals from all over the world. The Nakba resulted in the displacement of 800 thousand Palestinians out of the 1.4 million Palestinians who lived in historical Palestine in 1948 in 1,300 villages and towns.
Once you get beyond the "ethnic cleansing by [Jewish] gangs" lie, you see that the 750,000 number has magically become 800,000.
Perhaps, you can say, they are including thousands of Arabs who were displaced from their homes in 1948 but remained inside the 1949 armistice lines. But a look at their 2016 report shows that this is not the case:
In 1948, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages all over historical Palestine. More than 800,000 of the population were driven out of their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighboring Arab countries, and other countries of the world.Thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes but stayed within the Israeli-controlled 1948 territory.
So besides the not insignificant fact that the PCBS blatantly lies about statistics, it inflates its own numbers as time goes by!
What kind of a statistics agency would publish numbers that contradict its own previous data? A Palestinian one, where propaganda and politics is always more important than telling the truth.
If you trust their current statistics, here's an interesting finding:
Even as they scream "genocide" and "holocaust" and "ethnic cleansing," the number of Palestinians worldwide has increased by a factor of nine since 1948. But in Israel, it has increased even faster, from 140,000 to 1.6 million - or about 11.5 times! Somehow, those racist Jews are allowing Israeli Arabs to thrive even more than the Palestinian Authority does.
