NUMB3RS

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Mark Twain

A friend who sells for a living once taught me that no matter how well a sales presentation or demonstration goes, the only thing that travels up the decision-making chain is numbers. Quantitative information plays a similarly powerful role in the presentation of an argument.

Thus, the So-Called Somerville Divestment Project's (SC-SDP's) fondness for numerical detail, even if they play as fast and loose with numbers as they do with words.

For example, with their current petition drive, the SC-SDP has been littering our billboards with posters bewailing the 780,000 Palestinians made refugees in Israel's 1948 War of Independence. Yet just some simple arithmetic is all that is needed to demonstrate that this number is impossibly high.

Before the 1948 war, there were 1.2 million Arabs living in the area. After the war, 450,000 remained in the Arab-controlled West Bank and Gaza, and another 160,000 stayed in their homes and became citizens of Israel.

Taking out my pencil, 1,200,000 - (450,000+160,000) = 590,000 total possible Arab refugees from 1948.

Putting aside that this calculation is the most generous one possible for the Palestinian refugee count (restrained as we are in the tyranny of addition and subtraction), one wonders why the divestment crowd felt the need to inflate a number that was already high enough to serve its propaganda purposes.

It is the facts and numbers NOT stated that damage the anti-Israel crowd's argument most, which is why such information is left on the cutting room floor of their presentation (or in the words of Orwell, "dumped down the memory hole"). How many of these 500,000+ people simply got out of the way of the five Arab armies that attacked Israel in 1948, for example? How many of them joined the ranks of those five phalanxes of troops, only to be pushed beyond Israel's new borders once fighting ended?

Of course, the 800,000+ pound gorilla of a number left out of this debate is this calculation:

Number of Jews in the Arab world before 1948: 860,000
Number of Jews in the Arab world after 1948: 5,000

860,000 - 5,000 = 855,000 Jews kicked out of the Arab world after Israel's 1948 victory.

Looked at numerically, what happened in 1948 was not the exclusive mass expulsion of Arabs by Israel endlessly repeated by Israel's critics, but a population exchange, similar to those that took place between Germany and Poland after World War II or between India and Pakistan after independence. Such exchanges are never pretty (ask the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had to be resettled in Israel as penniless refugees), but they are historic.

What has no precedent is the perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee crisis for decades. All of the other world's refugees, including over 800,000 Jews of the Arab world, were resettled within a generation, with the nations of the world providing resources to find homes for the unfortunate millions who were forced to flee conflict.

Only the case of the Palestinians have vast resources been spent to perpetuate a refugee crisis rather than solve it. All so the Somerville Divestment Project and similar propagandists can inflate the numbers still further to score points in an argument that collapses once the actual numbers are known.