When Israeli propaganda becomes so absurd that even its target audience raises an eyebrow, the need arises to imbue it with a pseudo-scientific sheen. At the end of the day, apologists for Israel aren’t actually going to do any research on the matter before absorbing it into their repertoire of mythology; all a talking point needs to accomplish is to sound plausible, regardless of how false it is. After all, this is about making claims, not reflecting reality.

In this context, we see all kinds of numbers and sources emerging that supposedly “debunk Palestinian propaganda”. We saw this with Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial”, which cherry-picked and distorted data to make unfounded claims and allegations not supported by the aforementioned data  [You can read more about this here].

Similarly, we see population charts and numbers being deployed all over social media to “prove” that there never was any ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba. These same sources had also previously written about the “demographic danger” of allowing Palestinian refugees to return. It is quite amusing how one must contort themselves into a knot to try and make any sense of the Zionist narrative of history.

Absurdity of these claims aside, this manipulation of sources and data could serve as a good teaching moment; just because hasbarists cite a source, it doesn’t make it reliable, scientific or even representative of its actual content.

Producing a complicated-looking table and claiming it proves your argument may seem impressive. It might even convince those less-acquainted with the history and facts on the ground. After all, it looks so “scientific”. However, these attempts to imbue propaganda with empirical validity collapse under even the briefest of scrutiny.

An oft-used tactic is to cite actual data from real sources but to remove them from their context, and proceed to project meaning onto them which isn’t supported or claimed by the original source. Even grifters and genocide deniers use copious amounts of citations and data in their racist publications, but as mentioned previously, they usually tend to be decontextualized, distorted and cherry-picked to build a certain narrative while suppressing contradictory evidence.

Indeed, statistics can be lazily used to claim relationships between different phenomena. Let’s look at an example of how the same data can be decontextualized and used to reach radically different conclusions:

In a certain city, the health of citizens was measured and given a numerical value. After reviewing the data, it became apparent that the average health of citizens in a specific area of the city was significantly less than the city-wide average. What conclusions can we draw from these numbers?

Poverty has been known to have adverse effects on health. People living in poorer neighborhoods tend to have lower life expectancies, as they have less access to healthy nutrition, less time to take care of themselves, and less access to healthcare. This area could simply be a poor neighborhood.

An alternative explanation is that this area houses a chemical plant that has been known to dump its toxic waste nearby, decreasing the overall health of the residents of the area.

Perhaps the whole idea of the area reducing health is erroneous to begin with, and the lower health average is simply due to it being the location of a hospital complex. Meaning that people with poor health congregate in this area rather than the area itself being the cause.

As you can see, without knowing enough about the context and history of this city, the same data -no matter how accurate- cannot tell us the real story or help us to draw conclusions or causal relationships. This is why propagandists love statistics, because they are wagering that you are not familiar enough with the context or history and that these raw decontextualized numbers will convince you. This is why it is also critical to not only look at how the numbers are used, but also where they came from to begin with.

It is a mistake to think of all data as neutral and objective. It was produced by humans who are -at best- influenced by their social context no matter how objective they try to be, and at worst engineer the data specifically to reinforce a narrative or argument.

This is why you should always ask yourself, who is asking the questions? Why are they asking the questions? How did they arrive at their numbers? Do they have any interest in skewing results one way or another?

Pro-Israel organizations are infamous for designing misleading surveys, where the questions are heavily slanted to produce certain outcomes.

Denying or minimizing the Nakba is nothing new. A brief look at our myths section shows that the Palestinian refugees and their ethnic cleansing have always been the target of Israeli propaganda. From blaming the Palestinians for their own expulsion, to claiming that no expulsions happened at all, you will find contradictory talking points to fit any purpose.

What these myths have in common is their dishonesty in how they present information. They either decontextualize data to influence conclusions, or they build an argument on erroneous assumptions and projections. This myth mixes both these approaches.

From the get-go, it launches its argument from a false definition of ethnic cleansing, conflating it with outright genocide. While it is argued that ethnic cleansing is a form of genocide, it can vary in the methods used. For example, you do not need to wipe out an ethnic group to practice ethnic cleansing. The term “ethnic cleansing” came to prominence after its widespread practice in the regions of former Yugoslavia, a United Nations Commission of Experts referred to ethnic cleansing as:

“… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”

This is not a mere misunderstanding by hasbarists, but a deliberate twisting of the term to make a slanted argument not compatible with the full definition.

(Similarly, the term Apartheid is often incorrectly used to mean a complete carbon copy of South Africa when the definition of Apartheid says no such thing. There are many examples and types of Apartheid. The insistence on this false definition is to distract you from that fact and to stop you from judging Israel by the criteria of the legal definition.)

With the information above in mind, it becomes clear that looking at the total population number to determine if any ethnic cleansing happened is not in and of itself a useful indicator. Indeed, if everyone was pushed out of New York into Austin, the total population number of New Yorkers would not differ. This would not change the fact that the entire population of New York was expelled.

When the correct dates and areas are specified, not even openly pro-Israel websites like Jewish Virtual Library can dispute the fact that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the areas people today call “Israel”:

(The table has been abridged for brevity. You can access the full table here)

This is the reason why many Zionist memes trying to “debunk” this historical fact often begin their table after 1948. This kind of cherry-picking of data, and the suppression of inconvenient facts is rife in the Zionist narrative of the Nakba.

It is no surprise that social media has also become a battleground for hearts and minds when it comes to Palestine. Zionist propaganda has always adapted to whatever is trendy at the time; at its inception, it argued that the Zionists were enlightened colonists who would bring the “backwards” Palestine into civilization, a feat the natives could not accomplish. As colonialism fell out of favor, suddenly Zionist colonizers started rebranding themselves as a force for decolonization, the absolute opposite of their forefathers.

Today, with the recent rise to prominence of a distorted and shallow understanding of identity politics in the US, we see that hasbarists are once again adapting according to popular rhetoric. Suddenly, we see Zionism being detached from its material history and presented as an integral part of an identity. This is especially popular in the West, where young Zionists who are raised on propaganda and myths of the Zionist project come to treat it as inseparable from themselves. Here, we see the cynical twisting of social justice language to frame any criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

In this context, many Zionist “influencers” -often on the payroll of Israel and its various hasbara organizations- have risen to prominence, spreading disinformation and propaganda couched in progressive language. One such propagandist is Hen Mazzig, who recently shared a laughably bad series of images “debunking” the Nakba, using terrible statistics to try and flip reality on its head:

I’m certain that you can instantly see some of the problems with this graph. Twitter user Terriblestats published a series of short videos absolutely demolishing the claims presented.

You will notice that they utilize many of the methods to lie with statistics explored earlier in the article. For example, the graph conveniently inspects the areas of “West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel” to measure any population change. This is similar to the New York and Austin example above; they are trying to tell you since no population decreased in this area there was no ethnic cleansing. This is clearly false. Another problem with this chart is that it purposefully lacks any kind of data points, obscuring the fact that many Palestinians were expelled to neighboring Arab countries.

This brings us to our next point: The data. Mazzig claims the data is from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). The PCBS can indeed be a good source of information on Palestinians today; however, notice how no specific report is cited, just a whole website full of hundreds of reports. The specific numbers used by this chart cannot be verified from the website by a cursory look at the majority of their population statistics.

Even the way the chart is designed would not pass a Statistics 101 class, as it doesn’t even present consistent units of measurement. Notice how the first notch is 30 years, and the remaining ones are 10. If we look at the other graphics in the post, the years and the population being measured are also inconsistent. This was done deliberately to affect the steepness of the inclination of the line on the graph, and by doing so imply a more “rapid” change than what actually occurred.

Once again, we strongly recommend looking at the short videos from Terriblestats for a more illustrated explanation of this post and how it is fudging the numbers.

Ultimately, none of the people spreading these images and memes will fact-check them. We see this all the time in Zionist propaganda. We have seen claim after claim of posts “debunking” well-documented Palestinian history and events by simply contesting them, without providing any real evidence or argument. Quite often, the “debunkings” rely on distortions and outright lies like the case above.

But as we usually say, the goal of propaganda is never to reflect reality. Propaganda exists to make political claims and justify them. It doesn’t even matter if these claims are illogical, all they need to do is support a certain worldview or ideology and its apologists will uncritically adopt it. As our website consistently demonstrates, these ahistorical talking points and dishonest framings comprise much of Zionist propaganda, where ridiculous claims that could be debunked within a minute of research become the cornerstone of a narrative.

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