Why do people accuse Israel of genocide against Palestinians when the latters population has increased 14 fold since 1967 ?
This is thoroughly addressed below:
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.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.How to lie with statistics: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 good nutrition, less time to take care of themselves, and less access to h