[_Q_]

Originally Posted by blankall

Your oversimplifying and leaving out details. A Palestinian refugee is defiend as anyone who had been in what is now Israel for 2 years or any of their descendants. Meanwhile you also have rapid expansion of the Palestinian arab population between 1850 and 1949, which cannot be explained by natural growth alone. In other words, Arabs are immigrating into ISrael from other parts of the Ottoman Empire as ecnomic conditions improve..

I would hardly call the population expansion rapid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogra...n_to_Palestine

here is every reason to believe that consequential immigration of Arabs into and within Palestine occurred during the Ottoman and British mandatory periods. Among the most compelling arguments in support of such immigration is the universally acknowledged and practiced linkage between regional economic disparities and migratory impulses. The precise magnitude of Arab immigration into and within Palestine is, as Bachi noted, unknown. Lack of completeness in Ottoman registration lists and British Mandatory censuses, and the immeasurable illegal, unreported, and undetected immigration during both periods make any estimate a bold venture into creative analysis. In most cases, those venturing into the realm of Palestinian demography—or other demographic analyses based on very crude data—acknowledge its limitations and the tentativeness of the conclusions that may be drawn.[38]

"[B]etween 1800 and 1914, the Muslim population had a yearly average increase of an order of magnitude of roughly 6-7 per thousand. This can be compared to the very crude estimate of about 4 per thousand for the "less developed countries" of the world (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) between 1800 and 1910. It is possible that some part of the growth of the Muslim population was due to immigration. However, it seems likely that the dominant determinant of this modest growth was the beginning of some natural increase."[40]

From analyses of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestinian sanjaks, one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after the 1870s was small. Had there been a large group of Muslim immigrants their numbers would have caused an unusual increase in the population and this would have appeared in the calculated rate of increase from one registration list to another... Such an increase would have been easily noticed; it was not there.[42]

The argument that Arab immigration somehow made up a large part of the Palestinian Arab population is thus statistically untenable. The vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters of Arabs who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries.[43]

So your idea that the vast majority of Palestinians were Arab immigrants is at best inconclusive and and worst a flat out lie. Just because Arafat had an Egyptian Grandmother it doesn't mean that every Palestinian is like him.