The reason the numbers are important is that 3/4 million Palestinian Arabs could have had a nation in 1948. They and their progeny could have been celebrating the 60th anniversary this year, just as the Israelis have.

That nation could have thrived as a under the aegis of (Trans)Jordan, which had been lopped off of Palestine in the 1920s to accommodate the Hashemite sheiks. Having rejected the partition (and thereby a country) they could have lived and thrived in Jordan, but that country, nor all the Arab world refused to take them in, but kept them in camps away from the general populace, in hopes of destroying Israel.

There is no reason even today for Palestinian Arabs to live as refugees. They could have built thriving cities in Gaza and the West Bank (Palestine), but they choose squalor for the masses, and confrontation by the elite with Israel...and even Lebanon.

So the three-quarter million have grown to 3-5 million souls, most of whom are little better off than they were in pre-war Palestine, Jordan or Lebanon.