THE 1967 CENSUS OF THE WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP: A DIGITIZED VERSION

From the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College:

In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the WestBank and Gaza Strip under Israel’s control, the Israeli Central Bureauof Statistics conducted a census of the occupied territories. The resulting seven volumes of reports provide the earliest detailed description of this population, including crucial data aboutrespondents’ 1948 refugee status.

In recent decades, these volumes of tables -- over 300 tables in all-- have received little or no attention from historians of the occupation, not least because it is not easy to use the reports inprint form and in any case the volumes are not widely available even in good research libraries.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is making the contents of these volumes available in machine-readable form for the first time, free of charge to anyone with access to the internet. The tables canbe downloaded in Excel format for intensive research.

Many tables provide information cross-tabulated with several social characteristics at once (for example, education or occupationcross-tabulated with age, gender and refugee status) and presented for small geographic locales as well sub-totaled for regions.

Also, in conjunction with the Palestinian Authority's censuses of 1997 and 2007 these tables help provide an understanding of trends over 40 years. We hope that the data can be exploited by researchers interested in a fuller understanding of the social history of thePalestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

For an overview of our project and to access the hundreds of tablescontained in the 1967 Census database, go to http://www.levyinstitute.org/palestinian-census/