Why Did Israel Get More Than Half of Palestine in the 1947?

Through the 18th hundreds and even the 19th hundred, the population of Arabs has far surpassed the Jews, and In 1947 the population of Arabs nearly doubled the number of Jews. So it’s not unreasonable to ask why did the Jews get a bit more than half of the country in the 1947 UN proposal? Yet if you dig a bit deeper, you will clearly see why.

So, first of all, let’s start by analyzing what the Jews really got. It’s easy to take specific borders of convenience and then claim that Jews took half.

The Arab land as a whole is about 13,132,327 Sq KM. The proposed Israel land of that time was 8850 sq KM, which is 0.07%. Keep in mind that the majority of Arab countries were formed between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the British and French colonization in the early 19th century. So they are mostly freshly new spanking countries.

But we can appreciate that most of Arabia have nothing to do with the Jews. So let’s compare to the region heavily populated by Arabs that is not considered Arabia, the Levant. A region known to be conquered by Arabs during the caliphate, which consists of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and of course, Israel/Palestine. The size of the Levant is 602,091 sq km, and the UN proposal for Israel was about 1.5% of that.

Let’s sink deeper. How about the original British Mandate of Palestine of 1922, which was sized at 120,466 sq km. Israel was offered only 7.3% of that. Just to be clear, Jews were offered 7.3% of the region, while the rest was given to the Arabs who formed the Kingdom of Jordan.

So the fact that Arabs have gotten all this land across middle and North Africa, then got 80% of the British mandate of Palestine, omitted Jerusalem,  and then divided the last 15%, that is the approximate size of New Jersey, does not mean that Jew got 56%.

Now many people would argue that what the British considered Palestine was not necessarily fair in the first place. That might be true, but that concern goes with both the original mandate and the modified one. If you look at most maps of Israel, Judah, or Palestine, the region includes a big chunk east of the Jordan River. So it almost never just started from the river.

So maybe the original mandate of Palestine was a bit bigger than what we would have considered to be Palestine. Modified Palestine was way smaller. That means the negotiation for land should have started from much more east of the river.

But let’s stick to the Narrative that the rest of the Arab’s land is associated with a completely separate ethnic group from the Palestinians. We will ignore that Jordan consists of mostly Palestinians and is controlled by a foreign Hashemite Kingdom abd we will ignore that Palestinians were simply levant Arabs that created their national identity in the 20th century and should be considered part of the greater Arab community.

So now we have Israel/Palestine, and we need to accommodate both ethnicities,

Now strictly analyzing the land based on the river to the sea border and associating land proportional to people is truly a border of convenience that does not tell all story.

Not only because we are ignoring the previous borders or Arab lands and the original Palestine, but also ignoring regions in Palestine where Jews were the majority.

The UN has divided the land according to the concentration of the population, where Jews were a majority.

This included Cities like Safed, Jaffa and Haifa. Interestingly enough, in those regions that Jews mostly populated, the Arabs that came along were new migrants that moved there because of the economic benefits. We know this to be true because the population of Arabs in the regions around Jewish settlements grew by 401% since 1893, while the region not populated by Jews grew by 116%.

Also, the land that Jews got was 60% desert, mostly infertile, until Israelis developed some genius farming techniques. It was also not a strategic region for security and military purpose.

To make this raw deal even more sour, the Jews also did not get their 2 most important cities. Jerusalem, which was under international mandate, and as the Jewish minority, would most likely always get the last word on everything. Then Hebron, where all the forefathers have been buried, was given to the Arabs.

Speaking of proportionality in population, the reason why the Jewish population was only about half of the Arabs, is because the Arabs put pressure on the Brits to limit Jewish migration, while Arab migration was unaccounted for. About 37% percent of the Arab population in Palestine were considered to be migrants from neighboring countries. Also, a nice chunk of the Arabs were Nomadic Bedouins that had nothing to do with the Local Arab national identity.

I have to say, writing the few paragraphs above was exhausting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the reader is overwhelmed by this level of technicalities. This fairness argument could lead to hours of pointless arguments that will not be worth the time of any influencer.

The big fact is, that the Arabs, Under the Grand Mufti Al-Husayni, were not interested in any partition. They were not humoring the UN or negotiating with the Jews. They made it very clear that they wanted everything and focused on limiting Jewish migration, even during the Holocaust. So any discussion about fairness is null because there were no negotiations on their part, and not even on Jewish town would have made them happy.

The reality is that Jews are a population that is destined to be a minority forever. We have very strict conversion laws and were always an easy pick for massacre or genocide. The idea is that an Indigenous minority does not get a fair chance in a land to call their own, a home, is simply unreasonable. The idea that only a population resulting from conquering and forced conversion gets to pick and choose which land belongs to them is an unreasonable concept that might have worked in the past but shouldn’t be accepted in the present time.

Coming soon…

Coming soon…