The 1947 UN partition plan was a lot more generous to Arabs than the Israel haters claim ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, November 30, 2025

The 1947 UN partition plan was a lot more generous to Arabs than the Israel haters claim

I just came across a Substack by "The Progressive Jew" in which he pretends to debunk 17 of "The Biggest Zionist Lies of All Time."

It is, frankly, an embarrassing list. Either the "lies" are true (Jews really did make the desert bloom) or they are things that no informed Zionist ever says ("the conflict between Jews and Arabs is thousands of years old". ) It is meant for the echo chamber of anti-Zionists; it doesn't hold up under 30 seconds of actual scrutiny.

But one thing he mentions made me want to look at history a little further:

The 1947 UN Partition Plan was drafted by a committee of 11 countries with no Arab representation and proposed turning roughly 55% of historic Palestine into a “Jewish state” at a time when Jews were about a third of the population and owned less than 7% of the land.

I've looked at how Israel haters misuse the second half of this statement before - there was very little private land altogether in British Mandate Palestine, so the Arabs didn't "own" 93% of the land, but about 17%, the rest being public or other non-privately owned lands. (There were varying classes of lands in between private and public and each side chooses the statistics that help their case, but my numbers are reasonably accurate when talking about private land in the Western sense, not including Arab "musha'a" lands cultivated by Arab villages and also not counting JNF-leased lands cultivated by Jews. And the Jewish percentage would be much higher if there weren't British restrictions on Jews buying land, but that's another topic.)

But let's look at the first half of his statement: the partition plan would have given 55% of the land to only 33% of the population. Sounds unfair, doesn't it? Until you look at the partition map itself:

The vast majority of the land earmarked for the Jewish state was non-arable, Negev desert.

If you exclude non-arable lands from the partition plan, the remainder shows a quite different story than the one given by anti-Zionists. It shows the 33% population of Jews would have received less than 20% of usable land!

This flips the anti-Zionist script on its head - the partition plan was hugely biased towards giving arable land to the Arabs far out of proportion to their population! Under the partition plan the Jewish state would have received ~2,600 km² of non-desert land for its ~600,000 Jews → roughly 230–240 people per km² of usable land, while the Arab state would have received ~11,100 km² of almost entirely non-desert land for its ~725,000 Arabs → roughly 65–70 people per km² of usable land.

In other words, every Jew was allocated about one-quarter to one-third the amount of arable/habitable land that every Arab citizen was allocated.

If you read the UNSCOP report from which the partition plan was hatched, you can see that it supports the "Jews made the desert bloom" idea that is dismissed as a myth. It envisioned hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and there was no physical space for them, so UNSCOP said that the Jews were more likely to turn the desert into usable land for these immigrants. UNSCOP admitted that that without irrigation and investment, the Negev was "practically rainless and almost without life," but "Jewish agriculturists have given much attention to the problems of irrigation" in drier areas.

So the next time someone tells you the 1947 partition was 'unfair to the Arabs,' remember: the UN offered the Arabs 80%+ of the good land for 67% of the population and the Jews a mostly desert state for 33% of the population - and the Arabs still rejected it and started a war.

The 'unfairness' narrative doesn’t survive contact with an actual map.