Thursday, September 3, 2015

Why did the 1947 UN partition of Palestine


Why did the 1947 UN partition of Palestine allocate 56% of Palestine for a Jewish state when they owned just 6% of the land and formed 30% of the population? Was this the reason this conflict has lasted for so long?

  • 56% of Palestine's land was to become a Jewish state, 43% to become a state for the Arabs.
  • The Jewish State was to include 85% of Palestine's agricultural land.
  • In 1945 the Jews owned just 6% of the land, the rest almost entirely being Arab owned. More than half of that 6% of Jewish-owned land was also owned by the JNF and PICA, so not Jewish individuals.
  • In 1945 Jews made up just 31% of the population, almost all of them being immigrants. 68% were Arabs of the Muslim and Christian faiths. 1% were others. In 1931, only 17% of Palestine was Jewish, and their population increased by five times within that 14 year period.

Why exactly was such this partition even proposed, and why were the Palestinians expected to accept this proposal? Why didn't the people behind this partition plan expect that trying to implement this would result in war?

If they wanted to create a Jewish state, couldn't they have done it using the land that Jews actually owned, so making up 6% of the land? With the power the west had, they could have even made a compromise and made up to 15% of Palestine into a Jewish state - but why 56%? Why would a clear majority of a country be given to an immigrant minority group that owned only 6% of the land in that country?
10 Answers
Menachem Pritzker
Menachem PritzkerI live in Israel and it's awesome
2.3k Views • Upvoted by Ilana HalupovichI live in Israel.
It is true, 6% of the land was owned by the Jewish Agency.  This doesn't mean that 94% of the land was in privately held Arab hands.  The vast majority of the land was state-owned, first by the Ottoman Empire, then passing to the British Mandate, with the intention of allocating it to lead the path for two independent states, one Arab, one Jewish.  The first thing the British did with the land was split it 70-30, giving 70% to the Arabs (which was to become Transjordan, later Jordan), and leaving 30% for the Jews (Generally referred to as Palestine, or Eretz Israel).  The later split of 56% to the Jews and 44% to the Arabs was a division of only the remaining 30%.


(NOTE:  The original split of 30-70 is an estimate, I couldn't find an exact number anywhere.  If someone could come up with a more accurate figure, I'll replace it)

EDIT:  A commenter to this question is adamant that I add his map to my answer.  Why Christos doesn't just write his own answer is beyond me, but here goes:


It's not so relevant to my points made above, but I guess in the context of the original question it deserves a place.

There are a few interesting things about this map.  First of all, you can clearly see where the lines 1948 lines would be drawn.  Gaza, Jenin, Nablus all had massive Palestinian communities, so no wonder they ended up on the Arab side of the fence.  I assume the 16% of Jenin and 13% of Nablus somehow made it back to Israel safely and were resettled.

Second, it really highlights the Arab communities that fought alongside the Jews in the war of Independence.  It's a fact that's pretty much lost to history that the War was fought not strictly speaking between Arabs and Jews, but between the invading Arab armies of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, and the Jews, who were fighting alongside their Druze, Christian, Circassian and Bedouin allies, who sure as hell didn't want to live under the thumb of a regressive Islamic invading regime.(*)  These minorities assumed, correctly, that their freedoms would be better guaranteed under a Jewish state than a Muslim one.  These minorities account for a large part what what this map labels as "Palestinian" in Haifa and Nazareth.  Unfortunately, the Palestinian community rejected living in peace with their neighbors, and supported the invading Arab armies.  In cases where the local populace joined in the fighting, many of them lost their homes.  Many Palestinians also heeded the calls of the Arab commanders to evacuate the area and return when the Arab armies had exterminated the Jews (we're all still waiting).

Thirdly, what I think is the most notable point of this map is what it chooses to leave out.  Let's zoom the map out a little bit, and take a look at the Middle East as a whole.  During this period of warfare, the invading Arab states also expelled their own Jewish communities.  About 700,000 Jews lost their homes in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and other Arab cities.  So yes, it's certainly true that many Arabs lost their homes during these wars.  It's possible Israel might have considered some form of compensation at the time (if any could have proven non-involvement in the war) if she hadn't been so busy taking care of her own incoming refugee crisis.  Today, the children of these refugees are successful, productive members of a free society.  It's too bad Syria, Jordan, and Egypt chose to keep their Palestinian refugees living in mud and squalor, to be used as bargaining chips.

An equal amount of land was lost by both sides in this war.  It's time to drop the issue.

(*) Side note about these communities.  The last time I did my reserve duty in the IDF, I rode a jeep along the northern border with Lebanon.  The driver of my jeep was Druze, the commander was Circassian, and the tracker was Bedouin.  I was the only Jew, the lowest ranking soldier of the four of us, and I was the only one who wasn't born in Israel!  My time with them really gave me a sense of the proud diversity in this country.
  
Balaji Viswanathan
Balaji ViswanathanTeacher and a Product Manager.
1.4k Views • Balaji has 150+ answers and 48 endorsements in International Relations.
>> they could have even made a compromise and made up to 15% of Palestine into a Jewish state 

1937, the Peel commission offered only 15% to the Jewish people. The offer was rejected by the Arabs although it had a partial support among the Jews. Peel Commission.

This has been the attitude of the Arab leadership from day 1. Arabs didn't want to give up any piece of land and underestimated the world reaction. More flexibility could have gotten a more amicable solution even in 1930s. By refusing to negotiate, the Arabs lost all respect and leverage. Eventually, world opinion sided towards the Jewish state. 

Any partition was bound to be brutal. Someone has to lose their home and lands to a stranger. But, it was a terrible situation. A sizable chunk of the world thought that the Jews had no nation to go to (leading to many of the horrors in early 20th century) while the Arabs in Palestine had other nations who could accept them. 

To make the matters worse, a coalition of Arab nations - Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan invaded the Palestine territory in 1948 shortly after the UN's partition plan. 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The use of force from a large group of external countries further led credence to the world fears that Jews would be eliminated if they didn't have a sizable enough territory. 

In short, if anyone is to be blamed for the partition, it was the Arab leadership. They acted clueless, inflexible and completely underestimated world opinion while overestimating their strength.
  
Quora User
Quora User
2.5k Views • Quora User has 40+ answers in Palestine.
The basic reason why Arabs rejected the partition was not the percentages allocated to each group, though that made the proposition more unjust. Your last point correctly identifies the basic reason:

In 1945 Jews made up just 31% of the population, almost all of them being immigrants. 68% were Arabs of the Muslim and Christian faiths. 1% were others. In 1931, only 17% of Palestine was Jewish, and their population increased by five times within that 14 year period.


Since the beginning of the British mandate in Palestine, the Arabs of Palestine had demanded independence from the British, and also demanded that massive Jewish immigration to the land be halted. The British had as much legitimacy to alter the demographics of Palestine as they did in India, Iraq or Egypt. That is, none whatsoever. The basic principle at work is unjust. Had the British allowed hundreds of thousands of Romani Gypsies to immigrate to India during their colonization of the subcontinent, and then decided to partition the subcontinent giving half of it to recent immigrants, most Indians would have rejected the partition, and would have fought for a unified India. In such a scenario, the persecution of the Romani people during the holocaust, or the fact that they are a people without a state, is unlikely to matter much to Indians who have very little to do with either of these things. The same was true for the Arabs.
  
Quora User
Quora User
766 Views • Quora User has 40+ answers in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Anticipated immigration. 700,000 Jews did immigrate to Israel by 1951.

As for the land ownership, this is the best map.


The British considered the plan unfair to the Palestinians, but at that point they just wanted to get out (who wouldn't?). From the looks of it, an emphasis was placed on creating a contiguous Jewish state more than creating perfect justice for the Arab state (perfect justice being impossible). Still, a significant effort was made, judging by Jaffa being made part of the Arab state despite being in the middle of the Jewish state right beside Tel-Aviv. Maybe that's a sign of how impossible the partition was.

In the absence of nationalistic violence in the preceding decades, Jewish land ownership would likely have been much higher, and Jewish immigration numbers would have been much higher. So this is from an artificially low starting point. 

Lastly, much of the 56% figure is actually the Negev desert, which was state-owned and had few settlements.
  
Omer Strulovich
Omer Strulovich
1.6k Views • Upvoted by Ilana HalupovichI live in Israel.
Counting the offer by percentage is a gross simplification.
A quick look at the map will show that the majority of the future Jewish state would have been plain desert from the Negev area, and some land is worth less than other land.

The offer might be unfair to one side, but it requires better analyzing to actually draw such meaningful conclusions.


A few other notes:
- The general Arab rejection of the plan wasn't because of the details of the partition, but the general idea itself.
- The fact that Jews owned 6% of the land officially then, does not mean the other 94% was owned officially by Palestinians (even counting all Bedouins, and the various variations and tribes that were not one cohesive national unit)
  
John Freitas
John Freitas
677 Views
A better question is why did Western Christian countries, those responsible for centuries of persecution of the Jews, determine that they had the authority to give something that was not theirs to give, a land occupied by and belonging to the Palestinian people, to another people who were to come from thousands of miles away to dispossess the indigenous occupants of the land?  Make no mistake, in November, 1947, it was Western Christian countries that completely dominated the UN.

Might the motivation of these Western Christian countries have been to assuage the guilt they felt over their centuries of persecution of the Jews culminating in the Nazi holocaust?  Why should the Palestinians have been the ones to pay for these centuries of persecution of Jews by Western Christian countries?  Why, indeed, were none of these countries interested in providing a safe haven for Jews when evidence of their persecution began to mount in pre WWII Germany?  Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a conference in 1938 in Evian France to address the issue.   The several dozen countries in attendance all found one excuse or another to decline to give refuge to anything more than a token number of Jews.  David Ben-Gurion was extremely relieved when the conference ended without haven being granted to large numbers of Jews.  If that had happened, in his view, that would have been the death of political Zionism and its plan of an exclusivist Jewish state in the land of another people.

As to the specifics of the question, those drawing the partition lines were, again, Western Christians who felt they owed something to the Jews for the centuries of persecution.  Moreover, there continued to be resistance in many of these countries to taking in large numbers of Jewish refugees.  So, what to do?  Well, send them to Palestine, of course, which is precisely what the Zionists wanted. The partition lines were an attempt to give the Jews a majority in their sector.  Even so, had it not been for the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing initiated almost immediately following the UN partition on 29 November 1947, the State of Israel would have consisted of nearly an equal number of Palestinians and Jews.  Inasmuch as the Zionist aim was a JEWISH state, such a division of population was entirely unacceptable and, hence, the campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to give the Jews a substantial majority in their sector.  In addition to the factors mentioned by the person posing the question, it is important to note that the Jews were given 75% of the shoreline, including the only port, and control of the major source of fresh water.

M. Pritzker claims that the British gave 70% of the land to the "Arabs".  This is an oft repeated Zionist falsehood.  From the very earliest days dating back to the Balfour declaration, an outrageous piece of Zionist/British chutzpah, the British had made it very, very clear to the Zionists that Transjordan was not a part of the area envisioned as a "national home of the Jews".  Just because the Jews wanted it does not mean that they were entitled to a share of it.  

Further, while large tracts of Palestinian land were state land or owned by large absentee land owners, that is entirely irrelevant to the issue.  For centuries, Palestinian peasant farmers had been able to rent the land of large land owners, and to farm tracts of government owned land.  That is an arrangement entirely different than one in which a foreign people would come from thousands of miles away to take control of that land for the benefit of Jews only.
  
Robert Santora
Robert SantoraProblem solver and researcher
245 Views • Upvoted by Ilana HalupovichI live in Israel.
1. The UN allocated the remaining portions of Palestine into 2 states with borders and governments based on demographic majority. 

Majority Jewish areas would become Israel. 

Majority Arab areas would become a second Palestinian Arab state. 

Majority Jewish Jerusalem would become an "international city" open to all. 

So, the 56% figure reflects the area that was majority Jewish in population. 

By way of analogy, more than half the population of NY State lives in NYC alone even though NYC is way less than half of the area of NY state. 

But, if the state of NY were to break up into independent areas, it would not make sense for NYC residents to say, "we are the majority population in the entire state, so we are taking not only NYC but other parts we want as well even though there are no NYC residents there." 

2. The "statistic" that it was 56% of Palestine is a bit misleading because the definition of Palestine changed in 1946. Approximately 80% of Palestine was granted independence as a Jew Free state and renamed Jordan (and given to the foreign Hashemites to rule). 

3.  I don't know about the validity of the claim about how much land was agricultural land. But, I do know that Arabs complained earlier and the British investigated and concluded that Arabs were selling low quality land to Jews at exorbitant prices; the Jews were then turning the land into high quality agricultural land by working it. 

4. Palestinian Jews owned about 7% of the land in Palestine. 

Palestinian Arabs owned about 5% of the land in Palestine.

Foreign Arabs (mostly absentee landlords) owned about 20-25% of the land in Palestine.

The government owned the rest (most of the land in Palestine).
  
Adam Gal
Adam Gal
258 Views
I will only add to the other answers by saying - regarding the majority of the beaches being given to the Jews:
At that time beaches were considered valuable as a place to dump sewage. Even tel-aviv, which now makes a ton of money off beaches used to be referred to as 'a city with its back to the sea'. The shoreline was only developed much after 1947. 

The bottom line is that - as many have noted - this complaint about percentage of land or percentage of beaches etc. does not take into account the percieved value of that land at the time. 

As a personal note: to me all these questions are obviously motivated by irrational antisemitism. Perhaps the OP should examine their motivation.

Edit: it seems the antisemites have succeeded in collapsing my answer. 
Kudos- antisemites.
  
Josh Gonik
Josh Gonik
362 Views
A large amount of the land which was allotted to the Jewish state was in the Negev Desert, which isn't the most appealing place to live. Also, it is worth noting that there was a desire to ensure that Israel would have enough room/space to settle large numbers of Jewish immigrants who will arrive there after Israel is created.
  
Quora User
Quora UserLived and studied in Jerusalem for 2 years.
249 Views
The point of the partition plan (actually the purpose of the State of Israel) was to provide a stable homeland for the Jewish People and not just the jewish population of Palestine at the time of partition. Had the partition been according to the population of that time, it would have defeated that purpose.
  
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