Books Cited or Mentioned in this Column:

Gilbert, Martin. Israel: A History. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge University Press, First paperback edition, 1989.

Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999.

Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2000.

This is the second in a series of columns [first one here] commenting on Thomas Knapp’s “Context is everything: American libertarians and Israel, part 1.”

Tom wrote the article as a response to “Is Applying Libertarian Principles to Israel Anti-Semitic?” by Carol Moore.

One of the most important claims in Carol’s article is that “Israel holds just claim to only a small percentage of even Israel proper.” Carol links to a scholarly article, “The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel,” by Stephen P. Halbrook, which estimates the amount of land owned by Jews in 1947 as less than 7% of Palestine, and less than 10% of the Jewish state proposed by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (UNGAR 181) in that year. [Map]

Tom doesn’t acknowledge the point, much less respond to it. Instead he writes:

Ms. Moore’s fifth articulated principle is “Political self-determination and secession.” “Libertarians believe everyone, no matter their religion, ethnicity, ideology, etc., has the right to secede from any political union or colonial or occupied territory on their justly acquired land and to self-govern themselves on it,” she says. And she’s correct. Of course, when Jews in Palestine attempted to do exactly that (the formation of Israel was preceded by half a century of peaceful immigration and land purchase/development), they found themselves attacked at every juncture.

Tom understates the case if time were the issue. Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the middle of the nineteenth century. The First Aliyah began in 1882.

But the question isn’t “how long?”, it’s “how much?” The Zionists didn’t found their new state strictly on their “justly acquired land,” but on a much larger territory, mostly owned and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Arabs to whom they extended no right of counter-secession. Carol makes that point loud and clear. Tom, having no answer, pretends not to hear.

The report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) is a good place to begin exploring this. UNSCOP drew up the partition plan which, with some modification, was incorporated into UNGAR 181.

The UNSCOP report notes that “The Arab population, despite the strenuous efforts of Jews to acquire land in Palestine, at present remains in possession of approximately 85 per cent of the land.”

Historian Tom Segev says “At the beginning of the British occupation the Zionists had expected to acquire five million dunams within five years. They ended up owning a mere 10 percent of the country, and of the land included in the Zionist wish map submitted to the Paris Peace Conference their holdings constituted much less than 10 percent.” (Segev, p. 273)

Historian Benny Morris agrees with the 7% figure. “In 1947 Jews (i.e., the JNF, the PICA and private landholders) owned some 7% (i.e., 1.775 million dunams) of Palestine’s total of 26.4 million dunams of land.” (Morris, 1989, p. 170)

An article posted by the pro-Zionist Jewish Virtual Library says “By May 1948, when the Mandate expired and Israel was about to proclaim its statehood, land redemption had placed nearly one-tenth of the country under Jewish ownership, the rest being owned by the government or by Arabs.”

I’m not aware of anyone claiming that Jews owned more than 10% of Palestine in 1947. Of my off-line sources the most pro-Zionist, Martin Gilbert’s Israel: a History, is silent on the subject.

UNGAR 181 allocated just over half of Palestine to the proposed Jewish state. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 54% to 57%. Stephen Halbrook says 57% in the article that Carol links.

If we take 15% as an upper bound for the land that might plausibly have been “justly acquired” by Jews in Palestine, the proposed Jewish state of UNGAR 181 was over three and a half times as large.

The UNSCOP report provides some demographic information. It follows the convention (as I will also) of using “Jew” and “Arab” as dichotomous terms. Jewish Arabs are counted as Jews, and are not counted as Arabs. The “others” would be a small fraction of the population, I think mainly Circassians and Armenians.

“The figures given for the distribution of the settled population in the two proposed States, as estimated on the basis of official figures up to the end of 1946, are approximately as follows:

	Jews	Arabs & Others	Total
The Jewish State	498,000	407,000	905,000
The Arab State	10,000	725,000	735,000
City of Jerusalem	100,000	105,000	205,000

“In addition there will be in the Jewish State about 90,000 Bedouins, cultivators and stock owners who seek grazing further afield in dry seasons.”

The reader will recall that some changes were made to the UNSCOP proposal before it was incorporated into UNGAR 181. The most important involved the port city of Jaffa. The UNSCOP report says: “Jaffa, which has an Arab population of about 70,000, is entirely Arab except for two Jewish quarters. It is contiguous with Tel Aviv and would either have to be treated as an enclave or else be included in the Jewish State. On balance, and having in mind the difficulties which an enclave involves, not least from the economic point at view, it was thought better to suggest that Jaffa be included in the Jewish State . . .”

Notwithstanding this advice, UNGAR 181 accorded enclave status to Jaffa. This and other changes reduced the Arab population of the proposed Jewish state from 497,000 (including the Bedouins) to about 400,000. (Morris, 1999, p. 184)

Comparing these two maps, the Jewish state proposed by UNGAR 181 appears to include most of the district of Safad, and most if not all of the districts of Tiberias and Beisan (Baysan).

Each district is named for its principal city. This was an Ottoman practice which continued through the Mandate period. It can be confusing, particularly with regard to such things as population statistics.

The UNSCOP report says that Jews are “between 25 and 34 per cent of the total population” of the Tiberias and Beisan districts, and “between 10 and 25 per cent of the total population” of the Safad district.

Benny Morris says that in 1947 the city of Beisan was entirely Arab, with a population of 6,000. (Morris, 1989, p. 105) The city of Safad had “a population of 10,000-12,000 Arabs and 1,500 Jews.” (Morris, 1989, p. 102) UNGAR 181 assigned both cities to the proposed Jewish state.

The guiding principle seems to have been that only overwhelmingly Arab areas were assigned to the proposed Arab state. Mixed areas were assigned to the proposed Jewish state, even when they had substantial Arab majorities. Further evidence of this is the relatively small number of Jews, about 10,000, in UNSCOP’s proposed Arab state.

The “proposed Jewish state” of UNGAR 181 did not represent a secession on “justly acquired land”. It incorporated a large population of non-Jewish Arabs, whose consent was not asked for and who would not be permitted any counter secession on their own “justly acquired land”.