I was speaking with someone about Jewish land ownership in Israel before 1947, and one of my findings was incorrect. I spent two hours afterward researching the mistake. I apologized. I shared the new details I had found, and it made me feel the way all of these fact checking discussions end up making me feel: kind of gross.

I feel a big part of this conflict is relitigating the history of the conflict, and if I learned anything from my divorce and my present day partnership where we actively Do The Work, it’s that relitigating conflicts usually prolongs them.

It seems that for every fact on the Israel side there’s an equal fact on the Palestinian side. I’ve always felt this to be true, and it mostly shakes out.

Today, I learned that 60% of the UN Partition allocation to Israel was in the Negev Desert. While this region was barren and undeveloped, there were nomadic Bedouin Arabs living there. Their nomadic culture did not exactly pair well with the formation of a formal Arab or Jewish state. Here’s another percentage that surprised me: The Negev Desert was 40% of Mandatory Palestine! The figures around this are probably part of the reason you will hear people say that the land was not developed before Jews began establishing in the region. If I were a fact rating organization, I would probably say this is somewhat true, but you see how convoluted it is.

So, as I said, 60% of the Negev went to Israel.

What about the remaining 40% of land allocated to Israel? It was based on demographic areas where Jews had either majority cities or established communities or both. In approximate numbers, this looks like:

Total area of Mandatory Palestine: 26,000 sq. km., 1947 portion allocated to Israel: 14,000 sq. km.

Approximate land allocated to the Jewish state by area:

• The Negev Desert 8,400  sq. km.
• Tel Aviv and Haifa (including the coastal plain): ~2,000–2,500 sq. km. 7%
• Galilee: ~3,500 sq. km.
• Jezreel Valley: ~400–500 sq. km.
• Beit Shean Valley: ~300 sq. km.

In the process of reviewing the UN Census from 1947 and comparing it to the allocation numbers above, I saw the Jewish majorities aligning in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and while I tally it all, I’m thinking: is this important? Do we still have to prove who deserves the land? 

Rav Shimon Sarfati used to say “Plenty of people in the cemetery died being right.”

How do we begin to let go as a people of that need to be right? And is it fair to ask such a thing when it feels like any concession will be weaponized to challenge our existence?

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.

* https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210930/

** https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-u-n-partition-plan#:~:text=These%20boundaries%20were%20based%20solely,arid%20desert%20in%20the%20Negev.