There is a common narrative that shows up in classrooms, on social media, and in graphic “partition maps” that Jews illegally moved into Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine as outsiders, seized land they didn’t own, kicked the Arabs out, and only gained a state because the United Nations handed them one in 1947. The implication is simple: the Partition Plan was a nefarious project to steal land from Arabs and give it to Jews; European Jews stole the land from the indigenous people and colonized it.
This article doesn’t try to solve every argument about the indigeneity of Jews to Israel. It focuses on something narrower and more concrete: land. Specifically, how much of the territory shown in the 1947 UN Partition Plan map was already legally purchased by Jews before 1947. To understand this, we look at the 1945 Jewish National Fund Land Ownership Map, which shows where Jews had already established legal footholds by the end of the Mandate period, and why private Jewish ownership doesn’t need to equal the borders proposed by the UN to make the partition plan legitimate.
What the 1945 JNF map shows — and what it doesn’t
JNF 1945 land map
In 1945, the JNF’s Survey Department compiled a map of land already purchased by Jewish institutions and individuals across Mandatory Palestine. It highlights Jewish-owned parcels spread through the coastal plain, parts of the Galilee, the Jezreel Valley, and scattered areas of the Negev. These weren’t “future dreams” on paper; they were titled holdings acquired years — often decades — before the UN ever voted to partition the country.
But it’s crucial to be clear about what this map is not.
It is not a proposed border map. It is not a UN document. And it is not a full picture of who owned every dunam of land (a dunam is roughly 1,000 square meters or about a quarter acre). It’s a snapshot of Jewish holdings in a land where much property was owned privately by Arabs and where a very large share (around 46%) was legally classified as state/public land under Ottoman and British systems.
So why does the map matter? Because it shows something critics erase: that Jewish statehood did not begin with a UN vote. It rested on decades of legal purchase and development that created real demographic and economic facts on the ground.
JNF advertisement asking for donations (Courtesy of David Matlow)
Map of JNF- and Jewish-owned land (Courtesy of David Matlow)
How Jews acquired the land before 1948
In the late 19th century, an extraordinary movement began, which was the evolution of a 2000-year-old prayer and yearning to return to Jerusalem and the land of Israel. The movement, known as Zionism, envisioned the physical return to the Jewish ancestral homeland through the purchase and cultivation of land. This movement was not a colonial project or launched by armies; it was the organization and formulation of centuries of struggle.
To organize that effort, the Zionist movement founded JNF, known in Hebrew as Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. The JNF’s mission was straightforward: to buy land in Ottoman and later British Mandate Palestine for Jewish settlement and development.
Overlay of the 1945 JNF map and the 1947 UN partition map
The JNF turned to Jewish communities across the Diaspora for help. Its most iconic fundraising tool was the blue pushke box, a small tin collection box placed in Jewish homes, classrooms, and synagogues from New York to Warsaw to Johannesburg. Coins dropped into these boxes funded the purchase of land for future generations. Beyond fundraising, the pushke became a cultural symbol of participation in rebuilding the land.
By the 1940s, millions of Jews had contributed to pushke boxes. The JNF’s efforts were synergistic with those of major philanthropists to keep early agricultural communities alive. Chief among them was Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who personally financed struggling and nascent settlements such as Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Yaakov, and Rosh Pinna.
JNF Pushke box (Courtesy of David Matlow)
JNF call for donations (Courtesy of David Matlow)
Between 1901 and 1947, Jewish institutions, land companies, and private buyers purchased land through legal channels recognized by Ottoman and then British law. Much of it was bought from absentee Arab landlords living in Beirut, Damascus, or Istanbul; other times, it was purchased from local owners and, occasionally, from the state. These transactions were real estate conveyances undertaken in accordance with the real estate transfer laws under Ottoman, and later British, law.
JNF deliberately focused on land in low-populated areas, so that there was minimal impact to people living there, and to avoid conflict, but in cases where they bought land which had tenants, or even squatters, JNF paid them above the Ottoman or British laws for new owners.
JNF land acquisition chart (Courtesy of David Matlow)
Jewish ownership by 1947
By the end of the British Mandate, Jewish land ownership was still a minority of the country’s total area, but it was significant and concentrated in strategically important regions.
The map below, compiled in 1945 by the JNF’s Survey Department, shows areas representing purchased land already in Jewish possession long before the partition plan or Israel’s independence in 1948. The map reveals how Jewish settlement spread across the coastal plain, Galilee, Jezreel Valley, and Negev, regions largely neglected or undeveloped before the Zionist movement began restoring them.
In the images here, you see the purchased land increase; they use the measurement dunam. The combined dunams purchased by JNF and Private investors equaled 2,482,782 dunams, or 620,695.5 acres, or 970 square miles of land.
Those numbers matter for two reasons. They show the Zionist project relied heavily on purchase and cultivation, not conquest. They also help explain why Jewish settlement patterns were geographically clustered rather than spread evenly.
1947 UN partition plan
On Nov. 29, 1947, the newly formed United Nations passed Resolution 181, a partition plan to divide the land into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration.
While critics often claim this was an international “gift” of land to Jews, or the blood libel that Jews stole the land, the reality is quite different. Jews bought much of the land, so there could be no question of the legal status. The UN was not drawing a property title map. It was trying to create two viable states based on population concentrations, existing Jewish and Arab settlement blocs, economic and agricultural potential, and large stretches of state land that could be allocated.
This is also why the UN plan differed from earlier British ideas, such as the Peel Commission (1937), which proposed a far smaller Jewish state (around 20% of the land) and was shaped by the politics of the Arab Revolt and the geography of settlement concentration at the time. The Jewish side of the partition plan land area was 5.4 million Acres, of which 60% was the Negev desert, which at the time was largely arid and sparsely populated. It was only through the effort of the Jewish community did the Negev develop into the forests, drip irrigated farms and kibbutzim, and cities that are there today. That leaves 2,160,000 acres of the partition plan, which was in the north, and as mentioned, 620,695.5 acres (or 25%) was already owned by Jews. The other 75% for the most part, was filling in the gaps between the existing Jewish-owned land.
Meanwhile, much of the agriculturally rich central highlands, where Jews had limited landholdings, was designated for the Arab state. The UN partition was not the creation of something from nothing; it was a division based on realities that Jewish labor and philanthropy had already shaped.
The JNF’s accomplishments extended far beyond land purchases. It drained the malaria-infested Hula swamps, transformed the Negev into arable farmland, and planted forests where barren hills once stood. The organization’s work became a living expression of the Zionist ideal to make the desert bloom. As imperfect as the State of Israel is, as imperfect as its founding was, we are the materialization of 2000 years of Jewish yearning for return.
Benji Rosenzweig and David Matlow (courtesy)
This summer, I was lucky enough to spend some time with David Matlow, a Toronto-based historian and the world’s foremost collector of Theodor Herzl memorabilia. Matlow’s collection, which includes JNF boxes, posters, and photographs of early Zionist pioneers, provided a window into the spirit of the time, a people rebuilding their homeland, one dunam at a time. I am sharing a handful of images to give you a snapshot of the views the Jews of the time saw.
