11% of Palestine's 1948 population created Israel

11% of those born in Palestine created the State of Israel in 1948

Can the creation of a state be justified in a territory where those claiming it are a minority and the majority of residents do not approve? That is the crux of the matter. In 1948, when the British Mandate expired, **1,415,000 non-Jews** lived in Palestine compared to **650,000 Jews**, and the majority of those 650,000 were not even born there. With these figures, the administration of **55% of the territory** went to the Zionist project and **45%** to the rest. The arithmetic does not match the narrative.

The 1948 numbers that support the argument

The demographic review is the core of everything. In 1533-39, Jews were **3% of the population** of that territory. In 1931, only **20%**. In 1948, with the British Mandate exhausted, Jews totaled 650,000 souls against 1,415,000 non-Jews, and the vast majority of those 650,000 were outsiders arriving in the heat of the project. The UN-approved partition delivered to the minority side the administration of 55% of the land, including the fertile coast, and left 90% of the native population with the remaining 45%, mostly desert and hills.

Some maintain that this division was the lesser evil after the Holocaust and that the territory was a wasteland with no clear owner. Against this weighs a fact documented by the British Mandate itself: Jews owned only **1,500 km² of the 26,000** at stake. The difference between real ownership and assigned administration is, at best, striking.

Why did the left and the USSR support the partition?

The Soviet Union, the communist countries of the time, and much of the international left were the first to back the new state. This detail dismantles the simplistic reading that it all boils down to right against left. Soviet support responded to Cold War calculations: reducing British influence in the Middle East and gaining a potential ally. Time proved the calculation accurate, though not in the sense Moscow expected.

The paradox serves more than sarcasm. Today, whoever automatically positions themselves on the side supporting the left may end up defending the opposite of what the left defended seventy years ago. Ideological labels unravel when you pull the historical thread.

The comparison with Spain that runs through the analysis

The most repeated exercise is the trinc: imagine that descendants of Andalusians, now a minority in Spain, claimed a state in Andalusia invoking historical rights and a sacred book. Whose side would the people take? The majority answer is clear. And applying that same criterion to 1948 leads to the conclusion that the Zionist project was a colonizing project executed on already inhabited land.

The parallel has traps—historical memory is not symmetric nor do international conditions repeat—but it works as a test of coherence. Whoever rejects it for Spain but accepts it for Palestine should explain why.

The shift of the analysis toward individual conscience

Much of the argument abandons geopolitics and lands in the sarracena terrain. The thesis is that, if we set aside the sacred books of each side and appeal only to conscience, the conclusion is inescapable: the project that dispossesses a native majority of its territory cannot be sustained. And from there derives a broader critique of those who position themselves by electoral calculation or sarracena posing.

The weak point of this reasoning is that conscience is not a neutral arbitrator. Everyone has theirs, and all come loaded with education, interests, and prejudices. Appealing to it as a supreme court solves the problem in theory and perpetuates it in practice.

From Camp David to Gaza: what the analysis adds to the present

The historical review goes up to Camp David. Under Ehud Barak, in 2000, Israel offered a Palestinian state with a capital in Abu Dis, without significant dismantling of settlements and without return of refugees. The negotiations failed. The reading made of Oslo is that it became a peace discourse with no correspondence on the ground.

This thread leads to the present. The repeated conclusion is that the origin of the current conflict lies in the insistence on creating a Jewish state in a place already inhabited, and that everything else—violence, occupation, blockades—is a consequence of that starting point. Discussing obviousities, they say, makes little sense.

In the end, the question remains the same as in 1948: who has the right to decide over a territory and by what criteria. Seventy-five years later, no one has found an answer that satisfies everyone. And those who seek it with data usually end up in the same box as those who seek it with faith.