Jewish landholding in Mandatory Palestine reached about 2,000,000 dunams by 14 May 1948, roughly 7.6% of the land of Palestine, on the figures published by the Center for Israel Education. Almost all of it changed hands by purchase, recorded under an Ottoman statute of 1858 that had already moved formal title away from many of the people farming the ground. The published shares for that same moment run from 2.1% to 7.6%, a threefold spread across four organizations, and the state proclaimed on 14 May 1948 rested its sovereignty on an instrument that mentions no purchased parcel at all. Behind the argument sits a plain question: whose ground was it, and what document made it so?
Key Findings
- About 2,000,000 dunams of land in Palestine were in Jewish hands by 14 May 1948, roughly 600,000 dunams of it acquired before 1920 and about 1,400,000 dunams between 1920 and 1948, on the Center for Israel Education’s published explainer on land in Palestine and land in Israel.
- That total is about 7.6% of all the land in Palestine and about 28% of the land that became the State of Israel, two different denominators the same explainer reports separately.
- Published shares for Jewish landholding at the end of the Mandate differ threefold: 7.6% (Center for Israel Education), 5.67% (the compiled Mandate-era map series published by PASSIA), and 557,000 to 781,192 dunams, or 2.1% to 2.9%, in BADIL’s compilation. None of the four is a state cadastral survey.
- The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 introduced registration in individual names, and cultivated land was frequently registered to notables, merchants and absentee owners rather than to the cultivators in possession, per the Journal of Historical Geography study of nineteenth-century landownership in Palestine and the An-Najah University journal review of land tenure and registration.
- Roughly 700,000 Palestinians left their homes and became refugees during the 1948 war, on Benny Morris’s archival estimate in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which attributes the exodus to causes varying by locality and phase and rejects both a single master expulsion plan and the claim that departures were voluntary.
How did Jews acquire land in Palestine before 1948?
By purchase, and the running total is published: about 2,000,000 dunams in Jewish hands by 14 May 1948, on the Center for Israel Education’s explainer on land in Palestine and land in Israel. The same explainer splits that total by period, about 600,000 dunams acquired before 1920 and about 1,400,000 dunams between 1920 and 1948, which places roughly 70% of the acquisition inside the twenty-eight years of the British Mandate.
A second published account gives a slightly earlier reading. The United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history of the question of Palestine states that by June 1947 Jewish interests had taken over 1,850,000 dunams out of the 13,000,000 dunams it reports for Palestine, acquired mainly through transactions with large Arab landowners, with the remainder obtained from the Mandatory administration or from religious charitable bodies. That is the Division’s own account on its own denominator, and the 13,000,000 figure is not the full surface of Mandatory Palestine, so a share computed from it is not comparable with the shares in the section below.
The two accounts agree on the channel and on the period. Growth was slow through the Ottoman decades and concentrated after 1921, when acquisition ran through institutions organized for settlement, the Jewish National Fund among them, rather than through scattered individual buyers. The purchasing side is the better documented half of the transaction: institutional buyers kept records of what they bought, and those records are the basis of every total above.
What none of these figures establish is who was in possession of the ground being transacted. Title and occupancy were separate facts in Palestine, and they had been separated by statute more than two decades before the first of these purchases. That separation is the subject of the next three sections.
Was the land bought rather than taken before 1948?
For the period before 14 May 1948, purchase is the correct description of the channel, and the base rate is the reframe: about 7.6% of all the land in Palestine was in Jewish hands by that date, on the Center for Israel Education’s figure. Purchase accounts for the acquisition; it accounts for a minority share of the territory.
It is often said that the land was legally bought, and on the pre-1948 record the transactions were recorded transactions under the registration system then in force. Nothing in the published totals suggests otherwise. The compiled Mandate-era map series published by PASSIA puts Jewish-owned land at 5.67% at the end of the Mandate. BADIL’s compilation gives 557,000 to 781,192 dunams, or 2.1% to 2.9% of Palestine’s total land area. Every one of these figures, at either end of the range, describes a minority holding.
Two things follow, and they pull in opposite directions. The purchase record is real, documented, and the sole channel for the great majority of pre-1948 acquisition. It is also, at its highest published value, less than a tenth of the territory, which means the ownership map of 14 May 1948 does not by itself explain the territorial extent of the state proclaimed that day.
The Center for Israel Education reports the second denominator that closes the gap: about 28% of the land that became the State of Israel had been purchased into Jewish hands. That leaves roughly seven parts in ten of the territory of the new state outside the purchase record, and it is why the question of how land came to be anyone’s cannot be answered from transaction totals alone. Sovereignty over territory and title to parcels are separate legal facts, produced by separate instruments. The sections on the Ottoman registers, on the 1948 Declaration and on the post-1948 statutes take each of them in turn.
What did the 1858 Ottoman Land Code change about ownership?
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 introduced registration of land in individual names, and the Journal of Historical Geography study of changing patterns of landownership in nineteenth-century Palestine records the consequence that mattered: cultivated land was frequently registered not to the cultivators working it but to notables, merchants and owners resident elsewhere.
The An-Najah University journal review of the historical land tenure and registration system in Palestine sets out why registration produced that result. Cultivators had reasons to avoid appearing in the register, conscription and taxation among them, and the practical business of enrolling a village’s land often ran through whoever could deal with the administration. The register recorded a proprietor. Possession stayed with the household that had worked the plot, sometimes for generations, under arrangements the register did not describe.
The study of the route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s to 1947, published in the Cambridge journal Continuity and Change, traces the same transition to its end point. Customary occupancy, unwritten and locally recognized, was converted over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into formal tenancy, a status a registered owner could terminate. The peer-reviewed literature treats this as the decisive legal change of the period, ahead of any particular sale.
This is the instrument that made the later purchase record possible. A transferable registered title is a thing that can be sold to a distant institution; a customary right to cultivate is not. Read against the transaction totals in the first section, the 1858 code is not background to the purchases. It is the mechanism that determined whose signature the purchases required.
Who was selling the land, and who was farming it?
Large registered landowners were the principal sellers. The United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history attributes the bulk of pre-1947 Jewish acquisition to transactions with large Arab landowners, its own characterization of the transaction record, and the peer-reviewed tenure literature identifies who those proprietors typically were: notables and merchants, in many cases resident outside the district or outside Palestine altogether.
The An-Najah University journal review of land tenure and registration describes the resulting structure. Registered proprietorship and physical possession sat with different parties across much of the cultivated surface. A landowner in Beirut or Damascus held the title; a tenant household held the plough. When the title moved, the register recorded a completed sale between two consenting parties, because in the terms the register kept, that is what had occurred.
The Continuity and Change study of the route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction, 1800s to 1947, follows what happened to the other party. Occupancy that had never been registered had no standing to convey and no standing to withhold, so the cultivator’s position in a sale was neither seller nor buyer. Eviction is the term the study uses for the end of that sequence.
Two facts therefore hold at once, and collapsing them is what produces most of the disagreement about this period. The purchases were transactions with registered owners, conducted under the law in force. The people displaced by them were, in many cases, not the registered owners and were not parties to the transaction. Neither statement contradicts the other, and the register is why: it recorded one relationship to the land and not the other.
That is also why the totals in the first section, accurate as transaction records, do not measure how many households changed circumstances. No published count in the record consulted here reports that quantity for the Mandate period. The absence is worth stating plainly, because it is the figure the argument about consent would need.
How much of Palestine was privately owned at all?
Most of the surface was never private property in the freehold sense, so most of it was never available to buy from anyone. The An-Najah University journal review of land tenure and registration in Palestine records that the Ottoman categories continued to govern land under the British Mandate, and that mulk, full private freehold, covered only a small fraction of the territory.
The categories the review sets out are five. Mulk is private freehold. Miri is state-owned land held by cultivators under a usufruct right, transferable and inheritable but not full ownership, and it covered the greater part of the cultivated ground. Waqf is land dedicated as a religious endowment, held in perpetuity and outside ordinary commerce. Matruka is land left for common or public use, village grazing and roads among it. Mawat is uncultivated land beyond settled habitation, the largest category by area in a territory whose southern half is desert.
This is the answer to the half of the question that the transaction totals cannot reach. Asking how the land came to be anyone’s presumes a territory composed of parcels with owners. Mandatory Palestine was not that. On the categories the review describes, the majority of the surface was state land under usufruct, endowment, common use or unassigned waste, and the private market operated on a minority of the ground.
It follows that ownership shares and sovereignty over territory were never measuring the same quantity, and that the state category is the one that carries most of the difference. Where a state holds the underlying title to the greater part of a territory, the identity of the state is the decisive fact about the land, and the transfer of sovereignty in 1948 transferred that underlying position along with everything attached to it. The Journal of Historical Geography study of nineteenth-century landownership records that registration in individual names cut across these categories rather than replacing them, which is why Ottoman classifications were still doing legal work in Palestine ninety years after the code that set them down.
How did purchased parcels become a sovereign state in 1948?
About 28% of the land that became the State of Israel had been purchased into Jewish hands by 14 May 1948, on the Center for Israel Education’s figure. The sovereignty declared that day rested on a different instrument entirely, and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel names its grounds in its own text.
The Declaration, read in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, declares “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.” Its recitals set out the chain the Provisional Government relied on: the First Zionist Congress of 1897, the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, which the text calls a recognition that “is irrevocable.” It was signed by the 37 members of the People’s Council. Land purchase appears nowhere among the grounds.
The same document states two commitments about the people living in the territory. It pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and it appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The Knesset’s English text reads “citizens” in the equality sentence; other widely used translations render the word as “inhabitants.”
So the sequence has two distinct legal events, seventy years apart in their beginnings and different in kind. Registered title to roughly 2,000,000 dunams was assembled by purchase between the 1880s and 1948. Sovereignty over a far larger area was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 on the basis of a General Assembly resolution and a claim of national self-determination. A reader who treats the purchase totals as the origin of the state’s territory is answering a question about deeds with a document that is not one, and a reader who treats the Declaration as an account of who owned which field is doing the reverse.
Which laws transferred Palestinian-owned property after 1948?
Displacement came first and statute followed. Roughly 700,000 Palestinians left their homes and became refugees during the 1948 war, on Benny Morris’s archival estimate in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the property they left behind was retained by the new state before any acquisition law was written.
Morris attributes the exodus to multiple causes varying by locality and phase of the war, including military attack, fear of attack, expulsion in certain sectors, and flight. His account rejects a single master expulsion plan and equally rejects the claim that departures were voluntary. Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006) argues the opposite reading of the same events, that the displacement was a planned ethnic cleansing. The two are the named poles of a live scholarly dispute over how to characterize 1948, and both rest substantially on Israeli archival material. The displacement record itself is the point on which they agree.
The statutory stage is described in its own terms by the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history, which states that Palestinians were dispossessed of land and other assets “in stages” and identifies 1953 as an especially important year, when legislation on the acquisition of land and other property allowed the state to take direct legal ownership of Palestinian-owned assets. That is the Division’s own characterization of the legislative sequence.
The structure it describes matters more than any single date. Wartime departure created a category of property whose registered owners were absent. Administrative custody held that property. Legislation then converted custody into ownership. At each step the register recorded a lawful act under the law then in force, and at no step did the registered owner participate. This is the same gap between title and possession that the 1858 code opened, running in the other direction: in the Mandate period, possession without title lost the ground; after 1948, title without possession lost it.
Why do the ownership figures differ by threefold?
Because the four published shares are measuring four different things. The Center for Israel Education gives 7.6% of all the land in Palestine before 14 May 1948.
The compiled map series published by PASSIA gives 5.67% at the end of the Mandate; BADIL’s compilation gives 2.1% to 2.9%.
The spread between the highest and lowest published share is roughly threefold, and it traces to denominator, date and inclusion rules rather than to a disputed count of deeds.
Denominator is the largest source of divergence. The Center for Israel Education’s own two figures, about 7.6% of all the land in Palestine and about 28% of the land that became the State of Israel, describe one holding against two bases, and they differ by a factor of nearly four for that reason alone. Its 7.6% and its total of about 2,000,000 dunams reconcile on a base of roughly 26,000,000 dunams, the full surface of Mandatory Palestine. The 13,000,000 dunams reported in the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history is a narrower base again, so shares computed from it belong to a different series.
Date is the second source. The same UN history puts Jewish holdings at about 2.5% of the total land area in 1920 and over 5.7% by 1939, its own figures, which means a share quoted without a year can be off by more than a factor of two on that account alone.
Inclusion rules are the third. Whether land leased from the Mandatory administration, land held by institutions rather than individuals, and endowment land are counted moves any total, and the published figures do not all state which rule they applied. Behind all three sits a documented absence: no state cadastral survey of landholding by community for Mandatory Palestine appears in the record consulted here. Each of the four figures is a compilation by an organization with a publishing interest in the subject, and each is cited above as that organization’s own estimate.
How does the land-origin argument travel in measured discourse?
Land-origin arguments appear in measured antisemitic discourse at low but non-trivial shares: 7.7% of the antisemitic comments in the United Kingdom sample invoked denial of Jewish self-determination and 5.2% used the apartheid analogy, in the peer-reviewed corpus study by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) of comments on the Facebook pages of leading British, French and German media outlets.
The study coded 1,504 UK comments, of which 26.9% were coded antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme, alongside 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments. The shares above are of the antisemitic comments within the UK sample, and the categories are non-exclusive, so a comment can appear in more than one. The authors also report that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, which bears directly on any historical framing: an argument about origins reads differently inside the exchange it answers.
Survey work measures a related association. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026), across three preregistered studies in American Psychologist, report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model of New Antisemitism accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, with conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediating the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not and a general conspiratorial mindset did not explain the results. These are correlational findings from survey data, and the authors state them as associations.
What the measurement establishes is narrow and worth keeping narrow. Denial of Jewish self-determination and the apartheid analogy are the two coded framings closest to the origin-of-title argument, and they appeared in the low single digits to under 8% of the coded antisemitic comments in one national sample from one two-week escalation. That is a share of a corpus, not a property of the historical argument, and nothing in either study measures whether a given account of how land changed hands is accurate.
Methodology
This report assembles published records on landholding in Palestine and the instruments that changed its legal status, and states what each source measured.
Four source types carry the findings. Peer-reviewed scholarship supplies the legal mechanism: the Journal of Historical Geography study of changing patterns of landownership in nineteenth-century Palestine, the Cambridge journal Continuity and Change study of the route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s to 1947, and the An-Najah University journal review of the historical land tenure and registration system. Two of these are carried without a publication year, which is not recorded in the copies consulted. A primary record supplies the 1948 sovereignty claim: the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948, quoted from the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial. Archival scholarship supplies the 1948 displacement estimate: Morris (2004), against which Pappé (2006) argues the contrary characterization, and both are named because the literature genuinely disagrees. Peer-reviewed corpus and survey work supplies the discourse measurement: Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) and Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026), whose findings are associations and are reported as such.
Landholding shares come from organizational compilations, attributed in every case to the organization that published them: the Center for Israel Education, PASSIA, BADIL, and the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history, whose figures are its own account. No state cadastral survey of landholding by community for Mandatory Palestine appears in the record consulted, so no figure here is an official land statistic, and the four compilations differ in denominator, date and inclusion rule as set out above. Where a percentage appears, the base it is a share of is named in the same sentence, because the published bases are not interchangeable.
The report measures the documentary record of ownership, transfer and proclamation, and the measured circulation of origin arguments in discourse. It does not measure how many households changed circumstances in any transaction, a quantity no source consulted reports for the Mandate period.
Conclusion
So whose ground was it, and what document made it so? On the record above, no single document did. A statute of 1858 decided who could sell, a purchase register between the 1880s and 1948 recorded who bought, a proclamation on 14 May 1948 decided who held sovereignty, and legislation from 1953 decided what happened to the property of people who were no longer present. Four instruments, four different questions, four different answers.
The figures hold together only when each is read against its own base. Purchase was the channel, and it reached about 2,000,000 dunams, between 2.1% and 7.6% of Palestine depending on which compilation and which counting rule, and about 28% of the land that became Israel on the one publisher that reports that second base. Most of the surface was never on a private market at all, sitting in state, endowment, common-use and unassigned categories that the Ottoman code carried into the Mandate. The people displaced by the sales were frequently not the parties to them, because the register recorded title and not occupancy. And roughly 700,000 people were displaced in 1948 before any acquisition statute existed, a figure Morris and Pappé share while disagreeing sharply about what to call it.
That structure is what makes the question so durable, and it is where the measurement in the last section earns its place. An argument about origins that runs on one instrument alone can be built to reach almost any conclusion, and 7.7% of the antisemitic comments in one national sample reached for denial of Jewish self-determination while 5.2% reached for the apartheid analogy. The origin argument is one of the vocabularies in which this subject is discussed, including in comments a peer-reviewed study coded as antisemitic. Whether an account of how land changed hands functions as history or as an input, and what distinguishes the two when the underlying records are as partial as these, is a question the register cannot settle and the reader is left holding.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a dunam, and how large an area do these figures describe?
The dunam is the unit of area used in Ottoman and Mandate land records. A metric dunam is 1,000 square meters, so the 2,000,000 dunams the Center for Israel Education reports for 14 May 1948 is 2,000 square kilometers, and the roughly 26,000,000 dunams that its own share implies for all of Mandatory Palestine is about 26,000 square kilometers.
Which organizations were buying land during the Mandate?
Institutional buyers organized for settlement, the Jewish National Fund among them, according to the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights history, which describes the main growth phase as running from 1921 to 1947. Institutional purchase is also why the transaction totals exist: the buyers kept records, and those records are the basis of the published dunam figures.
Did the British Mandate keep the Ottoman land categories?
Yes. The An-Najah University journal review of land tenure and registration in Palestine records that the Ottoman categories, mulk, miri, waqf, matruka and mawat, continued to govern land under British administration. This is why a nineteenth-century Ottoman classification was still determining the legal character of a plot in the 1940s.
Who produced the count of people displaced in 1948, and from what records?
Benny Morris’s roughly 700,000 estimate in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004) is drawn from Israeli military and state archives. Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006) works largely from the same archival base and characterizes the events differently.
How do researchers separate criticism of Israel from antisemitism when they measure attitudes?
By measuring them as separate scales and reporting the correlation between them. Allington, Hirsh and Katz (2023), a preregistered survey of 1,790 UK adults published in Scientific Reports, measured generalised, Judeophobic and anti-Zionist antisemitism separately and found coronavirus conspiracy suspicion correlated with all three, most strongly with Judeophobic antisemitism.
Why do Israeli and Palestinian population statistics cover different territory?
Because the two statistical offices define their scope differently. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics enumerated 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census, while Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s own total, reported at about 10.148 million in September 2025. The two series are not additive.
Sources
- An-Najah University journal. Historical review of land tenure and registration system in Palestine. journals.najah.edu/media/journals/full_texts/historical-review-land-tenure-and-registration-system-palestine.pdf. Peer-reviewed.
- Allington, D., Hirsh, D., Katz, L., 2023. Correlation between coronavirus conspiracism and antisemitism: a cross-sectional study in the United Kingdom. Scientific Reports. DOI 10.1038/s41598-023-41794-y. Peer-reviewed.
- BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. Land ownership compilation, al-Majdal. badil.org/publications/al-majdal/issues/items/409.html. Advocacy organization compilation.
- Becker, M., Ascone, L., Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Center for Israel Education. Explainer: Land in Palestine and Land in Israel. israeled.org/explainer-land-in-palestine-and-land-in-israel/. Education organization publication.
- Continuity and Change (Cambridge University Press). The route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s to 1947. cambridge.org/core/journals/continuity-and-change. Peer-reviewed.
- Harber, K., Bulska, D., Malloy, T., Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, conspiracy beliefs, and anti-Israel attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Journal of Historical Geography. Changing patterns of landownership in nineteenth-century Palestine. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0305748884900690. Peer-reviewed.
- Morris, B., 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521009676. Scholarly book (archival history).
- Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA). Land Ownership in Palestine, 1948, compiled map series. maps.passia.org/land-ownership-in-palestine-1948/. Organizational compilation.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017, final results. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Pappé, I., 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book (advocacy-inflected thesis).
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; Knesset English text, main.knesset.gov.il. Primary and official record.