# Proof Narrative: The UN Partition Plan Resolution 181 allocated 56 percent of Mandatory Palestine to the proposed Jewish state while Jews constituted less than 33 percent of the population according to the 1947 British census.

## Verdict

**Verdict: PROVED (with unverified citations)**

The core numbers hold up: the UN's 1947 partition plan did allocate more than 56 percent of Mandatory Palestine to the proposed Jewish state at a time when Jews made up roughly a third of the population. There is one important caveat about how the claim describes its source data — but it does not change the conclusion.

## What was claimed?

When the UN General Assembly voted in November 1947 to divide British-controlled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, critics have long argued that the territorial division was lopsided — giving a large share of the land to a minority of the population. This claim puts specific numbers to that argument: that the Jewish state in the plan was allocated 56 percent of the territory while Jews represented less than 33 percent of the people living there. For anyone trying to understand whether the Partition Plan was proportionate — or why it was so contested — these figures are central.

## What did we find?

The land allocation figure is well-established. Resolution 181 designated 15,264 square kilometers for the proposed Jewish state out of a total Mandatory Palestine area of approximately 27,000 square kilometers, which works out to 56.47 percent. This figure appears consistently across authoritative reference sources and was confirmed directly from Wikipedia's article on the Partition Plan. An independent figure from Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees exactly, though that source could not be verified by automated retrieval — likely due to JavaScript rendering or access restrictions.

The population figure is equally well-supported, though it requires a clarification. According to 1946 British Mandate estimates — the figures used by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) when it drafted the partition recommendation — there were 608,225 Jews out of a total population of 1,845,559, which is 32.96 percent. That is indeed less than 33 percent, and the figure was confirmed directly from two separate Wikipedia sources.

Both numbers were also cross-checked against independent sources and agreed exactly: the land percentage matched to within 0.01 percentage points, and the Jewish population count matched to the individual person.

The disparity between these two figures — 56.47 percent of the land for 32.96 percent of the population — is real and confirmed.

## What should you keep in mind?

The most important caveat is about the claim's description of its source. There was no "1947 British census." The last formal British census of Palestine was conducted in 1931. The population figures used for Resolution 181 are estimates derived from that 1931 census, updated using immigration records and the Village Statistics 1945 survey. The underlying number (32.96 percent) is correct; the attribution to a "1947 British census" is not.

The population percentage is also worth examining more carefully. By late 1947, post-WWII Jewish immigration had continued at a significant pace. Some estimates place the Jewish population closer to 630,000 by November 1947, which against a total population of roughly 1.9 million would be about 33.2 percent — just above the 33 percent threshold. Most scholarly sources and encyclopedias cite "approximately 31-33%" or round to 32%. The official UNSCOP figures support the claim as stated, but the true figure at the exact moment of the vote is genuinely uncertain and borderline.

Finally, the 56 percent territorial figure includes the Negev desert, which comprised a substantial portion of the Jewish state allocation. Jewish-owned land at the time was only about 7 percent of total Palestine — a very different figure that is sometimes cited in the same discussions but refers to land ownership, not the UN's proposed territorial division.

## How was this verified?

This claim was evaluated by identifying its two sub-claims, sourcing each from independent reference publications, and checking both numerically against stated thresholds. You can read the full methodology and evidence table in [the structured proof report](proof.md), examine every citation and computation step in [the full verification audit](proof_audit.md), or [re-run the proof yourself](proof.py).