CONFINO, Alon

The warm sand of the coast of Tantura

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When the United Nations decided on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine, the Arabs numbered about 1,350,000, more than two-thirds of the population, and the Jews about 650,000. The Arabs owned 90 percent of Palestine’s privately owned land, and the Jews had acquired by purchase 7 percent of the total land area of Palestine amounting to about 20 percent of the arable land.

When the war ended in early 1949, the area of the Jewish state was 37 percent larger than what had been allotted to it by the Partition Resolution, and 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted from the territory of Israel, their homes, lands and property expropriated by the new state. At the same time, between 1948 and 1951, 750,000 Jewish immigrants, many of them refugees, arrived in Israel.

The expulsion at Tantura was part of this larger, dramatic demographic transformation in Palestine and Israel in 1948. This demands explanation and interpretation.
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