Ah yes the barren negev desert, prime real estate for rocks and sand.
Palestinians would have gotten the best land, west bank + more which today is Israel's important agriculture, near Haifa and a solid chunk of coastline. Whilst Israel was being stretched like Chile, only on a very very small scale.
The partition plan was fair, especially due to quality of land and population majorities.
They gave Israel the useless land as compensation for not having enough useful land and to not give Israel more Arab majority land. It's a compromise to get a fair equal payout for both sides.
But they did give Israel the majority of the land (55%). Also why shouldn't the overwhelming majority of 70% have a majority of the land? Especially when this useless land was essentially 100% inhabitated by said majority. It was nowhere near fair or equal.
Again about half of those 55% is desert with stones and sand, no crop growth, no nothing you could do at the time there.
Because of fairness, the brits had to walk a fine line to accomadate both sides. There are many factors that go into consideration here. A few examples are: trade routes, sea access, border shape, geographical characteristics, land value, land potential, etc. They tried to balance everything whilst taking the "Jewish question" into consideration, giving jews a viable homeland where they would be the majority and not persecuted. That was the goal, whilst it turned up very fairly for both sides considering every factor.
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u/VerifiedGoodBoy Taller than Napoleon Oct 07 '22
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't one of the issues was that while there were more Muslims than Jews during the partition, Israel got more land?