http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=28&x_article=291
Once again Philip Mattar was featured, repeating some of the same falsehoods he had uttered in the previous segment:
The Jews were being offered 55% of Palestine when in fact they had owned only 7% of the country. Four-hundred-fifty thousand Palestinians were going to end up within the Jewish state, and they did not see any reason why they should go along with that kind of inequality, that kind of injustice.
Mattar's clear, and false, implication is that if Jews owned only some small percentage of the land, then Arabs must have owned the rest, in this case more than 93% of the country.
But this is nonsense – in Mandate Palestine the Arabs owned little more land than did the Jews. Indeed, going back to Ottoman times,
most of the country was state-owned land, not under any individual ownership. Thus, under the Ottoman code one of the main land categories was
miri, meaning land
belonging to the Emir.
During the Mandate, the British carried out detailed land surveys, marking off who owned what, and according to figures in the 'British Survey of Palestine' (republished and endorsed by Mattar's Institute for Palestine Studies),
at least 65% of the country was state land, and probably much More than that.'
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