Response to question #1, Kimmerling

1. Was the land that became the state of Israel predominantly Arab or Jewish at the onset of the reprisal raids and the formation of Unit 101?

According to UN estimates, there were 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs in the land allotted to the Jewish state under the Partition Plan of 1947. Discounting the Negev, which is almost completely uninhabitable and uncultivatable, the Jews received less land than that allotted to the Palestinians. They also did not receive Hebron, the biblical city of refuge with a Jewish majority for over twenty centuries, and western Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site on earth.

Source: Dershowitz, Alan. The Case for Israel. Wiley, Hoboken, 2003.