The first Zionist colony in Palestine, Petah Tiqva, was founded in 1878 on 14,200 dunums (dunum=1000 square meters) of land purchased from money lenders from Jaffa. In 1901 the Karen Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund) was established in London to acquire land in Palestine. Between the 1880s and 1914 some thirty Zionist colonies were founded and by 1914 the total Jewish population in Palestine had reached about eighty thousand.
United Nations map no. 94(b), of August 1950 shows the percentage of
ownership of land in every subdistrict in Palestine under British mandate
according to the village statistics of the British mandate government of
Palestine. The Map is reproduced in Walid Khalidi's book "Before
their Diaspora", published 1984 by the Institute for Palestine Studies,
Washington, DC Here are the numbers:
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| Jerusalem | 84 | 2 | 14 | |
| Hebron | 96 | < 1% | 4 | |
| Beersheba | 15 | < 1% | 85 | |
| Gaza | 75 | 4 | 21 | |
| Ramleh | 77 | 14 | 9 | |
| Ramallah | 99 | < 1% | 1 | |
| Jaffa | 47 | 39 | 14 | Highest. Zionist TelAviv is here. |
| Nablus | 87 | < 1% | 13 | |
| Tulkaram | 78 | 17 | 5 | |
| Jenin | 84 | < 1% | 16 | |
| Beisan | 44 | 34 | 22 | |
| Nazereth | 52 | 28 | 20 | |
| Haifa | 42 | 35 | 23 | |
| Tiberias | 51 | 38 | 11 | |
| Acre | 87 | 3 | 10 | |
| Safed | 68 | 18 | 14 |
And by 1948 less than 7% of all the land in mandate Palestine was owned by the Zionists.
