British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan answered an Israeli diplomat on Oct. 20 who wrote that Israel had been willing to “share the land.”
Hasan’s reply: “At partition, in 1947, Jews owned 7% of the land. This guy says they were willing to ‘share’ the 93% that wasn’t even theirs. There is a word for that.”
There is. Several, actually. Hasan’s 7% is roughly right. His “93%” is a fabrication, and it is the load-bearing myth beneath the Senate candidate Hasan has spent this autumn promoting, Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Start with the record Hasan skipped.
The British Mandate’s own land survey, the 1945 Village Statistics, split Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams into three columns, not two. Jews owned 5.7%, rising to about 7% by 1947. Nearly half was public land, held by the Ottomans for four centuries, then by Britain.
The “Arab and other non-Jewish” column came to about 48%, and even that overstated private Arab ownership, as it folded in church property and Ottoman-era miri land, which villagers farmed while the state kept title. Arab private ownership in 1947 stood at roughly 16%.
The largest block of land proposed for the Jewish state was the Negev Desert, roughly half the Mandate. Emory historian Kenneth Stein notes that just 50,000 dunams south of Beersheva carried title deeds. Almost no one owned the desert the United Nations proposed for the Jewish state.
Hasan’s “93%” mendaciously takes state land, unregistered desert and church holdings, and stamps it all “theirs.” Michigan has roughly four million acres of state forest. Nobody calls it the private property of whoever lives closest.
The second trick is worse: Hasan conflates private land ownership with sovereignty. Partition would have transferred political control, not deeds.
U.N. Resolution 181 would have barred the Jewish state from expropriating Arab land except for public purposes, with full compensation paid in advance, a rule that was to bind the proposed Arab state equally. Roughly 400,000 Arabs would have lived in the Jewish state as citizens, keeping their homes, fields and votes.
The Jewish Agency accepted that bargain. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it and went to war. The refugee crisis of 1948 was the product of a war the Arab side chose.
Hasan is no neutral pundit here. He has spent this autumn defending El-Sayed against critics, and on Democracy Now on Oct. 22 framed an El-Sayed win as proof that “Americans rejected Islamophobia.”
But the myth he posted two days earlier was the premise of his candidate’s foreign policy, which is why branding objections to El-Sayed as Islamophobia is as dishonest as the “93%” claim.
On the MS NOW cable-news show “Morning Joe” in August, El-Sayed called Israel “an illegal apartheid regime” and made clear his objection reached well beyond the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A state that is “illegal” regardless of who governs it only makes sense if the land was stolen in 1948. Hasan’s fake math supplies the fake theft.
The script is ancient: Your table is empty because the Jews took your bread. And your leaders serve them, not you.
It also explains El-Sayed’s frequent evasions. Asked whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, he told a “Jews for Abdul” event in May that he “often struggle[s]” with the question. He appears never to have struggled with the dozens of countries that have zero freedom of worship and name Islam as their state religion.
In 1947, Jewish leaders accepted an Arab state without demanding it justify its existence. El-Sayed demands such justification only of the side that said yes to peace.
The genocide libel follows the same logic. On CNN in July, El-Sayed described Israel as “certainly a rogue state” and said, “they did a genocide.” Once a state is deemed illegitimate at birth, every war it fights to survive becomes another crime.
Then there is the city of Dearborn, Mich. On March 1, the day after Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, El-Sayed told staff on a campaign call, leaked to The Washington Free Beacon, that he would not comment because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.”
After a Dearborn Heights man attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., a synagogue with a preschool, El-Sayed noted the attacker had lost family members in an Israeli airstrike and offered “hurt people hurt people” as a rationale for the attack. Israel later stated that one of the family members in question was a Hezbollah terrorist.
Last week these antisemitic myths went to the grocery store. Rebellion PAC, founded by the “Young Turks” podcast host Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American left-wing political commentator, began airing an ad for El-Sayed in which a Michigan couple can’t afford eggs or bananas because their tax dollars supposedly bankroll Israel’s bombing of Palestinians while Israelis enjoy the universal health care Americans are denied.
The villain of the piece is Mike Rogers, who supposedly answers to Israel instead of Michigan. Uygur’s pitch: Americans “suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars” and Israel “buys” politicians like Rogers.
Check the receipt.
Annual aid to Israel is $3.8 billion under the 2016 agreement signed by the Obama administration, about $11 per American and roughly one-twentieth of 1% of all federal spending.
Nearly all of this money must go to American defense manufacturers, and the last carve-out for purchases in Israel expires in 2028. Not one dollar can fund Israeli health care. Israelis pay for their health care via their own taxes.
Strip away the ad’s production values, and this script is ancient: Your table is empty because the Jews took your bread, and your leaders serve them, not you.
It is the “93%” lie in a shopping cart. The theft that never happened in 1947 becomes a theft from your family’s budget in 2026. The ad’s disclaimer says no candidate authorized it, but the intended beneficiary is obvious.
Hasan said there is a word for offering to share land that isn’t yours. There are better words for taking state land, unowned desert and a U.N. plan to compensate private owners, and selling it to millions as proof of theft: fabrication, propaganda and an antisemitic libel older than Michigan.
Hasan’s 7% is a fact. His “93%” is fiction. Uygur has now priced it per dozen eggs.
