> and a fairly even mix of Jews, Christians and Muslims

False. The population in 1800 was ~90% Muslim, ~8% Christian.

> let's not forget that the partition plan for Palestine was proposed by the UN

The UN had no authority to partition other people's land.

Wrong. They were given the authority by general consensus after WW2. Maybe a poor choice, but it's not at all the responsibility of current Israelis to think about what their grandparents did. For a Gen Z Israeli, there's only one country.

If they don't control it, it's not the "other people's" land either.

Land belongs to whoever controls it. That's it. That is all it will ever be.

If there is not some higher power (e.g. the UN, who you say does not have authority), you have no recourse.

No matter what land it is or who they are: nobody currently living was there first. The only claim is always "I was the last to control it". But none of us are the first.

The censuses were always flip-flopping back and forth, until the 1880s. You cherry picked one nice one, but I could check pick over half a dozen censuses that show Jewish majority during the 19th century - no less than the amount of censuses that promote the other competing narrative. And all the later censuses, after 1880, show Jewish majority. That was over three decades before the fall of the Ottoman empire.

  Source for census data:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem

From wikipedia's article on the history of Palestine:

> "Most of Palestine's population, estimated to be around 200,000 in the early years of Ottoman rule, lived in villages. The largest cities were Gaza, Safad and Jerusalem, each with a population of around 5,000–6,000."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine