Is Jordan really Palestine? Well . . .

Sidney Zion

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“IS JORDAN REALLY PALESTINE? Ariel Sharon says yes. King Hussein says no. The State Department agrees with Hussein. It provides no evidence to support the king. But neither does the king; he just says it’s ‘ridiculous.’

Until recently, Hussein and the department saw no need to respond to the question, which had lingered at the edges of the Middle East debate for years. Now that the issue is joined, perhaps it will no longer be ignored. This is progress, since the matter is fundamental to resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli problem. Is Jordan Palestine?

In 1920, the World War I Allies conferred on Britain a mandate to govern Palestine, an area on both sides of the Jordan River that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. This mandate, confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, remained unchanged during the League’s lifetime.

Though the mandate incorporated Britain’s 1917 commitment to provide a homeland in Palestine for the Jews — the Balfour Declaration — the mandate did not provide a homeland for Arabs living there, though it did protect their ‘civil and religious’ but not political rights.

Two months after the League approved the mandate, the British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, changed the rules and the picture.

He created the Emirate of Transjordan, installing the Hashemite Abdullah, Hussein’s grandfather, as emir of all the land east of the Jordan River… However, Britain did not free Transjordan — an area constituting nearly 80 percent of Palestine — from the mandate.

The people on the East Bank — like the Arabs and Jews on the West Bank — were all considered Palestinians, traveling with Palestinian passports and subject to British control.

Moreover, according to Sir Alec Kirkbride, England’s East Bank representative, who later served for years as Abdullah’s adviser, Transjordan was ‘intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which (Britain was) pledged to support, became an accomplished fact.

There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the river Jordan into an independent Arab state.’ Indeed, Churchill persuaded the Zionists to suspend Jewish immigration to the East Bank on the ground that this would mollify West Bank Arabs and thus make easier a Jewish homeland west of the Jordan.

Obviously, the West Bank Palestinian Arabs were not mollified; if anything, their appetites were whetted for the whole of Palestine… Is Jordan Palestine? Yes, but not all of mandated Palestine. Israel holds a little more than 20 percent of the mandate’s Palestine, including the 5 percent known as the West Bank and Gaza.

Jordan is not only de facto Palestine because all who have lived there except for Bedouins and the king’s family are Palestinian; it is de jure Palestine. Does all of this history matter? Of course. It’s fundamental. Palestinians are a nation without a state. Jordan is a state but not a nation.

Let Hussein declare himself the king of Palestine, and the world will see the problem for what it is — a border issue between two nations, Israeli and Palestinian — who share the same land. And border problems get solved. When a people believe its nationhood has been ripped off, nothing can be settled.”

Context added by this archive

A columnist arguing the Jordan-is-Palestine case and, in the middle of it, recording that under the mandate everyone on both banks was considered Palestinian and carried Palestinian passports.

Cite this clipping

"Is Jordan really Palestine? Well . . .," Houston Chronicle, 8 October 1982, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-020. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-020

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34 years of plans to settle them in someone else’s country