Jordan is indeed Palestine

Charles Chi Halevi

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“Is there already a Palestinian state? A group called the Jordan Is Palestine Committee says that Jordan is a de facto Palestinian state, and has taken out ads in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune to air its case. One of the ads quotes King Hussein of Jordan, who said in 1981, ‘The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.’

Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman doesn’t deny the statement, but claims that when Hussein made it he was ‘speaking metaphorically. If Arafat and Hussein believed it literally,’ Chapman continues, ‘there would be no argument and thus no need for these ads.’

Perhaps one should just blindly accept Chapman’s interpretation, even though it denies decades of history. After all, this is the Mideast: If water can change into wine, perhaps statements can be transformed into metaphors.

Compounding the problem, the ads fail to mention a very important fact: Jordan is an artificial country, carved out of the Palestine Mandate by Britain after it took over the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

Even Jordan’s ruler, Abdullah, predecessor of Hussein, was an outsider who was given the newly created emirate as a reward for not attacking the French in Syria… But even though they bought off Abdullah, England did not free Transjordan—which constituted nearly 80 percent of Palestine—from the British Mandate.

The residents of both the East and West Banks continued to travel under Palestinian passports, subject to British rule… More to the point, Sir Alec Kirkbride, England’s East Bank representative, said Transjordan was supposed to serve as ‘a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the national home for the Jews in Palestine 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.’ It was for that reason that Sir Winston Churchill persuaded the Zionists to suspend Jewish immigration to the East Bank. Viewed in this context, the ads are stronger in their contention that there already is a Palestinian state.

The ads center around the following points: Jordan occupied almost 77 percent of Britain’s original Palestine Mandate. Three-fourths of Jordan’s government appointments, including nine Cabinet posts, are held by Palestinians. Half of Jordan’s prime ministers since 1950 have been Palestinian.

Jordan’s first king, Abdullah, wanted to call his land ‘the kingdom of Palestine.’ Of course, all of this leads one to ask a key question: If Jordan is indeed Palestine, as the evidence indicates, why is it ruled by the Hashemites, who are not indigenous to the area, instead of Palestinians? To Hussein, as to Abdullah before him, this is a dangerous question.

Abdullah had annexed the West Bank in 1949, claiming the territory on the grounds that both banks are Palestinian. A year later, however, Abdullah issued a decree forbidding the use of the word Palestine in royal documents. Many Palestinians opposed his rule, and he didn’t want to give them ideas. Abdullah’s fear of Palestinians was justified.

He was murdered by a Palestinian in 1951, and was succeeded by his grandson, Hussein, after his son, Talal, Hussein’s father, was declared non compos mentis… It is this fear of the PLO and a Palestinian state that makes strange bedfellows of Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Both realize that a Palestinian state, no matter where it would be set up, would constitute a danger not only to Israel but to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. Is Jordan Palestinian? Definitely. Is Jordan Palestine?

Yes, but the Palestinians, the Arab nations that support them and the Soviet Union would rather focus their claims on that 23 percent of the Palestine Mandate that is now called Israel. Until the Palestinians realize that 77 percent of a loaf is better than none, there will be no Palestinian state—just violence as usual.”

Context added by this archive

The Jordan-is-Palestine case argued in the Tribune, answering the Tribune’s own columnist, who is also in this archive arguing the opposite. The author is identified as a former city editor of Chicago’s Jewish newsweekly.

Cite this clipping

"Jordan is indeed Palestine," Chicago Tribune, 13 June 1983, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1983-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1983-002

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