Home InDepth Front Page The Palestine Problem: It’s All In A Name

The Palestine Problem: It’s All In A Name

3 Elul 5763 – August 30, 2003

This mandate was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922 and remained unchanged during the League’s lifetime.

The mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, the famous 1917 proclamation by which Great Britain committed itself to provide a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people; it did not provide a homeland for the Arabs living there, but it did protect their ‘civil and religious,’ although not their political, rights.

However, two months after the League of Nations approved the mandate, Winston Churchill, then Britain’s colonial secretary, changed the rules of the game.

‘One afternoon in Cairo,’ as Churchill later boasted, he simply took all the land east of the Jordan River and inserted the Hashemite Abdullah – the great-grandfather of the present King Abdullah – as its emir.

But he did not free it from the mandate, and the people living on the East Bank were in all respects Palestinians. The people living there traveled under Palestinian passports, as did the Jews and Arabs living on the West Bank. But the whole country was effectively ruled by Britain.

Why did Churchill do it? Because Abdullah was bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen by the British as king-designate of Iraq – a post that went to his brother. Churchill wanted to stroke Abdullah’s ego and at the same time serve the empire.

But, according to Britain’s East Bank representative, Sir Alec Kirkbride, this land, constituting 80 percent of the mandate, 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 they were 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 go along with the suspension of Jewish immigration to the East Bank on the grounds that this would mollify the indigenous Arab population on the West Bank – then 200,000 strong ? and thus make possible a Jewish homeland west of the Jordan.

Of course, it did no such thing; instead, it whetted Arab appetites for the whole of Palestine, an objective which was nearly achieved several time: the Palestinian Arab uprising against the Jews in 1936; the British White Paper of 1939, which cut off the Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, locking European Jews in with Hitler; and the united Arab war against the newly proclaimed State of Israel in 1948.

Reversing Balfour

Until 1946, however, Transjordan remained under the British Palestine Mandate. The English declared Transjordan an independent entity without a soupçon of international authority.As a result, what began in 1920 as a mandate to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland turned into a reverse Balfour Declaration, creating an Arab nation in four-fifths of Palestine and leaving the Jews to fight for statehood against the Arabs on the West Bank.

The upshot: Jordan is now considered an immutable entity, as distinct from Palestine as are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

But a country whose population is virtually all Palestinian can hardly be considered as something less than a Palestinian nation.

Still, the notion that Jordan has nothing to do with Palestine is so deeply embedded that it comes as no real surprise that The New York Times and the rest of the media elite treat it as a world apart.

This is hardly something new, of course; readers of a certain age and long memory may recall that the Times took this approach as least as far back as the mid-1970’s when, in a three-part series on the Palestinians, the paper drew historical maps cutting Transjordan out of the British mandate — and repeated the fiction that Israel occupied the whole of Palestine.

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