Reply #38: That Is Not Quite Correct, My Friend

[The Magistrate]

An examination of the history of Jordan, and the expressions of the English statesman who created it in 1922, make quite clear that it was not intended to be a homeland for Arab Palestinians. Following the French expulsion of the Hashemite Feisal from Damascus in 1920, the desert east of the Jordan River, a territory claimed by England, became a hot-bed of Arab guerrilla bands conducting operations ostensibly on King Feisal's behalf into Syria. As England was currently engaged in squeezing France out of various claims elsewhere in the Near East at the time, this circumstance constituted a potential flash-point that might ignite serious difficulties between the two counties, recent allies in war, but long rivals in this region.

Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, conceived the idea of pacifying the region east of the Jordan by constituting it as an Emirate ruled by Feisal's martial brother Abdullah, who had been field commander of the Arab bands fighting the Turks, and was viewed as capable of commanding the allegiance of the tribes, many of which had supplied him with fighters in 1918. This plan was put into effect in 1922, over some objections by Emir Abdullah, who resented having no part of the Mediterranean coastline, and that Jerusalem did not come under his control. He was somewhat mollified by being allowed to forbid any purchase of land by Jews in his realm, a condition which the early Zionists viewed as a betrayal by the English government. This exclusion of Jews from east of the Jordan, in the view of the English authorities, either at the time or at any point in their administering the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (the legal frameword for the Emirate's protectorate status), did not consititute a setting aside of the whole area west of the Jordan for the "Jewish National Home" referred to in the Balfour Declaration, and incorporated in the Mandate itself. Not only Mr. Churchill, but also Mr. Samuels, the first governor of the Mandate, and the person who had first proposed during the Great War the policy that became embodied in the Balfour Declaration, stated specifically on numerous occassions that the land west of the Jordan was to be shared between Jews and Arabs.

The question of a Palestinian population in modern Jordan is a somewhat vexed one. The original population comprised two distinct groups: agriculturalist and settled pastoralists living in the eastern portion of the river valley, and Bedouin nomads living in the desert beyond, many of whom made a practice of raiding into the valley, on both sides of the river, as opportunity presented. Both groups thus had certain ties of tribal and clan kin-ship across the river: however convenient for map-makers and border enforcement, the river line was not a very good one in human terms. During the Mandate, there was a good deal of permeability to that border, and in both directions. During the '48 war, a number of Arabs from Palestine fled into Trans-Jordan, and after that war, the remaining portions of the Arab Zone in the Jordan valley were annexed by Jordan, and its populace thus converted into a species of Jordanian citizenry. During the '67 war, a number of these fled across the river into Jordan proper. Thus, while some portion of the Arab Palestinian populace of Jordan could be said to stem directly from the time of the Mandate, being comprised of those people simply seperated by the river by their western kin, another portion certainly stems from refugees who fled their homes and entered the place, and for these latter, it can hardly be considered a homeland. In terms of numbers, by the widest construction of Arab Palestinian, these constitute a bit over half the population of Jordan today, which numbers a bit over five millions.