Jordan in a nutshell

At Israpundit and Dawson Speaks, Joseph Alexander Norland sums up succinctly the true history of the entity known today as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

In March, 1920, the Emir Feisal, son of Hussein king of Hejaz, was crowned King of Syria, Feisal having marched into Syria with his armed followers. In April, 1920, the San Remo conference confirmed the mandates allocation, according to which Britain would receive the mandate over Palestine (which would include both banks of the Jordan), and France would received the mandate over Syria/Lebanon. To France, the latter decision was incompatible with Feisal ruling as Syria’s king; the French solution was to occupy Syria/Lebanon and expel Hussein (July 1920).

But Arab attacks on the French continued, and Britain was concerned that France would use the hostilities as a pretext to invade Palestine. This issue was one of many Middle East problems that Churchill (as colonial secretary, 1921-1922) had to deal with. To discuss these issues, Churchill called the “Cairo Conference” for 12-22 March, 1921. While the Conference was ongoing, news arrived that Abdullah, brother of the deposed King Hussein of Syria, arrived in Transjordan at the head of two hundred Bedouin warriors. It was believed that Abdullah intended to go to war on the French and reinstate his brother as king of Syria. Alarmed, Churchill proposed to offer Abdullah the following deal: in return for Abdullah agreeing not to attack French Syria, Churchill would appoint Abdullah as temporary ruler of eastern Palestine, with the express mandate of establishing order and preventing attacks on the French in Syria/Lebanon.

Herbert Samuel and Wyndham Deedes, respectively, the High Commissioner and the Chief Secretary for Palestine, objected to this proposal on the grounds that Eastern Paelstine was included in the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, and that Churchill could not change the terms unilaterally. But Churchill argued that Abdullah’s position would be temporary, for a few months only, and with this argument succeeded in persuading the British cabinet.

As the Cairo Conference closed on March 22, 1921, Churchill travelled to Jerusalem and met Abdullah in person. In these meetings, Abdullah agreed to govern Transjordan for six months, with the advice of a British chief political officer and with a British financial subsidy.

Within weeks it became clear that Abdullah was unable to either quell the internal fighting among the local tribes or to prevent attacks on the French in Syria. But when summer turned to fall and the British doubts about Abdullah became clear, he simply made it know to his British handlers (especially to TE Lawrence “of Arabia”) that he would not leave. Abdullah knew that the Arabists in the British Colonial Office would prefer to see him installed permanently under their tutelage, rather than eject him by force of arms, and he was right: Abdullah had succeeded to out-manoeuver Churchill. Faced with this reality, Britain used her clout to redraft the San Remo terms, so that the mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations in July 1922 did indeed permit Britain to exclude Eastern Palestine from the Jewish National home.

Fromkin summarizes the subsequent developments thus:

[T]he Colonial Office's temporary and merely administrative set of arrangements for Transjordan in time hardened into an enduring political reality. The Arabian prince with his foreign retinue settled in Amman and became a permanent new factor in the complex politics of the Palestine Mandatory regime... The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine.