Actually, I don't believe that's correct Alistair.
There wasn't an actual division of the Mandate located west of the Jordan River until 1947, which divided it into the Jewish and Palestinian partitions.
After the San Remo peace conference of 1920 (and ratified by the League of Nations), the British Mandate looked like this:
israel.org
Here's an interesting site discribing that period when the British were drawing up boundaries. If you read all the content, you'll find that the Hashemites Abdullah and Faisal, were not opposed to providing Trans-Jordan in its entirety over to the formation of the Jewish homeland.
"On November 2, 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration in the form of a letter from British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, including the words "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . ."
Was the Balfour Declaration intended to apply to Trans-Jordan? The answer is yes! The internal British debates that led to the Declaration show clearly that the British policy was to achieve control of an uninterrupted land corridor from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. They could not have intended to create a Mesopotamia (later renamed Iraq) with its Western boundary at the Jordan River. Even Lord Curzon's October 26, 1917 critique of the proposed Balfour Declaration expressly took it for granted that its support for a Jewish National Home policy would apply to historical Palestin on both sides of the Jordan River. His memorandum stated that Palestine east and west of the Jordan River was too small a country for the Jewish people.
In 1919 a Zionist delegation was invited to the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of the future population of Palestine. The Emir Feisal, a son of the Hashemite Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, as well as a hero of the Lawrence of Arabia adventures, attended as Arab Plenipotentiary, with authority also from the Syrian nationalists.
The Zionist delegation stated its territorial demands for the Palestine Mandate-to-be to extend east of the Jordan River to the Hejaz Railroad. Feisal described these demands later as moderate and proper." In his own demands to the Peace Conference, Feisal expressly excluded Palestine because of the Jewish National Home policy adopted by the Allies, and he suggested a Mandate. He earlier had made an agreement with the Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weiztnann envisioning Palestine as a future Jewish state....................
..........At the same time, Britain and France negotiated the Northern border of Palestine, to, the East as well as the West of the Jordan River, on the basis of a Biblical atlas (remember Reuben, Gad and Menasheh). Incidentally, this included the Golan Heights in Palestine, but the area was ceded to Syria in 1923.
The Mandate was granted to Britain in April 1920. Sir Alec Kirkbride, once Palestine District Commissioner and in 1946 the first Minister to the new Kingdom of Transjordan, wrote in his 1956 book <A Crackle of Thorns>, quote:-
. . . At the time of the issue of this Mandate, there was no intention ... of forming the territory east of the River Jordan into an independent Arab State.
The Turkish Peace Treaty was initialed by Turkey at Sevres in August 1920 but not ratified, as a result of Kemal Ataturk' overthrow of the Turkish Government.
On December 6, 1920, the British, who had already approved the Mandate, submitted it to the League of Nations for ratification. It contained the Jewish National Home provisions without protecting the political rights of the Arab population, and it applied to both Cis-Jordania (Western Palestine) and Trans-Jordania (Eastern Palestine).
By that time, the Emir Feisal had been driven out of Syria. A Syrian National Congress had elected Feisal King of Syria on March 11, 1920. That was too much for the French, who forced him out of Damascus in July 1920.
In March 1921, a conference of senior British officials was convened in Cairo, chaired by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, in order to deal with the outstanding issues in the Middle East. In Mesopotamia (Iraq), where a rebellion had been going on for months, they installed Feisal as King. His older brother, Emir Abdullah, had come up into Trans-Jordan from the independent Hejaz (which would be seized in 1924 by the Wahhabi Ibn-Saud and become western Saudi Arabia).
Abdullah threatened to rally local Bedouin tribes for an attack on the French in Syria.
An idea was developed, supported by Britain's leading Arabist, Colonel T.E. Lawrence, who was at Cairo. It was to offer Abdullah the Governorship of the Trans-Jordanian Province of Palestine. In a wire to Prime Minister Lloyd George, Churchill stated that the solution would be the one insisted upon by the Prime Minister in a prior telegram, namely "while preserving Arab character of area and administration to treat it as Arab province or adjunct of Palestine." Churchill also stated that he expected Abdullah to refuse the Governorship because the territory was too small. Abdullah agreed to undertake the Governorship for six months, but he never left. Note the telegram's emphasis on continuing Trans-Jordan, Arab character and all, as part of Palestine.
Preserving the Arab character of Trans-Jordan was counter to the Jewish National Home provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, not yet ratified by the Council of the League or Nations.
So the Mandate for Palestine was amended by the British, principally by drafting a new Article 25 in April 1921. This was included in the Mandate ratified by the League of Nations in July 1922, which thereafter was never amended except by the British Government's Memorandum described below.
A great error is made regarding Article 25 and Trans-Jordan. It is even made by Zionists. It is the view that in 1922 three-fourths of Palestine was given to the Arabs, and thereafter Palestine was limited to the area West of the Jordan River.
The opening words of Article 25 disprove this statement:
In the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, ...
This proves that the land on both sides of the Jordan continued to be part of the Mandate for Palestine and that the eastern border of Trans-Jordan continued to be the eastern border or the Mandate.
Article 25 allowed the British, with the consent of the Council of the League, to "postpone or withhold" but not to cancel application of certain provisions of the Mandate...
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You can read the San Remo accords here:
lib.byu.edu
But suffice it to say... Israel has more right to exist than does Jordan or Syria.
After all, Were it not for the British defeating Turkey, their would be no Arab states in the region (at least as we see them existing now).
Hawk |
