Transjordan

The Emirate of Transjordan was a former Ottoman territory incorporated into the British Mandate of Palestine in 1921 as an autonomous political division under as-Sayyid Abdullah bin al-Husayn.^[1] This move was formalized by the addition of a September 1922 clause to the charter governing the Mandate for Palestine.^[2] Transjordan was geographically equivalent to 1942–1965 Kingdom of Jordan (slightly different from today's borders), and remained under the nominal auspices of the League of Nations and British supreme rule, until its independence in 1946.

Under the Ottoman empire, Transjordan did not correspond precisely to a political division, though most of it belonged to the Vilayet of Syria and a small southern section came from the Vilayet of Hejaz. The inhabitants of northern Jordan had traditionally associated with Syria, those of southern Jordan with the Arabian Peninsula, and those of western Jordan with the administrative districts west of the Jordan River. However, the creation of the Hejaz railway by the Ottoman Empire had started to reshape the associations within the territory. Historically the territory had formed part of various empires; among these are the Jewish, Assyrian, Achaemenid, Macedonian (Seleucid), Nabataean, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, Sassanid, Muslim, Crusader, and Ottoman empire.

The Mandate for Palestine, while specifying actions in support of Jewish immigration and political status, stated that in the territory to the east of the Jordan River, Britain could 'postpone or withhold' those articles of the Mandate concerning a Jewish National Home. In September 1922, the British government presented a memorandum to the League of Nations stating that Transjordan would be excluded from all the provisions dealing with Jewish settlement, and this memorandum was approved by the League on 11 September. From that point onwards, Britain administered the part west of the Jordan as Palestine, and the part east of the Jordan as Transjordan. Technically they remained one mandate but most official documents referred to them as if they were two separate mandates. Transjordan remained under British control until 1946.

The borders and territory of Transjordan were not determined until after the Mandate came into effect. The borders in the east of the country were designed so as to aid the British in building an oil pipeline from their Mandate of Iraq through Transjordan to seaports in the Palestine Mandate.

The Hashemite Emir Abdullah, elder son of Britain's wartime Arab ally Sharif Hussein of Mecca, was placed on the throne of Transjordan. Britain recognized Transjordan as a state on May 15, 1923, and gradually relinquished control, limiting its oversight to financial, military and foreign policy matters. This had an impact on the goals of Revisionist Zionism, which sought a state on both banks of the Jordan, as it effectively severed Transjordan from Palestine and so reduced the area on which a future Jewish state in the region could be established.^[3] In March 1946, under the Treaty of London, Transjordan became a kingdom and on May 25, 1946, the parliament of Transjordan proclaimed the emir king, and formally changed the name of the country from the Emirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. After capturing the 'West Bank' area of Cisjordan during the 1948–49 war with Israel, Abdullah took the title King of Jordan, and he officially changed the country's name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in April 1949. The following year he annexed the West Bank. With the exception of the French Cisjordanie, the coinage, Cisjordan, meant to apply specifically to the West Bank at that time, has not since caught on, outside Jordanian circles.

1 See also
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

Notes

^ Bernard Wasserstein, 2004, pp. 105-106.: "In a telegram to the Foreign Office summarizing the conclusions of the [San Remo] conference, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, stated: 'The boundaries will not be defined in Peace Treaty but are to be determined at a later date by principal Allied Powers.' When Samuel set up the civil mandatory government in mid-1920 he was explicitly instructed by Curzon that his jurisdiction did not include Transjordan. Following the French occupation in Damascus in July 1920, the French, acting in accordance with their wartime agreements with Britain refrained from extending their rule south into Transjordan. That autumn Emir Faisal's brother, Abdullah, led a band of armed men north from the Hedjaz into Transjordan and threatened to attack Syria and vindicate the Hashemites' right to overlordship there. Samuel seized the opportunity to press the case for British control. He succeeded. In March 1921 the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, visited the Middle East and endorsed an arrangement whereby Transjordan would be added to the Palestine mandate, with Abdullah as the emir under the authority of the High Commissioner, and with the condition that the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine mandate would not apply there. Palestine, therefore, was not partitioned in 1921-1922. Transjordan was not excised but, on the contrary, added to the mandatory area. Zionism was barred from seeking to expand there - but the Balfour Declaration had never previously applied to the area east of the Jordan. Why is this important? Because the myth of Palestine's 'first partition' has become part of the concept of 'Greater Israel' and of the ideology of Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement.
^ Ilan Pappe (2004). A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, 84. ISBN 0521556325.
^ Wasserstein, 2004; The Making of Transjordan