The Old Testament indicates that historic Palestine included land on both sides of the Jordan River, east bank as well as west bank, including the territory now known as Jordan

Palestinians are by law guaranteed the RIGHT OF RETURN to Jordan, where they are entitled to citizenship, "unless they are Jews."

Jordan is very much afraid that it will be declared THE PALESTINIAN STATE, Jordan has NEVER allowed publication of the percentage of Palestinians in its population. Jordan is also afraid that someone might suggest to take a portion of its territory for a Palestinian state.  MORE THAN TWICE the number of Palestinians live on the EAST BANK of the Jordan River in Jordanian territory, than live on the WEST BANK.
 
 

1. The Old Testament indicates that historic Palestine included land on both sides of the Jordan River, east bank as well as west bank, including the territory now known as Jordan. The portion of historic Palestine east of the Jordan River equaled or exceeded in area the portion west of Palestine. In biblical times the tribe of Manasseh occupied more territory to the east of the Jordan River than to the west, the entire tribe of Reuben dwelled east of the Jordan, and the land called Gad was east of the Jordan. Mount Gilead and Ramoudh Gilead all were east of the Jordan, as were other biblical places and people. (See map, page 12, Literary and Historical Atlas of Asia, prepared by J. G. Bartholomew for the Everyman Library.) Even in the time of the New Testament (as shown by the map in Appendix 1). the land included territory on the east side of the Jordan River as well as the west. The New Testament city of Philadelphia was well east of the Jordan River, as was the city of Golan, which was part of Palestine, according to the Old Testament as well as the New. For an additional example, see Rand McNally Atlas of World History, ed. R.R. Palmer, Chicago, 1957, p. 25.

2. For map of Palestine, east, see 0. R. Conder, The Survey of Eastern Palestine, Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, London, 1889; also see J. Stoyanovsky, The Mandate for Palestine (London, New York, Toronto, 1928), pp. 66, 204---210. Arthur Balfour's memorandum of August 11, 1919, stated: "Palestine should extend into the lands lying east of the Jordan." Balfour, who led the British delegation to the Paris Peace conference (in 1919) "determined the frontiers" Of Palestine in a memorandum to Prime Minister Lloyd George, June 26, 1919: "In determining the Palestinian frontiers, the main thing to keep in mind is to make a Zionist policy possible by giving the fullest scope to economic development in Palestine. Thus, the Northern frontier should give to Palestine a full command of the water power which geographically belongs to Palestine and not to Syria; while the Eastern frontier should be so drawn as to give the widest scope to agricultural development on the left bank of the Jordan, consistent with leaving the Hedjaz Railway completely in Arab possession."

3. December 2, 1918-Toynbee minute: Foreign Office Papers; 371/3398-Amold Toynbee agreed with the Mandate: "It might be equitable [to include in Palestine] that part ... which lies east of the Jordan stream ... at present desolate, but capable of supporting a large population if irrigated and cultivated scientifically ... The Zionists have as much right to this no-man's land as the Arabs, or more," cited in Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 115. See also David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties (vol. 1), pp. 1144-1145.

4. United States recommendation at the Paris Peace Conference, January 21, 1919. See also U.S. Congressional Resolution, June 30, 1922, in Survey of Palestine, p. 21.

5. In Arabia itself, largely equivalent to present Saudi Arabia, Jews had been present and had developed towns such as Medina and Khaibar, where they thrived from Roman days and before, until the conquest by Muhammad and subsequent directions from Omar. Then the Jews were slaughtered or their land expropriated and Jews were forced to flee for their lives if they did not convert to Islam. Many of those Jews in the seventh century fled as refugees back to "Palestine," where Jewish inhabitants could even then be found in most towns referred to today as purely Arab areas.
Into the twentieth century, between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews lived in "purely Arab towns," such as Jenin, Tyre, Sidon, and Nablus during the Turkish domination; roughly 1,500 held on under the British Mandate; and in 1944-1947, zero. Those towns had been rendered judenrein by Arab pogroms; see Chapter 9.

6. Lord Balfour speech, July 12, 1920, cited in Palestine Royal Commission Reporl, para. 27, p. 27, 1937; see maps in this chapter and Appendix 1. See n. 15 here.

7.High Commissioner Harold MacMichael to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, regarding Transjordan, cipher telegram, private, personal and most secret, 1941, PRO C0733/27137.

8. David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, pp. 1119, 1140. Also see Esco, Palestine, vol. 1, pp. 641

9. Gilbert, Exile, p. 132; see T.E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert, about Abdullah, particularly pp. 1-7. Feisal's role is woven throughout Lawrence's account. Also see King Abdullah of Jordan, My Memoirs Completed (Washington, D.C., 1954).

10. August 1, 1921, Secret dispatch #2301/pol., C0733/41683, Enclosure "A," Report No. 6.

11. PRO FO 371/6342, March 23, 1921.

12. July 4, 1921, telegram to Secretary of State for the Colonies, C0733/35186; response to "Very Confidential" memo "from the Civil Secretary after his recent tour in Trans-Jordania," Churchill to Samuel, July 2, 1921, C0733/36252.

13.Churchill Papers 17/14, January 17,1921; cited in Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 132; the British chose Feisal to be King in March 192 1, at the Cairo Conference. See Esco, Palestine, pp. 121-126.

14.MacMichael hoped in 1941 to offer Abdullah a "consolation prize" of "Trans Jordan" when the country gained independence of the Mandate, and after Abdullah "has realized that his hopes ... for Syria ... are vain. We simply cannot have recrimination of these pledges to the Arabs until we are absolutely clear how and when they are to be converted into practice. The smaller the time gap between any promise and its implementation, the better. . . . " MacMichael to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, PRO C0733/27137.

15.According to the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report, "Trans-Jordan was cut away from that field [in which the Jewish National Home was understood to be established at the time of the Balfour Declaration.... the whole of historic Palestine]." The reason given was the later claim of the Arabs that a letter, called the McMahon pledge, from Sir Henry McMahon on October 24, 1915, had included Palestine in the territory that Britain promised to the Arabs. A formal Arab protest, called "The Holyland. The Muslim-Christian Case Against Zionist Aggression," was not declared until November 1921, six years after the date of the McMahon letter and four years after the Balfour Declaration. The fact that McMahon had excluded Palestine from his promise-as had the Emir Feisal excluded it from his request at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, ignoring the McMahon letter-was conspicuously absent. The British government's failure to publish the complete correspondence gave credence to what otherwise would have been a quickly squelched, rather obvious ploy, until 1939, when a committee of British and Arab delegates scrutinized the correspondence; the British then determined that, in the words of one delegate, the Lord High Chancellor, Lord Maugham, "The correspondence as a whole, and particularly ... Sir Henry McMahon's letter of the 24th October, 1915, not only did exclude Palestine but should have been understood to do so. . . ." Similar testimony came from many eminent British government officials. Most notably, from Sir Henry McMahon himself. in The Times of London, July 23,1937, McMahon wrote, "I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein." The British case supporting McMahon was strengthened even further by the fact that Feisal waited until January 29, 1921-nearly six years later-to bring up the subject, and then he was quoted by Winston Churchill as being "prepared to accept" the exclusion of Palestine. The logical deduction to be made from the plethora of evidence seems clear: Palestine was indeed excluded-and in any case, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated by the Council of the League of Nations and was thus binding upon its trustee, England as Mandatory power, while no British letter of pledge could have been binding even if one had been given. Nevertheless, Arabs and their supporters have continued to attempt to cast doubt, as though the written documents didn't exist. Significantly, however, the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report, which was issued the same year that McMahon published his Times rejoinder, made the recommendation that "Transjordan should be opened to Jewish immigration." It never was. Palestine Royal Commission Report, pp. 22-38; for texts of several British witnesses and full McMahon text: Esco, Palestine, vol. 1, p. 1811 Great Britain, Correspondence, Cmd. #5957; Churchill White Paper, June 3, 1922, Statement of British policy in Palestine, Cmd. # 1700, p. 20; Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, vol. 11, pp. 1042, 1140-1155; D.H. Miller, Diary, vol. XIV, pp. 227-234 and 414, vol. 11, pp. 188-189, vol. XVII, p. 456; H.F. Frischwasser-Ra'anan, The Frontiers of a Nation (London: Batchworth Press, 1955), pp. 104-107. Frischwasser-Ra'anan writes of the statement by British Foreign Office expert on the Near East, Lord Robert Cecil: " 'Our wish is that the Arab country shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians and Judea for the Jews,"' pp. 104-105; Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. 390-392; The Letters of TE. Lawrence, David Garnett, ed. (Doubleday, Doran, 1939), pp. 281-282; for international legal interpretation, see J. Stoyanovsky, The Mandate for Palestine (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), pp. 66, 205-223; Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 113, col.115-116, May 23,1939, for the views of the Archbishop of Canterbury; for examples of discussion of the McMahon-Hussein matter that omit available evidence described or referred to above, and suggest support of the Arab protestations, see William B. Quandt, Fuad Jabber, Ann Mosely Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 8-11; John S. Badeau, East and West of Suez (New York: The Foreign Policy Association, 1943), p. 45.

16.In the Anglo-American Committee's "Historical Summary of Principal Political Events in Palestine Since the British Occupation in 1917," a chronological summary beginning in 1917, no mention at all is made of the gift of Transjordan to the Arabs by the British-neither in the 1922 summary nor in 1928, when an "organic Law" was enforced, nor in 1929 when the ratification of the "Agreement" took place. See Summary in Survey of Palestine, vol. 1, pp. 15-25. Yet that act, which severed roughly seventy-five percent of the Mandate of Palestine, is ignored as a "principal political event"-the de facto creation of an Arab state on seventy-five percent of what had been deemed the "Jewish National Home," and which had been specifically set aside by the British and Arabs alike as an area "not purely Arab," as compared to Iraq and Syria. In the chapter preceding the "Summary," the Arabs' acquisition of an Arab-Palestinian state-a Palestinian state surely no less than Israel became-is presented as a fait accompli. "Prior to the 12th August, 1927, the High Commissioners for Palestine included within their jurisdiction the entire Mandatory area without separate mention of Transjordan. Since that date, however, the High Commissioners have received separate commissions for Palestine and Trans-Jordan respectively. " See Survey of Palestine, p. 14. (Emphasis added.) In the Summary, however, exhaustive attention is drawn to the Balfour Declaration and its ramifications upon the Arab community in Palestine; on the rioting- "The hostility shown towards the Jews [which was] ... shared by Arabs of all classes; Moslem and Christian Arabs, whose relations had hitherto been uneasy, were for once united. Intense excitement was aroused by the wild anti-Jewish rumors which were spread during the course of the riots." See Haycraft Inquiry, October 192 1, in Survey of Palestine, pp. 18, 19.

17.The only proposal Britain as Mandatory power submitted to the League of Nations "during the lifetime of the League. . ." was a 1922 memorandum citing Article 25 of the Mandate; Article 25 allowed the Mandatory power "with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of the mandate as he may consider suitable to those conditions, provided that no action ... is inconsistent with ... Article 15, 16 and 18." The article referred to "the territories lying between the Jordan and the Eastern boundary of Palestine ...... the eastern boundary being the Hejaz (Saudi Arabia). In Dr. Paul S. Riebenfeld, "Israel, Jordan and Palestine," (unpublished manuscript), pp. 10-18ff, exhaustive study of documentation concerning TransJordan and the Mandate. In fact it appears that, to humor Emir Abdullah, the British gave the appearance of a severance, with the real consequences of a severance from Palestine upon the Jewish National Home, and the de facto creation of the Palestinian Arab state, while the British never attempted to legalize their actions, only to record them; "the only legal action ever taken by the British Government" was taken under Article 25: the Resolution of September 16, 1922. League of Nations Official Journal, November 1922, pp. 1390-1391; Riebenfeld, ibid., p. 18. For an absorbing account of "what exactly happened on September 16, 1922" see Dr. Riebenfeld's "Integrity of Palestine," Midstream, August/September, 1975, p. 12ff; also see Ernest Frankenstein, Justice for My People.

18. Alec Kirkbride, A Crackle of Thorns (1956), pp. 19-20. Kirkbride goes on to say, however, that "There was no intention" in 1920 "of forming the territory east of the river Jordan into an independent Arab state." Also see Palestine Royal Commission Report, suggesting that Transjordan-Eastem Palestine-"if fully developed could hold a much larger population than it does at present," p. 308.

19.When Britain -entered into an agreement to transfer the exercise of administration on February 20, 1928, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission challenged the agreement as a "conflict with the Mandate for Palestine." Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 458. The statement of the Commission (in part) was: "Since the Commission is charged with the duty of seeing that the mandate is fully and literally carried out, it considers it necessary to point out in particular, Article 2 of the Agreement, which reads as follows: "'The powers of legislation and administration entrusted to His Britannic Majesty as mandatory for Palestine shall be exercised in that part of the area under Mandate known as Transjordan by His Highness the Amir . . .' does not seem compatible with the stipulation of the Mandate of which Article I provides that: 'The mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of this mandate."' League of Nations, Official Journal, Oct. 1928, p. 1574; also see pp. 1451-1453; also in Riebenfeld, Israel, Jordan and Palestine, pp. 24-25; ... At that point Britain's Council member "explained that Great Britain still regarded itself as responsible for the ... mandate in TransJordan and the Council was satisfied." Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 458; as another example, in 1937 the Permanent Mandates Commission, at the 32nd Session, insisted that no obstacle should "prevent that Jewish National Home being established." Minutes of the 32nd Session, p. 90.

20. May 1946. See Chapter 17.

21. April 12, 1948, Arab League Resolution: No partition would be acceptable, and a Palestine must be liberated from the Zionists; on April 16, 1948, Abdullah abolished the Jordan Senate and appointed 20 new Senators: 7 Senators were Palestinian Arabs; on April 24, 1948, Jordan's House of Delegates and House of Notables, in joint session of Parliament, adopted a resolution: ". . . basing itself on the right of self-determination and on the existing de facto position between Jordan and Palestine and their national, natural and geographic unity and their common interests and living space. . . ." The parliament supported the "unity between the two sides of the Jordan Cited in
"Jordan Annexes Arab Palestine," by Benjamin Schwadran, Middle Eastern Affairs; vol. 1, no. 4, April 1950.

22. April 12, 1948, cited in Paul Riebenfeld, "The Integrity of Palestine", in Midstream, August-September 1975, p. 22.

23. Ibid.

24. Jordanian Nationality Law, Official Gazette, No. 1171, Article 3 (3) of Law No. 6, 1954, February 16, 1954, p. 105.

25. Ahmed Shukeiry to the Council of the Arab League, November 1966, cited in Riebenfeld, "The Integrity," Midstream, p. 23.

26.Mohamed Heikal, Road to Ramadan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 96. See Heikal's account of a meeting between Arab heads of state, including King Faisal, Ghadaffl, and President Nasser; according to Heikal, King Hussein's war ended September 27, 1970, with the signed agreement between Hussein and Yasser Arafat, and the "withdrawal of all ... forces from every city in the country" (p. 99). According to another source, the ceasefire took place September 25, but fighting continued well into 1971. Political Terrorism, edited by Lester Sobel (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1975), cited in Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank edited by Anne Sinai and Allen Pollack (New York: American Academic Association for Peace in the Middle East, 1977), p. 60.

27. June 2, 1971: Hussein's orders to Jordanian Premier Wasfi Tel, cited in Hashemite Kingdom, p. 61.