Jordan

A country that exists because of an improvisation, and has stayed stable by absorbing everyone else's crises. Abdullah, son of the Sharif of Mecca, marched north in 1921 intending to attack the French who had just expelled his brother from Damascus. Britain, which did not want that war, offered him the land east of the Jordan to administer for six months instead. He ruled it for thirty years, and the Emirate of Transjordan became independent in 1946. The kingdom took the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1948 and annexed them, lost both in 1967, and renounced the claim in 1988. Waves of refugees have repeatedly remade the population - Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, Iraqis after 2003, and around a million and a half Syrians after 2011, in a country of eleven million with almost no oil and very little water. Black September in 1970 was a short civil war against Palestinian factions. Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994, the second Arab state to do so. The Hashemites retain custodianship of the Jerusalem holy sites. Petra, carved by the Nabataeans, is a World Heritage site. The country has about eleven million people and is almost landlocked, with a short coast at Aqaba. Arabic is official. The Dead Sea, on its western border, is the lowest point on the earth's land surface. Wadi Rum's desert has stood in for other planets in many films. Water scarcity is among the most severe in the world, and the country ranks near the bottom globally for renewable water per person.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history