Transjordan

The Emirate of Transjordan was created in 1921 out of an improvisation. Abdullah, son of the Sharif of Mecca, marched north with an armed force intending to attack the French who had just expelled his brother Faisal from Damascus. Britain, which held the mandate for Palestine including the land east of the Jordan, preferred not to have that war. Churchill met Abdullah in Jerusalem and offered him the territory to govern instead, provisionally, for six months. It lasted until his assassination thirty years later. Transjordan was administratively separated from the rest of the Palestine mandate, and the clause about a Jewish national home was explicitly excluded from it - which is why the modern borders lie where they do. It was poor, thinly populated and largely Bedouin, with no port and no significant agriculture, and it survived on a British subsidy. Its army, the Arab Legion under John Glubb, became the most effective Arab force in the region. Independence came on 25 May 1946. Two years later the Legion fought in Palestine and took the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Abdullah annexed in 1950 and renamed the country the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He was shot at the al-Aqsa mosque in 1951 by a Palestinian gunman, in front of his grandson Hussein, who reigned for the next forty-seven years. The territory had about two hundred thousand inhabitants at its founding. Glubb commanded the Arab Legion until King Hussein dismissed him in 1956 under nationalist pressure. Britain kept a garrison and paid the subsidy until 1957. Jordan lost the West Bank again in 1967 and renounced its claim in 1988.

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