Jordan is Palestine

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
21 June '10

The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has hit the bullseye:

‘Jordan is Palestine,’ said Wilders, who heads the third-largest party in Holland. ‘Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland...There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan.’ Wilders also called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Wilders has spoken the big inconvenient truth. As a result, it is inevitably being dismissed as merely what ‘the right’ regularly says. So of course it's untrue, on the grounds that, by definition, everything ‘the right’ says is untrue. Yadda yadda.

But it is not untrue. It is correct. Anyone familiar with the history knows it is correct. Immediately after World War One, Palestine consisted of what is now Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The great powers dividing up the region decided that Britain should be given a mandate to administer Palestine and restore within it the historic Jewish national home. Within a couple of years, however, Winston Churchill, for reasons of realpolitik, gave away three quarters of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty to found (Trans)Jordan (leaving all the rest to be settled by the Jews; but that’s another story).

So Jordan is indeed Palestine. As Camie Davis points out, the Arabs themselves repeatedly said so:

Jordanians, for decades, were avid proponents of the ‘Jordan is Palestine’ position. They used that position as justification for the annexation of the West Bank, arguing that Palestine was one single, indivisible unit, and that Jordan was the legitimate governing body of Palestine...

‘We are the government of Palestine, the army of Palestine and the refugees of Palestine.’ Prime Minister of Jordan, Hazza' al-Majali, 23 August 1959

(Read full article)

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