Prior to the '67 war Egypt ruled the Gaza Strip and Jordon ruled the West Bank.
Why did they not give independence to them as a Palastinian State?
I can’t claim to be an expert on the Middle East, but from what I have read, it seems the Palestinians ought to have just as much of a beef with their Arab neighbors as Israel. They’ve been used as pawns for larger purposes, been shuttled around as refugees, and I think violently repressed in Jordan.
I’ve also seen it stated that when Israel was created, a Palestinian state was outlined as well, but the other Arab nations persuaded the Palestinians to reject the offer and try to take out Israel by force.
Anyone more knowledgeable who can add to this?
I think part of the problem was that the Arabs living in post-WWII Palestine were given a leader that was not “one of their own” by the victorious Allies–King Hussein’s dad–who, IIRC, was actually related to the Saudi royal family. So, IMO, Jordan is the true homeland of the Palestinians.
Mjollnir: Close, but not quite. Post-WW II the Sharif of Mecca of the Hashemite dynasty ( i.e. descended from the Banu Hashem, or Muhammed’s familial clan ), the British ally in western Arabia ( the Hijaz ), was rewarded by having his dynasty take control ( under a certain level of British oversite ) of certain former Ottoman provinces. The provinces of Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra were combined to form the Kingdom of Iraq in 1920. The other newly created state was the Kingdom of Transjordan, a largely desert region inhabited mostly by nomadic Bedouin with strong tribal links to the Hijaz ( in fact most of them had actually moved north from Arabia with the Hashemites ). The old Kingdom of Transjordan lay just outside the boundaries of what was considered Palestine.
Jordan seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ( they were far and away the most successful of the Arab combatants ). This acquistion more than doubled the population, with all of the new additions being Palestinians who lacked the tribal loyalty to the monarchy that the Bedouin did. Even after the loss of the West Bank in 1967, the population had irrevocably shifted to a Palestinian majority. As a consequence tensions rose with the increasing entrenchment of the PLO, who almost became a government within a government. This boiled over in the Black September of 1970 when King Hussein crushed the PLO and expelled them from Jordan ( the PLO then shifted their main operations to Lebanon, with very unpleasant consequences for that little country ).
Of the old Hashemite kingdoms, only Jordan survives. The Hijaz fell to their archrivals, the quite unrelated ibn Saud family of the Najd ( eastern Arabia ), in 1926. The Kingdoms of Najd and Hijaz were united by conquest to form the present day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi monarchy was definitively overthrown ( there had been coups as early as 1936 ) in 1958.
- Tamerlane