Between 1948, when Israel was established, and 1967, when Israel took over Judea and Sumaria (i.e., the West Bank), what was going on in the West Bank? Why didn’t it become the country of Palestine during that time?
I’m hoping for a factual answer, not a debate.
It was seized by the Kingdom of Jordan ( Transjordan ) in 1948 ( Transjordan was the most successful of the Arab belligerents ) and illegally annexed to that state, in the process permanently altering the Jordanian demography to give it a Palestinian majority ( before that time the Transjordan was populated almost exclusively by Bedouin with traditional tribal loyalties to the Hashemite dynasty that still rules that state - indeed many of them had migrated into the region with the Hashemites in the post-WW I period ). Even after the loss of West Bank in 1967 this Palestinian majority was retained in the east.
In 1988 ( I think ) Jordan formally repudiated its claim to the West Bank.
The UN divided the area geographically, one part to establish a state of Israel and the other for a state of Palestine (where the West Bank is). The Palestines wanted no part of the UN mandate and tried to destroy Israel in several wars, one right after the mandate (actually, two separated by a brief truce). They did not bother to establish their state since they considered all the land theirs and thought they could drive the Israelites into the Sea.
The Arabs wanted the British Mandate to end by conversion of the entire area to a Palestine state. After the first war in 1948, many Israeli Arabs fled and became refugees. They resided in the West Bank in tent cities and required humanitarian help from the UN and Israel. After the second Arab attack, many more Arabs fled, totalling around 700,000 Arab refugees . Of 900,000 Arab Israelites, 700,000 had gone before the end of 1948.
So, post-1948, why didn’t the West Bank residents complain about Jordan’s annexation, and instead establish their own state, as per the same UN resolutions which established Israel?
Could it be that that is why, in 1964, the PLO was organized? That from '64 to '67, they wanted liberation from both Jordan and Israel? (Of course, after 1967, complaints against Jordan became quite moot.)
To Keeve:
I recommend “The Haj” by Leon Uris. It’s fiction, but it does give a lot of the background as to the mess in the Mideast.
Basically, all the kids on the playground want to get on the same side of the teeter-totter…
~VOW
This is close, but not quite correct. Though there were Palestinian Arabs involved in the fighting in a sporadic way, the serious belligerents were not the Palestinians per se, but the surrounding Arab nations. Many ( most? ) Palestinians were caught up in events beyond their control.
There is something to this. Palestinians in Jordan before relatively recent times were something of unofficial second-class citizens. The Hashemite dynasty, as I said, drew its support from the quite culturally distinct Bedouin minority and consequently for many decades the bulk of the armed forces and certainly most of its officer corps were drawn from this minority ( a common pattern throughout the Third World ). As a result the Palestinian integration into Jordan was not exactly smooth - Many Palestinians, at least for those first decades, did not necessarily regard themselves as Jordanian. Consequently relations between the PLO and Jordan were always rather cool, especially as the PLO eventually grew to become a ‘state within a state’ in Jordan and posed a direct political and military threat to the monarchy. The result was ‘Black September’ in 1971 when the PLO and the Jordanian army engaged in full-on military struggle, ending in the expulsion of the PLO from Jordanian soil and their relocation to new headquarters in Lebanon, helping to set in motion the series of tragedies that subsequently engulfed that country.
I should have said the Arabs, not the Palestinians. The Arab countries were Syria, Lebanon, Iraqi, and the Egypt. The Arab chiefs of staff had worked out a coordinated offensive, but there was no unified Arab campaign, and they attacked piecemeal, allowing Israel to win.