Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [9]
The British announced on September 23, 1947, that they would terminate their Mandate in Palestine by May 15, 1948. They had decided to hand over the problem of who should rule Palestine to the new United Nations, set up in 1945. Interestingly, the UN came up with a two-state solution. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem designated as an international city under UN control. Under Resolution 181 half the territory, including the valuable coastline, was given to the Jews, who at the time controlled only 6 percent of the land. Conflict was inevitable.
Even before the formal outbreak of hostilities in May 1948, there were bloody clashes between Jewish and Arab communities. On April 9, 1948, Jewish terrorists from the Stern Gang and the Irgun attacked the village of Deir Yassin, several miles to the west of Jerusalem, and massacred 250 people, mostly women and children. To protect the Palestinians from such atrocities, my great-grandfather, King Abdullah I, began in late April to move Arab Legion forces across the River Jordan. At the same time, the Jewish leaders began to marshal their forces, including their nascent army, the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang.
On May 14, 1948, the day the British Mandate ended, the Jewish People’s Council declared the establishment of the state of Israel. Eleven minutes later, this new entity was recognized by U.S. president Harry Truman, followed by the Soviet Union. The tensions between Jews and Arabs did not take long to escalate into armed conflict. On the night Israel declared its independence, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq sent troops into Palestine to try to protect the rights of Arab Palestinians. The new Israeli army outnumbered Arab troops and slowly gained the upper hand, profiting from a lack of coordination among the Arab forces.
Jerusalem, with its religious significance for Muslims, Jews, and Christians and its strategic importance for the center of Palestine, was the main focus of the fighting. One of the fiercest battles was around the village of Latrun, allotted to the Arabs under the partition plan, where Jordanian and Israeli forces fought for control of a key road leading into Jerusalem. The Jordanian forces, commanded by Habis Majali, repelled several attacks by the Israeli forces. In one engagement, a young Israeli platoon commander was shot and severely wounded by the Jordanian forces. His name was Ariel Sharon, and he would go on to become a prominent military and political figure—defense minister, and then prime minister.
The Arab Legion, commanded by my great-grandfather, was among the best-equipped and -trained but also one of the smallest of the Arab armies. It managed to hold the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and even made gains. In the spring of 1949, after more than eight months of fierce fighting punctuated by intermittent pauses, representatives of Israel and the Arab states met on the Greek island of Rhodes. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Israel signed a general armistice agreement on April 3. The West Bank had been allocated to the Arabs by the UN, and in recognition of my great-grandfather’s role in protecting the Palestinians and holding the West Bank, a group of Palestinian leaders now called for unity with the East Bank under my great-grandfather, who on May 25, 1946, was proclaimed King of Jordan by Parliament, which also changed the name of the country from the Emirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. So in April 1950, in an Act of Union of the two banks of the Jordan, the West Bank formally became part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and gained representation in the Jordanian parliament and government.
Before, during, and after the 1948 war some 750,000 Palestinian Arab refugees fled the fighting or were evicted from their homes. They settled in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf states, and elsewhere in