[BLANK_AUDIO] Transjordan was established as a separate entity, primarily not to include the country, as part of the implementation of the Zionist program. It was very clear to the British from the very early stage of their occupation in Palestine, that Arab opposition would make the implementation of the Zionist's program difficult to put it mildly. And therefore, the decision was not to include Transjordan, which was part of the British mandate in Palestine, as part of the mandate that would be subject to the Zionist project. At the end of 1920, Prince Abdullah, the Emir Abdullah, one of the sons of Hussein bin Ali who had led the Arab rebellion against the Ottomons in cooperation with the British, came to Trans-Jordan from the Hedjaz. After he had been defeated by the Saudi's, about which we will speak a little later on, Abdullah came to Transjordan at the end of 1920 ostensibly, to take revenge against the French, who had expelled his brother Faisal from Syria. [BLANK_AUDIO] The British at the same time were not quite sure what it was that they wanted to do with Transjordan and they had no political arrangement for the territory of Trans-Jordan. In March 1921, Abdullah and the British came to an agreement, where he would become the Emir of Transjordan. In an agreement with the British, that he would rule Transjordan, at least temporarily if things went well, he would continue. Under a commitment not to attack the French in Syria. The British needed an arrangement, according to which, Abdullah would keep the peace in Transjordan, but would not disturb their French allies in Syria. And it is with these constraints that Abdullah agreed to take over Transjordan. Transjordan had very strange borders, perhaps the strangest of all the borders of the Arab countries. With what they call the duck's bill sticking out towards Iraq, and one wonders why it was every put there in the first place. There are various explanations. One explanation was that it was important to have a land connection between Transjordan and Iraq, and at the same time, to separate Arabia, which was very much under the Saudi's already, with their very, radical Wahhabi, eh, Islamic ideology, to separate them from the French Allies of the British and Syria. And therefore this duck's bill that created the land connection between Transjordan and Iraq. There is another theory that it was also important for the British to have this piece of territory in order to establish air fields, that would enable steady and uninterrupted air traffic from the Mediterranean to the British possessions in the Gulf. So Transjordan was often, looked at as the most artificial of the Arab states that were created. And when we ask, in what ways was Jordan really artificial, and in what ways was it not? It was artificial in the sense that Jordan, when established, had no urban centers. Amman, which is today a huge city, was then a very small village of 2,000 people. There were no great cities in Amman. There was no Damascus, no Baghdad. Just very small towns of which there were not too many. So, in that respect, one could say, Jordan was artificial, but if we compare Jordan to the other countries of the Fertile Crescent, Jordan was not a country of minorities. Jordan was a country of Sunni Muslim speakers of the Arabic language. The great majority of the Jordanians in Transjordan in the 1920s, were Sunni Muslim Arabs, more than 90% of the population. The problem of ethnicity, and the problem of minorities, so difficult in countries like Lebanon and Syria and, as we will see in Iraq, were not present in Jordan. And as a result, whatever people may say about Jordan's artificiality, in the long run, Jordan has proved to be the most stable of these new states that came into being in the early 1920s. Jordan from the beginning, though not included in Palestine, had a very strong affinity with Palestine. Jordan was part of the Palestine mandate, although excluded from the Zionist implementation, but Jordan was eh, close to Palestine territorially, always had been, closely associated eh, with the areas of Palestine because of the topographical structure of Jordan. In Jordan, because of the rivers that cut the country out from East to West, the Yarmouk in the north, the Zarqa in the center, and the Mojiv in the south, these rivers that divide Jordan into three sections in their flow from East to West, create a much easier access of movement in the West-East direction rather than North to South. Historically, towns on the East bank of the Jordan had very close relations with towns on the West bank of the Jordan, and as a result, Jordan and Palestine historically have always had very close relations. Abdullah was dissatisfied with this small desert principality which he had obtained. Just with a few hundred thousand people, no urban centers to speak of, Abdullah had a great ambition for expansion. Abdullah's real dream was to rule in Damascus. And Abdallah was obsessed with the idea of greater Syria, him being the king of greater Syria sitting in Damascus, rather than in this dusty principality of Transjordan that he had. But that was an obsession that he never could realize. But he was more successful in expanding in another direction, and that was in Palestine. And in Palestine, it was where the Jordanians did succeed in the war of 1948, that we will deal with later, to obtain more territory for the kingdom. But if we look at Jordan through the test of survivability, not the test of artificiality, more or less, Jordan did establish a ruling elite, made up of the Hashemite family, the tribes of Jordan, and a sense of Jordanianess. A very loyal, security, and military establishment, and thanks to Jordan's geopolitical centrality, in the middle of the Fertile Crescent, there are many external players that seek to preserve Jordanian stability, for the sake of regional stability. And therefore, the Jordanian state actually survived for longer than most would have imagined. A very good example of the state-nation rather than the nation-state. The state being formed first and the nation coming afterwards, rather than the other way around.
