So let's have a look at the monarchy in Jordan. Jordan, as opposed to other Arab states came out well from the war with Israel in 1948. As opposed to the other Arab states who were involved in the war, Jordan was not defeated by the Israelis. They more or less obtained what they had hoped for to hang on to the bulk of Arab Palestine and to an exit to Jordan and this is the area that after the war was called the West Bank, including the Arab part of Jerusalem. That was indeed incorporated into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Jordan sought to incorporate the Palestinians, who now outnumbered the original Jordanians by about two to one. Some nine hun, 900,000 Palestinians compared to 450,000 original Jordanians, but such an incorporation was a tall order. The Palestinians, the large majority did not share the basic interests of the regime. While the regime sought to preserve the status quo with Israel, the Palestinians desperately wanted to turn the clock of history back and regain what they had lost in 1948. King Abdullah I of Jordan, he who had led Jordan into the war in 1948 was assassinated by Palestinians in 1951. Succeeded by his son Talal, who was mentally ill and was therefore, succeeded by his son Hussein who became the king of Jordan in 1953. This was the time of the rise of the officer regime in Egypt in 1952, which had become a turning point in the history of the Middle East. The Palestinians were great believers in Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The Palestinians were great believers. That revolutionary Egypt would deliver Palestine. And they became the natural allies of Abdel Nasser in the effort to transform Jordan from a pro-Western monarchy that believed in the status quo with Israel into the main Arab platform for the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinians in the West Bank of Jordan therefore, did not seek to break away from Jordan and to create a separate Palestinian state that would probably invite an Israeli attack. What they really wanted was the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, that which had come to power in 1921 in cooperation with Britain and to transform Jordan into a radical Pan-Arab state in alliance with Egypt and the Soviet Union against Israel and the Western powers. The struggle was fought intensively in the mid-1950s with the Palestinian people in Jordan serving as an available and willingly cooperative instrument in the hands of Abdel Nasser to pressure the Jordanian regime into submission by political opposition, mass protest and subversion. They almost succeeded. And to many of observers in the mid 1950s, it seemed as though the days of the Hashemite regime in Jordan were numbered. But the Hashemite survived and Jordan pulled through. So the question is how did the Jordanians manage seemingly against the odds? There are three components of this durability of the Jordanian regime. First, the loyalty of the Jordanian elite. Though, Jordan was an artificial creation with the passage of time, a Jordanian political elite was formed. Those who firmly believed that Jordan was their political patrimony for which they had no alternative and they were the loyal supporters of the Hashemite monarchy. Alongside the elite, the loyalty of the defense establishment that is the army and the security services, which rested very heavily on the Bedouin Tribes of Jordan, who were the steady and stable supporters of the monarchy since the 1930s. And thirdly, because of Jordan's geopolitical centrality, sandwiched between Israel, Palestine and Iraq, between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Jordan's geopolitical centrality gives it a special importance for the stability of the region. And as a result, Jordan has been and is supported by outside powers from the region itself and from the broader international community in order to preserve Middle Eastern stability. The regime therefore, survived. But it failed to Jordanize the Palestinians, that is to incorporate the Palestinian into the Jordanian state and to have the Palestinians become fully loyal Jordanians by gradually shedding their Palestinians identity. In the late 1950s, a movement developed in the Arab world through the League of Arab States on the one hand and independently under Palestinian initiative. The first clandestine autonomous Palestinian groups to revive the Palestinian identity and political entity. This eventually led to the formation under the auspices of the Arab League of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. It also led, at the same time, outside the framework of the Palestine LIberation Organization, to the establishment of other Palestinian organizations like Fatah and other fighting organizations of the Palestinian people. The Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO and Jordan were soon at loggerheads in the struggle for supremacy over the control of the destiny of the Palestinian people. The PLO demanded freedom to operate politically and militarily in the West Bank, but Jordan naturally refused. Since the West Bank was in their minds, their own sovereign territory and they weren't about to allow the PLO to operate freely against Jordan's own national state interest. Without access to the West Bank, the PLO could not operate effectively as the official representative of the Palestinian people. After all, the West Bank was the most important Arab part of Palestine that still remained under Arab control. But Jordan, seeing itself as the inheritor of Palestine didn't have the slightest intention of conceding its sovereign control of the West Bank to the PLO. But Jordan lost the West Bank to Israel in the 1967 war. And thereby, also lost it's manipulative control of the Palestinian destiny. Moreover, in Jordan's hour of weakness after the war in 1967, Jordan was compelled to allow the deployment on Jordanian territory of the Palestinian fighting organizations that continued to wage their struggle against Israel from Jordanian territory. These fighting organizations of which the biggest and most important was Fatah, were formed outside the framework of the PLO in the late 50s and early 60s. But in 1968,1968, they took over the PLO and turned it into an umbrella organization for the various Palestinian fighting organizations. Yasser Arafat, who was the leader of Fatah, now also became the chairman of the PLO, a position he kept until his death in 2004. Israel needless to say would not tolerate the operations of the Palestinian groups against its territory. And retaliated against the Palestinian groups in Jordan, gradually forcing them away from the border zone with Israel further into the interior of Jordan. The Palestinian organizations established a kind of state within a state. In Jordan, particularly in the Palestinian refugee camps. And thus, threatened the stability of the Jordanian monarchy. This eventually lead to a major clash between the Jordanian Army and the PLO forces in September of 1970. What the Palestinians call Black September, because it was in that September of 1970 in which the Palestinian forces were defeated by the Jordanians. By the summer of 1971, all Palestinian fighting forces were forced out of Jordan completely from where they went to Lebanon as we have already seen in our discussion of Lebanon.
