the British remained quite indulgent with their royal client. When France claimed its imperial rights in Syria and pushed Faisal out of Damascus, the British gave him a consolation prize: the Kingdom of Iraq. That left the problem of what to do with Faisal’s younger brother, Abdullah. To mollify the royal dynasty from the Arabian Desert, the British government arbitrarily detached the sparsely populated area east of the Jordan from the Jewish homeland provisions of the mandate and turned it into an entity called the Emirate of Transjordan, with Abdullah as emir. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill boasted that “with the stroke of a pen,” he had created a new country and crowned a king. Forever after, Jews were forbidden to settle in any part of Transjordan. Four-fifths of the original Palestine mandate now became Judenrein.
The Balfour Declaration aimed to reassure the Arabs of Britain’s benign intentions by including the commitment that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” But reconciling the aspirations of Arabs and Jews became far more tenuous after the declaration’s balancing act had to be carried out in the truncated area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. There was now much less room and a great deal more hatred.
As Middle East historians have noted, the Arabs of Palestine did not fare well under Turkish rule. Mired for more than two centuries in backwardness and grinding poverty, Palestinians were never recognized as possessing any distinctive national identity. Rather, they were regarded by the Turks as Ottoman citizens living in either the Jerusalem or Damascus districts of the empire. The north of Palestine was part of Syria and ruled over by the Ottoman military governor in Damascus. Palestinians had no representative bodies; many were forcibly conscripted into the Turkish army and denied the most rudimentary rights of speech and assembly. Any nationalist agitation was met by barbaric Turkish repression, including widespread torture, deportations to Anatolia, and public executions in Damascus.
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