Building Nations I: The Arab World

views updated

Building Nations I: The Arab World

Up until the end of World War I (1914–18; war in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies), the Middle East had enjoyed hundreds of years of relative political stability under the control of the Ottoman Empire (a vast empire of southwest Asia, northeast Africa, and southeast Europe that reigned from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century). The Ottoman Empire, with its capital in the present-day country of Turkey, had acted as a unifying force in the region ever since it invaded the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt in 1516–17. Ottoman rule may have stabilized the region, but it did not contribute to its advancement. The predominately Muslim, or Islamic, societies of the Middle East, including Iran, had not progressed nearly as quickly as those in Western countries (such as Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States), and by the turn of the twentieth century they fell far behind the West in terms of their economic progress, the education of their people, and their political development. All of that began to change in the years after World War I.

World War I freed the Middle East from Ottoman rule and began a period of political, social, and economic change in the region. The Ottoman Empire was divided by the League of Nations (an organization of nations created after World War I to promote peace and to assist countries with international relations) into smaller countries that were controlled by Britain and France. The hope was that with the assistance of the British and the French, these countries would eventually be able to function as independent nations. In many Middle Eastern countries, this came to pass due to the idea of nationalism, the process by which a people with shared ethnic, cultural, or religious identities form themselves into a self-governing political body called a nation. Many of the countries originally under Ottoman control, including Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan, were governing themselves before 1950. However, in some countries, nationalist movements created tensions within the societies. In Palestine both Muslim and Jewish residents felt that they had a right to create a nation of their own, causing conflict between the two. In other countries, such as Iraq, nationalism was difficult to achieve due to arguments between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, members of different branches of Islam. Nationalism also influenced relationships between the various countries in the Middle East as well. Many of these nations in the region were ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim and numerous countries and leaders suggested that these nations should combine under one leadership, a nationalist idea known as Pan-Arabism. Supporters of Pan-Arabism saw this movement as a way to strengthen the Muslim culture as well as grow stronger in the region due to combined resources. Yet not every country wanted to give up the individual power or culture that it had attained, making Pan-Arabism very difficult to achieve. As World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan) began, many Middle Eastern countries used alliances, or partnerships, with larger world powers in order to either strengthen or weaken ideas of nationalism.

After World War II, more of the countries in the Middle East had gained independence, but this did not bring peace to the region. The creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 and the forced removal of thousands of Arab Palestinians to other nations such as Jordan and Syria required countries in the region to either support the Jewish state or to work toward its destruction. This furthered the idea of Pan-Arabism as many countries, such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, joined together to form the League of Arab Nations, an organization created to keep the values and customs of Arabic and Muslim societies strong in the Middle East. It also brought more Western influences into the Middle East as countries such as the United States worked to keep the nation of Israel from being destroyed.

Turkey: unlikely survivor of the Ottoman collapse

At the center of the Ottoman Empire lay Turkey, a vast country that served as transitional ground between the Middle East and the West. Turkey had once been home to the ancient Greek state of Troy; it had been part of the Byzantine Empire (the eastern part of the Roman empire that ruled from c. 330 to 1453); and it was the location of the Ottoman Empire's government for over six hundred years. At the end of World War I, however, the nation of Turkey was in danger of disappearing. The conquering nations of Britain and France occupied important parts of the country and they put in place plans to divide the country, with the largest western region, Anatolia, granted to Greece and Italy, and independence given to Armenians (Christian Turks) in the northeast and Kurds (non-Arabic Muslims) in the southeast. Turkish Muslims, who made up the majority of people in Turkey, refused to let their country be destroyed by Western powers and they joined together to create a new Turkish sense of nationalism. Led by General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the Turks fought off the Greek and Italian armies, reclaimed control of the eastern lands, and joined together to create an independent Turkish republic.

Turkey's emergence as an independent nation was surprising not just because the Turks rejected Western attempts to divide up the country but because Atatürk modeled Turkey's new economic and political systems on those in the Western world once Turkey was free of foreign control. Atatürk believed that for Turkey to survive as an independent country in the twentieth century, it was necessary for Turkey to become like countries that were prospering, such as most of the countries of the West. Turkey had long been a Muslim society, and its leader, the sultan, was also the leader of the Islamic faith, giving him the title of caliph. But one of the first steps taken by Atatürk and his party, the Committee for Union and Progress, was abolishing Islam as the state religion and dismantling the legal system, which was based on Islamic holy law, or Sharia. Atatürk wanted a legal system based on secular (non-religious) laws and a separation between church and state, as in most Western countries. Atatürk pursued many programs to make his country more like those in the West: he granted women equal status with men, including the right to vote and hold office; he enforced the use of the Latin alphabet, rather than Arabic script; and he asked that all of his people wear Western-style clothes. Atatürk's reforms were not solely focused on eliminating cultural traits associated with the Muslim Middle East. He also encouraged his people to identify with their Turkish heritage, inspiring great pride in his countrymen.

Turkey's movement toward a more Western-style government was not completed before World War II. During his lifetime, Atatürk's rule was absolute: the elected parliament served to approve without question his policies and he used the military to enforce unpopular programs. Turkey developed an economy that was far more advanced than most other Middle Eastern countries, and was well integrated into regional and world trade. In the political matters that defined the Middle East, especially relations with European powers leading up to World War II and the Arab-Israeli conflict, Turkey remained officially neutral. Geographically part of the Middle East, Turkey kept itself largely outside the various conflicts that defined the region throughout the twentieth century.

Persia/Iran: A special case in the Middle East

The civilization that was Persia—it became known as Iran after World War I—has played a special role in the history of the Middle East. It has always been physically, ethnically, and religiously quite different from most other Middle Eastern countries, yet its stance on issues central to the conflicts in the Middle East have made it an important participant. Physically, Iran straddles the boundary between the Middle East and Southern Asia. A majority of Iran's people are ethnically Asian, while the majority of the population in the other Middle Eastern countries (excepting Turkey and Israel) is Arabic. Few Iranians speak Arabic, the dominant language in the rest of the Middle East, outside of religious ceremonies. Instead they speak a form of Persian called Farsi. Finally, nearly 90 percent of Iran's population belongs to the Shiite branch of Islam (a sect of the Islamic religion that believes the leader of the religion must be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad), rather than the Sunni branch (a sect of the Islamic religion that believes that the leaders elected to follow Mohammad do not need to be a descendant of Muhammad, only of his tribe) that dominates in the rest of the Middle East. These differences, combined with the fact that Persia maintained its own empire, distinct from the Ottoman Empire, for most of the nation's history, have made Iran an outsider to the exclusively Arab components of regional conflict. Yet Iran's difficult relationship with the Western powers, its unwavering opposition to the Jewish state of Israel, and its embrace in the late 1970s of an Islamic form of government (due to an Islamic revolution in the country) make Iran an important player in the ongoing turmoil in the region.

The Persian Empire (550–330 bce), much like the Ottoman Empire, had lost most of its power by the twentieth century. Western powers, especially Britain and Russia, dominated the political and economic life of the land owned by the empire and had begun to modernize it in the early 1900s. In 1905 a popular uprising against the shah, or emperor, forced the creation of a constitutional monarchy, a system of government that allowed for some popular representation but left the shah in power as the leader of the empire. In 1908 British interests discovered oil on Persian land, and thereafter the development of the oil industry began to play a large role in the area. The Persians remained neutral during World War I, but many battles between foreign powers occurred on Persian land since it was a route between Asia and the Middle East.

Following World War I, the League of Nations created the country of Iran from the area formerly ruled by the Persian Empire, but no foreign power took control since the region already had an established government, headed by the shah. In the 1920s, a military commander named Reza Khan (1877–1944) quickly rose to power due to his opposition to the shah's rule, which many felt was still under the influence of the Russians and the British. By 1923 Reza Khan had forced the shah from power and claimed that office for himself, founding the Pahlavi dynasty (a group that maintains power in a specific area for a long period of time). In 1925 the Majlis, or elected assembly of Iran, gave him the title of Reza Shah, and he began to rule Iran as a dictator (one with absolute power whose policies are often considered cruel or unjust). Like Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Shah quickly began to modernize Iran: he built roads and railways, reformed the educational system, supported the growth of industry, offered greater rights to women, and challenged the power of Islamic religious leaders. Unlike Atatürk, Reza Shah was not beloved by his people. They resented his policy to limit the role of religion in government and disliked his inflexible style of ruling. It was Reza Shah's foreign policy that ended his reign, however. He allied himself with Germany in the 1930s, and sided with the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) when World War II began in 1939. In response, Allied troops (British, French, Russian, and American) occupied Iran and forced him from power in 1941. In his place they installed his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–1980).

The postwar years saw major conflicts within Iranian society and politics. Many people disliked Iran's Westernization efforts and the control that foreign powers had over Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (1882–1967) helped lead a nationalist uprising to assert Iranian power over the government. Mossadegh seized control of Iran's oil industry, which had been controlled by British and American companies. He also tried to increase the power of the legislature, and in 1953 he forced the shah into exile (removal from one's native country). The United States, however, was unwilling to lose control in Iran, and it helped overthrow Mossadegh and return Reza Shah Pahlavi to power. In the years that followed, the shah sided openly with the United States, while continuing and expanding the modernization process begun by his father. Over the years, however, it became apparent that the wealthy, educated, and secular governing minority was out of touch with the overwhelmingly poor and passionately Muslim population. By the late 1970s, an Islamic cleric by the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900–1989) led the Iranian people in a revolution that saw the establishment of the world's first Islamic republic.

In the course of the twentieth century, Iran experienced much of the same turmoil faced by other Middle Eastern countries: it struggled to decide whether it would embrace or reject Western values, even as it became dependent on oil revenues produced by trade with the West, and it faced the question of how it would reconcile its people's devout Islamic faith with the principles of modern government. In 1979, the people of Iran revolted against the government and overthrew it in an event known as the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The Iranian people wanted a government that was founded on the teachings and laws of Islam and they placed an Islamic religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the position of Supreme Leader after the revolution. Khomeini enacted laws and policies that rejected all foreign influences on government, culture, and all other areas of life in Iran. Iran's rejection of the West and its embrace of Islamic government, however, led it on a path that was very different from many other Middle Eastern nations.

Egypt: grudging pawn of the British

The nation of Egypt has the longest continuous history of any nation in the world, having taken shape as early as 3,000 bce. Egypt had demonstrated its independence by successfully maintaining its identity despite the intrusion of foreign powers starting in 1517. But Egypt's modern history is usually dated from the year 1869, the year Egypt completed construction on the Suez Canal, a long waterway that allowed ship traffic to move between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, thus connecting Europe to Southern Asia and the east African coast. The construction of the canal nearly bankrupted the nation. Fearing a financially and politically unstable Egypt, Britain sent military troops there in 1882. From that date until it attained real independence in 1952, Egyptian political and foreign policies were largely controlled by the British. This put Egypt in a strange and difficult situation. Since the early 1920s, Egypt had been a country that had promoted the rights of Arabs throughout the Middle East. It had been one of the founder members of the Arab League (a group of Arab states in the Middle East that joined together to further the best interests of Arabs) and had been one of the supporters of the Palestinians against the Jews in their conflict over the land of Palestine. Yet even though Arabs across the Middle East looked to Egypt as a leader in Arab politics, they also criticized it for being a tool of the British.

Though Britain controlled Egypt after 1882, Egypt remained an official part of the Ottoman Empire until the start of World War I in 1914, when Britain declared Egypt a protectorate (a state ruled under the protection of another state). Britain then used Egypt as a base for its troops as it fought against the Ottoman Empire. Not long after the war, in 1922, Britain declared Egypt a constitutional monarchy, with King Fuad (1868–1936) at the helm and an elected parliament. Fuad and his successor, his son King Farouk (1920–1965), who took power in 1936, were opposed by an emerging Egyptian nationalist movement called the Wafd al Misri, or simply the Wafd. The Wafd was composed of educated, middle-class Egyptians who wanted to establish Egypt as an independent republic; they represented a potential future in which Egypt more closely resembled Western nations. From 1922 on, the king and the Wafd fought for control of Egyptian politics. In 1936 the Wafd negotiated a smaller British military presence in Egypt, but the events of World War II saw Britain again exercise its control of the country.

In the years following World War II, Egypt became increasingly unstable. Corruption and incompetence led to a widespread lack of confidence in the government, and popular uprisings emerged to challenge both the king and the Wafd. The most powerful radical group was the Muslim Brotherhood, which wanted Egypt to become an Islamic state. They were one of several groups leading riots against Western influence in the country and protesting Egypt's failure to deny the Jewish state of Israel its independence in 1948. Finally, on July 23, 1952, a group of military men led by Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) took power; they forced the king into exile and crushed the Muslim Brotherhood. From the time that Nasser took power, Egypt claimed a leading role in Arab politics. For many years it was an enemy of Israel and Western powers that supported Israel, and worked to unite other Arab nations against the Jewish state.

Iraq

Although it is the site of Mesopotamia, one of the oldest civilizations on earth, Iraq is a nation that has often been controled by larger, more powerful empires and nations. Situated at the meeting pointing of the great Ottoman and Persian Empires, this land defined by the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers changed hands several times over the course of history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became a protectorate of Britain in 1915, and after World War I the League of Nations made Iraq a mandate state of Britain.

Why Is the West So Interested in the Middle East?

Since the discovery of oil in the Middle East during the early part of the twentieth century, Western interests in the region have increased significantly. These industrialized countries depend on a steady supply of oil and petroleum-based products to fuel their economy, hence maintaining political stability and access to oil were important strategic concerns. Yet even before the discovery of oil, Western countries were interested in the Middle East for other economic and political reasons.

In the nineteenth century, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia were very interested in establishing colonies or protectorates around the world, upon which they could build their economies. (Protectorates are relationships of protection and partial control assumed by strong nations over dependent foreign countries.) Even though most of these countries did not want to build colonies in the Middle East, they wanted to be sure to keep their rivals from doing so. Up until World War I, Britain, France, and Russia kept the Ottoman Empire, which ruled much of the region, from falling apart to protect their interests in the Middle East. They repelled Germany's attempts to gain influence over the region in World War I; and after the war Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Empire into regions under their authority. (Russia did not take any of the Ottoman land due to internal conflicts within its own government.) The mandate system established in 1920 by the League of Nations, an international organization formed to preserve peace, gave Britain and France authority over equal portions of what was left of the former Ottoman Empire.

Another key reason for Western interest in the Middle East is its strategic location, since the Middle East served as a connecting point for Europe, Asia, and Africa. Britain and France, and later the United States, were eager to establish military bases in the region, allowing them easy access to trade routes and neutral ground between the three continents. The placement of these military facilities almost always aroused local opposition from Arabs who complained that they did not need Western military supervision. These tensions, and conflicts over the introduction of Western values in the Muslim world, continue to complicate Western interactions with the Middle East.

The creation of Iraq as an independent nation was plagued from the beginning by problems and contradictions. The borders of the country were drawn by European powers without much regard for ethnicity or tribal loyalty. Iraq came to include a large Kurdish minority in the north which has hoped for an independent country of its own; a large Shiite Muslim population, many of whom felt a deep allegiance to neighboring Iran; a sizable number of Sunni Muslims interested in ruling themselves; and numerous other minority groups. Britain installed Faisal ibn Husayn (1883–1933) as king of Iraq in 1921 as a reward for his help leading the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule during World War I. King Faisal was a Sunni Muslim, and his appointment as king helped stop a Muslim revolt against British rule, but he still had to contend with an ethnically divided population. In 1923, when oil was discovered in Iraq, European powers began to fight for control of this precious resource. Faisal may have been king, but the real power in Iraq lay in oil wealth, and ownership of oil rights in Iraq was split between Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Iraq thus began its history as a nation divided along ethnic and religious lines, and without access to its main source of wealth.

Despite these problems, Faisal used the small amount that Iraq received from the oil business and improved his country. This created a sense of pride and a national identity in the Iraqi people which led to its independence from British authority in 1932. The Iraqi royal family remained loyal to Britain, and payments from foreign oil interests helped build the Iraqi economy. Increasingly, however, nationalist politics brought turmoil to Iraq. Nationalists wanted to reject British and Western interference and to claim Iraq's oil wealth. They sided with the Germans during World War II, which prompted temporary British occupation of the country. In the postwar years, nationalists were vocal in their call for the destruction of Israel, which was formed in 1948, and later supported the call for Pan-Arabism, a political movement to unite all the Arab nations under a secular government. In 1958 General Abdul Karim Qassem (1914–1963), leader of an Iraqi nationalist party called the Free Officers, killed the Iraqi king, Faisal II, and installed himself as ruler of Iraq. For the next ten years, bloody feuds between rival nationalist groups kept Iraqi politics very unstable. Finally, the Baath Party, a Pan-Arabic group that combined nationalism with socialism (a system in which the government own the means of production, such as land and factories and controls the distribution of goods and services), took full control of Iraq in 1968 and remained in power until dictator Saddam Hussein (1937–) was removed from power in 2003. Under the Baath Party, Iraq was often at odds with other Arab nations, especially its rival Syria, and was an enemy of Israel for many years.

Syria and Lebanon

Though it has been home to human habitation for as long as Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, the region that became modern Syria was almost continuously occupied by a larger foreign power and subject to its rule. Like most of its Arab neighbors, it fell under Ottoman rule in the period between 1516 and 1517, and remained there until the end of World War I. At the end of World War I, Arab nationalists, including Faisal ibn Husayn, who later became king of Iraq, attempted to declare independence in a region that included modern-day Syria and Lebanon. But French forces, insistent on claiming some territory as the result of their share of the victory in World War I, defeated the Arab uprising and, in 1920, were granted control over the region under the mandate system of the League of Nations. Early French plans were to establish separate states for the ethnically and religiously diverse population of the region, with each of the Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Alawites, Druze, and Maronite subgroups allotted its own territory. (Alawites are an Islamic sect that believed that Ali, the son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad [c. 570–632], was the human form of the god Allah; the Druze are a small sect of Islam who believe that the ninth-century caliph Tariq al-Hakim was God; and Maronites belong to the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity.) In order to defeat Arab Muslim resistance to its rule, France divided Syria and Lebanon into two countries. Lebanon, once a majority Christian territory based on Mount Lebanon, was expanded and made religiously diverse; Syria was in turn stripped of major cities and coastal ports, and its Muslim population was diluted by the separation. The legacy of this division can be seen in the nearly continuous conflict that Syria and especially Lebanon have suffered since that date.

Lebanon created a constitution based on the French model in 1926. This constitution provided for rule based on the major divisions in Lebanese society. Under the constitution, the president was to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister was to be a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the elected Chamber of Deputies was to be a Shiite Muslim. Amazingly, this plan remained in place until 1989, though the division of power would later fuel ethnic conflict. Lebanon achieved its official independence from France in 1943, but real independence did not occur until French troops left the country in 1946, at the end of World War II. Deprived of the stabilizing influence of France, Lebanon soon faced internal conflict, including decades of civil war between the Christians, the Muslims, and various other religious groups in the country, and a lengthy military occupation by neighboring Syria.

Syria's experience under the French mandate was extraordinarily difficult. France imagined Syria with a federal system, with locally controlled states contributing to a national government. Arab nationalists wanted to unify control of the country, but Druze, Sunni, and Shiite factions fought bitterly over who would wield the most power. Several political parties formed during the 1930s, as French diplomats sought ways to withdraw their military presence. Finally, World War II intervened. Under international pressure France withdrew its presence from Syria, though it demanded that its economic interests be protected. Syria immediately elected a pro-Arab leader, joined the Arab League (a federation of Arab states), and declared its independence on April 17, 1946.

In the postwar years Syria alternated between military and civilian governments, with violent coups (sudden attempts to overthrow the current government) usually accompanying a change in power. Ever since declaring independence, Syria has played a dominant role in regional conflict. It has been one of Israel's greatest enemies since it declared war on that country in 1948, joining fellow Arab countries that fought against Israel in the wars that followed over the next few decades. It has been an instigator of civil unrest in Lebanon, using its power, including sending Syrian troops, to undermine stable governments in that country up until its announced withdrawal in 2005. The Syrian Baath Party—distinct from the Iraqi Baath Party—emerged in the early 1950s as the dominant political influence in the country. It led Syria into a brief political union with Egypt from 1958 to 1961 as a member of the United Arab Republic, and encouraged Syrian alliances with the Soviet Union and with terrorist groups. In 1971 Baath Party leader Hafez Assad (1930–2000) took power and ruled as a dictator until his death, when his son, Bashar, succeeded him.

The Arabian Peninsula before oil

The largest physical land mass in the Middle East—at one million square miles, it is about one-third the size of the continental United States—the Arabian Peninsula is home to seven countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Yemen. Prior to the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, however, the countries in this vast desert peninsula played a very small role in regional politics. It was only the members of the northern Bedouin tribes (people who lived and raised animals in the desert with no permanent homes) who were involved in regional political affairs before oil production made the Gulf States, as they are known, a major force in the world economy.

Ever since ancient times, the Arabian Peninsula has been a forbidding, deserted region whose deadly heat and fierce Bedouin tribes scared off the powerful empires that surrounded it. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, and Ottoman Empires all rose and fell around it. Only the seventh-century rise of Islam, based in the holy Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina, brought real unity to the land, which ended in 1250 ce. By the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the twentieth century, the main political power in the region was the leader of the Saud family, Abd al Aziz ibn Saud (c. 1880–1953), a descendant of an early supporter of an extreme branch of the Islamic faith known as Wahhabism. Encouraged by the British, who were happy to have an ally in the region, ibn Saud fought against other tribal leaders to bring political unity to the region. In 1932 ibn Saud formally established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on much of the Arabian Peninsula, which began to function as an independent Arabic country in the region. The Saud family continued to rule the country into the twenty-first century.

Saudi Arabia played an important role in emerging Middle Eastern conflicts for several reasons. The country's approach to the West has symbolized the difficulties that Arab Muslim societies have had with Western values. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia has historically been a steady political ally of the United States and Britain, and Western interests have been instrumental in building the Saudi oil industry. On the other hand, Saudi officials have long resisted allowing any Western cultural influences in the kingdom, restricting oil workers from traveling, banning the consumption of alcohol, and strictly limiting Western media, such as television and radio. Though a political ally of the largely democratic West, Saudi Arabia's government is among the least democratic in the world, with the king maintaining nearly absolute power. Until the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Saudi Arabia was home to the most conservative Islamic government in the world, and it continues to severely limit the rights of women and non-Muslims. Saudi Arabia has also been supportive of Arab efforts to destroy Israel since its creation in 1948 and is thought to provide significant support to Islamic terrorists, including the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden (1957–). Although economically and diplomatically allied with the West, Saudi Arabia is one of the most politically and religiously Islamic countries of the Middle East.

Jordan: stability amid turmoil

The country of Jordan (originally called Transjordan) was created by the League of Nations after World War I as a way to help the British deal with the rising Jewish population in Palestine. The lands that became Transjordan were previously considered as either part of Palestine (to the west), part of greater Syria (to the north), or part of the unmapped deserts of Arabia (to the south). When Britain was granted the mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations in 1920, it had already promised Jewish Zionists, who wanted to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the right to settle in Palestine but had also promised Arab Palestinians that they would lose none of their rights and privileges due to these immigrants. The solution was to create two states. Palestine, lying to the west of the Jordan River, would remain under direct British administration and would be a country where Jews could create a homeland. Transjordan (literally, across the Jordan), would be ruled under British supervision by Abdullah bin Husayn (1882–1951), an Arab leader who helped the British to defeat the Ottoman Empire, and would be a purely Arab country for those Palestinians unhappy living with such a large number of non-Arabic and Islamic people.

The Emirate of Transjordan was established in 1923 with Abdullah as its emir, or prince. It had a population of just 400,000 people, and the majority of these people were Bedouins loosely based in tiny desert villages. It was in the handful of larger towns, with populations between ten thousand and thirty thousand, that Abdullah established his base of power. With British assistance he trained an effective army called the Arab Legion, built roads and schools, and established an efficient government. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Britain transferred more of the administrative duties to Transjordanians. During World War II, Abdullah remained a faithful ally of the British, supplying one of the more accomplished Arab regiments to the British War effort. After the war, on May 25, 1946, Transjordan gained its full independence and within a few years changed its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, often referred to simply as Jordan.

Shortly after declaring its independence from Britain, Jordan became involved in a conflict with the newly created country of Israel. King Abdullah had originally cooperated with the British in their efforts to build a multi-ethnic state in Palestine between 1920 and 1947, making Jordan a country open to those Arabs who wanted to leave Palestine due to the large Jewish immigration. But when Britain withdrew from the region and the Jews in Palestine declared their independence as the Jewish state of Israel, forcing thousands of Arab Palestinians from their homes into neighboring Arab countries, the Jordanians, along with other Arab nations, felt compelled to help Arab Palestinians regain their land. The Arab effort was a failure and Israel became a stable country in 1949, but Abdullah's Arab Legion fought well, and Jordan acquired a significant amount of territory in what is known as the West Bank, as well as in the eastern half of the city of Jerusalem. To many in the Arab world it seemed that Jordan was victorious in taking over some Israeli land, but for Jordan it was the creation of a new set of problems. By taking over the West Bank, Jordan became responsible for its five hundred thousand inhabitants as well as other Arabs who were fleeing the hostile conditions within Israel and moving into refugee camps inside the borders of Arab nations such as Jordan. Since Jordan's initial conflict with Israel, Palestinians Arabs have become a majority of the population of Jordan. The Palestinians have caused significant political problems within Jordan, not least because of their open commitment to wage war on Israel. Navigating this conflict fell to Abdullah's successor, his grandson Hussein ibn Talal (1935–1999), who ruled beginning in 1953 as King Hussein. Jordan and Israel would fight many more times in the coming years and in the twenty-first century, a steady peace between the two countries had still yet to be reached.