wrote an article called “The Missing 19 Years,” the period between Israel’s creation in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967. It was great, I highly recommend reading it if you haven’t already.
His point was that for those 19 years, Israel didn’t control the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt administered Gaza. Yet no independent Palestinian state emerged in either territory.
It was interesting. And because apparently I’m incapable of encountering an interesting historical claim without opening seventeen documents to see what else is hiding underneath it, I started digging.
The 19 missing years turned into 40.
Because Jordan’s part in this story didn’t end in 1967.
And what happened between Jordan, the Palestinians and the West Bank over the following two decades raises much bigger questions about the history we’ve been taught about Palestinian statehood, citizenship, territory and displacement.
After the 1948 war, Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem while Egypt controlled Gaza. The Arab state proposed in the 1947 UN partition plan never came into existence. Jordan took a very different path with the territory it captured, one that lasted for decades and affected the citizenship and political status of its Palestinian population.
Jordan formally annexed the West Bank in 1950 and incorporated it into the Hashemite Kingdom. Its nationality legislation brought Palestinians living in Jordanian-controlled territory into Jordanian nationality, and the 1954 Jordanian Nationality Law defined as Jordanian nationals qualifying former Palestinian nationals who had been regularly resident in the kingdom during the period specified by the law. Jordan’s annexation received little international recognition, but within the kingdom the West Bank was being governed as part of Jordan.
West Bank Palestinians participated in Jordanian political life, voted in elections and sent representatives to the Jordanian parliament. Jordanian government institutions operated in the territory, including East Jerusalem. Jordan wasn’t preparing the West Bank for an imminent transfer to an independent Palestinian government. It incorporated the territory into Jordan and made its Palestinian population part of the Jordanian political system.
Egypt took a different approach in Gaza. The All-Palestine Government was proclaimed there in September 1948 under Arab League sponsorship, but it never became an independent government exercising effective authority over the territory. Its leadership was moved to Cairo, Egypt remained in control of Gaza, and Gamal Abdel Nasser dissolved what remained of the government in 1959.
By the end of the 1950s, Jordan had incorporated the West Bank while Egypt administered Gaza. Neither government established an independent Palestinian state in the territory it controlled. Israel controlled neither territory. There were no Israeli settlements there, no Israeli checkpoints, and no Israeli military administration.
That arrangement lasted until 1967.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, three years before Israel captured the West Bank or Gaza. Its original Palestinian National Charter defined Palestine according to the boundaries of the British Mandate, rejected the partition of Palestine, and rejected the establishment of Israel.
