The “less colonial” border of the Eastern Mediterranean region The National (Abu Dhabi) - 2 April 2014 - http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/history-shines-light-on-the-true- borders-of-palestine#full#ixzz2xl9HldIW “Israel opposes the establishment of an additional Palestinian state in the Gaza district and in the area between Israel and Jordan.” These words were included in the “peace initiative” presented in May 1989 by Israel’s Labour-Likud national unity government. Twenty-five years later, the “Jordan option” is back and being increasingly mentioned in the media. Whenever there is a concrete effort to push forward the peace process, talk about “a substitute homeland” for the Palestinians re-emerges. Most of those supporting this scheme claim that well before the partition suggested by the UN General Assembly in 1947, the Zionist movement suffered a mutilation of territory following the unilateral British decision in 1922 to separate Transjordan from the rest of the land subject to the Mandate for Palestine. They argued that the Palestinians already had a sovereign state – Jordan – and that, therefore, Israel, even by incorporating today’s West Bank and Gaza Strip, would comprise only 22 per cent of the whole “historic Palestine”. These claims are problematic. The Mandate for Palestine had direct, complete and explicit jurisdiction over the area that, in 1922, became the Emirate of Transjordan for eight months: from July 1920, when King Faisal was thrown out of Damascus, to March 12, 1921, the day of the Conference of Cairo which, in Winston Churchill’s words, sanctioned “the policy to be adopted with regard to Trans Jordania”. It was a “partially legal” time lapse even from the juridical perspective imposed by European powers, given that the Mandate for Palestine was formally assigned to London by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, becoming operative in September 1923. Transjordan was thus part of the Mandate for Palestine with the proviso that Britain might administer it separately and for a period which at best may be considered scarcely relevant. Transjordan, unlike Palestine, was never occupied by British troops and during the mandatory period there was no “overlapping”, either at a legal or practical level, between the two areas. A citizen of Transjordan was required to ask for official permission before being admitted to Palestine. However, to better understand why the “Jordan is Palestine” thesis is based on wrong assumptions it is necessary to go back further. A memorandum written in January 24, 1919 by William Ormsby-Gore, British under-secretary of state for the colonies from 1922, pointed out that “the historic Palestine from Dan to Bersheba comprises Galilee, Samaria and Judaea, and consists of a strip of land lying between the Mediterrean and the Jordan river”. In a meeting 10 months later, British prime minister Lloyd George resorted to Adam Smith’s The Historical Geography of the Holy Land and relied on the advice of a Protestant missionary organisation, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Some influential Zionists, including Nahum Sokolow, said that the eastern border of “Erets-Yisra’el” was represented by the Jordan river. Many others claimed a much vaster area. Their positions were justified through arguments linked to security and economic aspects, despite the fact that, as noted by Arnold