But the last thing Jordan wanted in 1994 was responsibility for the millions of Palestinians then living in the West Bank, especially after the aborted Palestinian civil war led by the PLO against King Hussein in 1970.

Palestine was not a political entity in any meaningful sense. Under Ottoman rule, which prevailed between 1516 and 1918, Palestine was divided into several districts, called sanjaks.

The Arab refugee problem could easily have been solved between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan controlled and annexed the West Bank, which was an underpopulated and undercultivated area. But instead of integrating the refugees into the religiously, linguistically, and culturally identical society, they were segregated into ghettos called refugee camps an

Winston Churchill also confirmed that the British government “contemplated the eventual establishment of a Jewish state,”9 and he noted that the substance of the Balfour Declaration had been reaffirmed in several binding multinational treaties, as well as the League of Nations mandate itself, and “is not susceptible of change.” It then became a mat

What would otherwise have been a political dispute, subject to a political compromise resolution, now became an absolute religious prohibition that was not amenable to any compromise: according to the grand mufti of Jerusalem, it would violate Islamic law for even one inch of Palestine to be controlled by Jews.

Ironically, one of the biggest objections many Arabs had to the Balfour Declaration was that it seemed to regard Palestine as a separate entity rather than as part of Syria. As the Peel Commission was later to observe, “The Arabs had always regarded Palestine as included in Syria.” The last thing they wanted was a separate Palestine, because they r

Yet, most Palestinians blame Israel for their own leader’s mistakes.

Palestinian terrorism preceded the occupation as the tactic of choice.

The Jewish refugees in Palestine had established this homeland on the ground without the assistance of any colonial or imperialist powers.