Transjordan memorandum

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Transjordan memorandum was Britain’s plan, announced on 16 September 1922, to implement Article 25 of the Mandate for Palestine. It allowed Transjordan to be included under the Mandate while excluding it from provisions about Jewish settlement, keeping Transjordan as a largely autonomous area.

Context: After World War I, the Levant was divided into zones and Transjordan lay to the east of the Jordan River. Abdullah bin al-Hussein became Emir of Transjordan in 1921, and a unified administration for the territory did not exist yet. The San Remo conference had given Britain the Palestine mandate but had not defined its boundaries, creating a need to maintain influence in Transjordan while avoiding endorsing a Jewish homeland there.

The solution was to place Transjordan within the Palestine Mandate but treat it separately in practice. Article 25 of the Mandate allowed such an exclusion. On 16 September 1922, Lord Balfour presented this plan to the League of Nations and asked for approval of the memorandum that would implement Article 25.

Boundary and administration: The Palestine Order in Council of August 1922 gave the High Commissioner power to define the boundary between Transjordan and Palestine. The memorandum used a boundary that ran from two miles west of Aqaba, up the center of Wadi Araba, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan River to its junction with the Yarmuk River, and then up the Yarmuk to the Syrian frontier.

Exclusions and governance: The memorandum listed several parts of the Mandate that would not apply in Transjordan, including the articles about a Jewish national home, as well as certain other articles and parts of the preamble. It stated that the administration of Transjordan would be carried out by the British Mandatory government under its general supervision, and that this administration would follow the Mandate’s provisions that were not declared inapplicable.

Impact: From that point, Britain administered the land west of the Jordan as Palestine and the land east of the Jordan as Transjordan. Technically one mandate covered two territories, but many documents treated them as two separate mandates. In May 1923, Transjordan gained internal self-government with Abdullah as ruler and Harry St. John Philby as chief representative.