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Historically, the British Mandate of Palestine included all of present-day Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan, (the Gaza Strip was also part of the British Mandate), and had been controlled by the Ottoman Empire of Turkey for hundreds of years from the early 1500sCenturies: 15th century 16th century 17th century Decades: 1450s 1460s 1470s 1480s 1490s 1500s 1510s 1520s 1530s 1540s 1550s Years: 1500 1501 1502 1503 1504 1505 1506 1507 1508 1509 1510 Events and Trends Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa External li.
With the defeat of Turkey during World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of and the rise of BritishThe word British has several different uses. See the article on Britain for more details. In a geographical context, it usually applies to a person or object from, or the people or nation of ("the British") the island of Great Britain though, confusingly, colonial power, the Balfour Declaration, 1917The Balfour Declaration was a letter of November 2, 1917 from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, to Lord Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federatio was issued by the British government, granting the entire area of Palestine on both banks of the Jordan RiverThis article is about the Jordan River is western Asia. For other meanings, see Jordan River (disambiguation The Jordan River seen from spaceNASA photo''Northern Part of the Great Rift Valley The Jordan River is a river in western Asia flowing through the to the Jews.
After the League of NationsThe League of Nations was an international organization founded after the First World War with goals of reducing armaments, settling disputes between countries and maintaining living conditions, but The League proved incapable of preventing aggression by issued the and the British were given the British Mandate of Palestine, it was Winston Churchill who guided a memorandum to the League of Nations stating that Transjordan (i.e. areas east of the Jordan River) would be excluded from all the provisions dealing with Jewish settlement, and this memorandum was approved on 11 September, 1922. From that point onwards, Britain administered the part west of the Jordan as "Palestine", and the part east of the Jordan as "Transjordan".
The Hashemite leaders had been the Arab's Sharif of Mecca (the chief custodians of Mecca, Islam's holiest city) since the 1100s. The Hashemite Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, who had previously declared himself king of the Hejaz in 1917, and also declared himself king of all Arabs, was defeated and expelled from Saudi Arabia by King Ibn Saud of the House of Saud in 1924.
Sherif Hussein ibn Ali's sons: Abdullah I of Jordan and Faisal I of Iraq also became newly-minted kings. They were rewarded by the British for their loyalty in expelling the Turks from the Arabian Peninsula, and because of their religious status (sons of the Sharif), they were seen as able to garner the support of the Arabs in Iraq, Transjordan, and even Syria for Britain. They were given the newly-established monarchies over Transjordan and over Iraq and Syria, (Syria was later given to France). Faisal I of Iraq had actually signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement in 1919 as part of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 ending World War I, accepting the Balfour Declaration on behalf of the Arabs and calling for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, but there was still no official Jewish state by the time he died in 1933. The subsequent kings, Ghazi of Iraq and Faisal II of Iraq were either anti-British, pro-Nazi, anti-Israel, or under the control of regents opposed to Israel's existence. They actually also sent Iraqi troops to fight Israel in the West Bank in 1947-1948. (Only following the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 have silent overtures resumed to create peace between Israel and Iraq.) Abdullah I of Jordan became Emir of Transjordan in 1921 and King in 1923. During a visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem he was assassinated in 1951 (planned by a Colonel Abdullah Tell a cohort of the pro- Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni) supposedly because he was suspected of trying to bring peace between Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, (at his side was the young future King Hussein of Jordan who eventually signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994).