Collusion Across the Jordan
The secret deal that divided Palestine
Description
In November 1947, as the United Nations prepared to vote on partitioning Palestine, a remarkable meeting took place in secret. Golda Meyerson — later Golda Meir — traveled in disguise to Naharayim, on the river Jordan, to meet King Abdullah of Transjordan. The Hashemite monarch and the representative of the Jewish Agency were not enemies plotting across a battlefield. They were two parties to an understanding, reached quietly and held even more quietly: when the British left and the Arab states marched in, Abdullah's army would not try to strangle the Jewish state. He would take the Arab part of Palestine instead.
Avi Shlaim's book reconstructs this relationship in detail, drawing on archives that long stayed closed. The story he tells runs against the founding myth shared, oddly, by both sides. In the Israeli version, a tiny new state stood alone against five Arab armies sworn to its destruction. In the Arab version, a united front rose to defend Palestine. Neither account leaves room for the king who had been talking to the Zionists for years, whose Arab Legion was led by British officers, and who wanted partition as much as Ben-Gurion did — just with himself, not a Palestinian state, on the other side of the line.
What Shlaim assembles is less a tale of war than of a tacit bargain, negotiated through back channels and tested when the shooting started. The Palestinian Arabs, the people whose land was being divided, were not in the room. The collusion across the Jordan helps explain why, when the dust settled in 1949, there was an Israel and an enlarged Jordan — and no Palestine at all.
The question we’re asking : How did a secret understanding between a Hashemite king and the Zionist movement shape the partition of Palestine, and what did it cost the Palestinians?What we’ll see : A three-decade relationship built on a shared interest in dividing the land, the diplomacy that ran beneath the war of 1948, and the country that never appeared on the map.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A king without a kingdom, a movement without a state
Abdullah came to Transjordan in 1921 almost by accident. The son of the Sharif of Mecca, he had expected a throne in Damascus or Baghdad; the postwar carve-up of the Ottoman lands by Britain and France left him with a thinly populated desert emirate east of the Jordan, cobbled together as much to keep him quiet as to reward the Hashemites for the Arab Revolt. It was a small consolation prize, and Abdullah never stopped regarding it as too small. His ambition was Greater Syria, with himself at its center, and Palestine was the natural bridge between what he had and what he wanted.
The Zionist movement, for its part, was a project in search of territory and allies. Its leaders understood early that the surrounding Arab states would shape whatever future the Jewish national home might have. Most Arab rulers were hostile or indifferent. Abdullah was different. He was pragmatic, financially dependent on British subsidies, and openly willing to deal. From the late 1920s onward, Jewish Agency officials cultivated him — land purchases in his territory, quiet payments, regular meetings. He was, in Shlaim's account, the one Arab leader who treated the Zionists not as an enemy to be denied but as a force to be bargained with.
02Chapter 2 — The understanding takes shape
By the mid-1940s the question of Palestine could no longer be deferred. Britain, exhausted and broke, was handing the problem to the United Nations, and the UN's special committee recommended partition: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone around Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepted. The Arab states and the Palestinian leadership rejected it outright. Abdullah's position was more interesting than either. He did not want the Palestinian state the UN proposed — he wanted that territory for himself.
This is where the Naharayim meeting of November 1947 fits. Golda Meyerson and the king reached what amounted to a non-aggression pact dressed as a partition agreement. Abdullah would annex the Arab areas of Palestine; in return, his Arab Legion would not attack the territory allotted to the Jewish state. Each got what it most wanted at the other's lowest cost. The Jews would have their state without the strongest Arab army in their path; the king would extend his kingdom across the river without firing on the Zionists. The Palestinians, whose state was the thing being quietly cancelled, were not consulted.
03Chapter 3 — War as the cover for a bargain
When the British mandate ended in May 1948 and the Arab states sent their armies into Palestine, the war looked, from the outside, like the all-out assault of the Israeli legend. Shlaim's reconstruction complicates the picture. The Arab Legion, the most effective of those armies, fought hard for the areas Abdullah meant to keep — the central highlands, the old city of Jerusalem — but it largely refrained from pushing into the territory of the Jewish state. Its objectives traced, with rough fidelity, the lines of the understanding reached the previous autumn.
The fighting was real and bloody, especially in and around Jerusalem, and it would be wrong to read the whole war as theater. But the broad pattern, in Shlaim's telling, matched the bargain more than the rhetoric. The fiercest collisions came where the prior understanding was vaguest, above all over Jerusalem, which neither side could afford to concede and which the partition plan had tried to neutralize as an international zone. Where lines had been tacitly agreed, the armies tended to halt; where they had not, they bled.
04Chapter 4 — The state that was negotiated away
Step back from the maneuvering and a larger pattern comes into view: the fate of Palestine was settled less by the clash of nations than by the calculations of those who found it convenient not to have a Palestinian state at all. Shlaim's deeper argument is that the Palestinian catastrophe — the loss of homeland, the flight and expulsion of some 700,000 people — was not solely the work of Israeli arms. It was also the product of an Arab order in which the strongest Arab actor on the ground had agreed, in effect, to divide the spoils.
This reframes the usual moral accounting. The standard narratives cast 1948 as a contest between a Jewish state and an Arab world united in its defense of Palestine. Shlaim's archives show something less heroic on both sides: a Zionist leadership pragmatic enough to deal with a king, and a king pragmatic enough to deal with the Zionists, each pursuing a national interest that ran directly counter to Palestinian self-determination. The Palestinians lost not only because they were weaker, but because the people meant to be their champions had other plans.
05Conclusion
Abdullah did not enjoy his enlarged kingdom for long. In July 1951 he was assassinated at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman, killed for the very dealings Shlaim's book lays bare — the suspicion, never quite proven in public but widely believed, that he had betrayed the Arab cause and made his peace with the Zionists. The West Bank he had absorbed would stay under Jordanian control until 1967, when Israel took it in another war, and the question of Palestinian statehood, deferred in 1948, was deferred again.
