Showing posts with label Jordan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jordan. Show all posts

Monday, September 18, 2023

Tuesday, September 18, 1973. The United Nations and the two Germanys.


The Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were admitted to the United Nations.


King Hussein issued a general amnesty for Palestinian terrorists held by Jordan.

Friday, May 26, 2023

Saturday, May 26, 1923. The Twenty Four Hours of Le Mans

The first Le Mans automobile race took place.


The French executed some Germans who were committing acts of sabotage and the like against their occupation of the Ruhr.


One of the terrorist was one Albert Leo Schlageter, a former German officer of the Great War and a Freikorps officer who had engaged in acts of sabotage against the French.  He was not a "Red" and would go on to obtain mythic status in the German far right, including the early Nazis, who in fact murdered his betrayer.  The killers of that individual were one Rudolf Höss and Martin Bormann, who would later go on to roles in the Third Reich.  They were first captured and sentenced for their role in the murder.  

Bormann is well known, but Höss less so.  He was Auschwitz's longest commanding officer and was executed in 1947.  Facing execution, he came to see his actions as gravely immoral and wrote this out to his wife prior to his execution:

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

On this same day, a Communist lead strike in the Ruhr expanded.

The British made the Emirate of Transjordan autonomous, but not independent of British oversight. It would achieve full independence in 1946.

Turkey waived reparations claims against Greece at Lausanne in exchange for the Thracian territory.

Saturday, June 5, 2021

Thursday, June 5, 1941. The US starts to occupy Iceland

4,000 Marines, a substantial number, arrived in Iceland to replace British troops garrisoning the country.

USS New York off of Reykjavik.

Iceland had not regarded the British invasion of their island, done to keep the Germans from seizing it, as a favor.  US forces were not invited either, but were better tolerated under the circumstances.

On the same day about 4,000 Chinese residents of Chongquing China died of asphyxiation in a tunnel in which they had sought refuge from a Japanese air raid.

Vichy France's status as a quasi belligerent on the Axis side increased when their aircraft bombed Aman, Jordan.   The Royal Air Force had already bombed Syrian airfields, so the move wasn't wholly unjustified, but it did signal that France was creeping up on being an outright Axis ally under the authoritarian regime of Marshal Petain.

Around 2,500 people were killed in an ammunition storage explosion in Yugoslavia.

Sunday, April 25, 2021

April 25, 1941 Echoes of wars past.

On this day in 1941, the Afrika Corps took Halfaya Pass between Egypt and Libya and entered Egypt from the west.  Given the dire situation, the British withdrew its Hurricanes from Tobruk, although they were down to two there at the time.  This left only Westland Lysanders stationed there for artillery spotting purposes.

Westland Lysanders over Madagascar in 1942.

The move conceded control of the skies to the Luftwaffe over Tobruk.

On the same day, Arab recruits to the British forces paraded in Jerusalem.


 



In spite of manpower shortages, and in spite of the fact that Arab volunteers were forthcoming, the British made very little use of them.  It made some, but not much.  All in all, there seems to have been an element of lingering mistrust of Arab volunteers and forces in spite of the significant cooperation between the Hashemites, now ruling Transjordan (and recently overthrown, albeit temporarily, in Iraq), during World War One.  This was partially amplified by Arab unrest between the wars.

On this day, the British forces were defeated at Thermopylae.  

Be that as it may, however, the British defense there did amount none the less to a strategic victory given as the delaying action gave the British forces now withdrawing from Greece much needed time.  The British forces made a 100 miles strategic withdrawal in twelve hours, a remarkable feat, and were greeted with flowers by crowds in Athens.

Many of the troops in Greece were New Zealand, so here again we'll not a bit of an irony in that on this day the British in the Middle East were observing ANZAC Day.

Australian troops at Anzac Monument in front of cemetery, April 25, 1941.


Regarding German intervention in Greece a complete success, Hitler ordered, on this day, the invasion of Crete.

In a press conference, President Roosevelt compared Charles Lindbergh's position on the war to that of the Copperheads to the Civil War.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

April 17, 1921. Sir Herbert Samuel's visits Transjordan for the second time.


The first time was a bit of a disaster as the British government had to renounce certain proclamations that Sir Herbert had made.


This time went better.  Quite a turn out was there in recognition of the official nature of the event, including the Bedouins depicted above.

Transportation wasn't limited to the old fashioned and traditional, however.  British aircraft were present at the Amman airfield.



T. E. Lawrence, no longer in mufti, appeared to meet old friends.


Sunday, April 11, 2021

April 11, 1921. Glass Arm Eddie, First Broadcast Lightweight Boxing Match, 67th Congress, Transjordan, Cigarettes in Iowa.

Eddie Brown.

On the same day that Eddie Brown, Centerfielder, was photographed, the first radio broadcast of a lightweight boxing match may, or may not have, been done:

Old Radio: April 11, 1921: The First Lightweight Boxing Match...: April 11, 1921: The first lightweight boxing match on radio between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee was broadcasted live on this day ...
Pity the poor blogger on something like this. . . 

On this Monday of April, 1921, the 67th Congress was sworn in.


The United Kingdom established the Emirate of Transjordan, which today is the Kingdom of Jordan. Abdullah, the future king, was the Emir.  His grandson is the present king. 

The kingdom has been in the news recently as it may be that a case of sibling rivalry has popped up, and is even potentially dangerous.  

Iowa lifted a prohibition on the sale of cigarettes, a retrograde act that shows the could happen.  

Indeed, cigarette prohibition was an early 20th Century thing that shows the dangers of tobacco, while not really fully understood, weren't completely unknown either.  Prior to Iowa three other states had banned the sale, and even the possession, of cigarettes.


World War One, however, hadn't helped matters.  Indeed, while the Great War had helped push alcohol over the top in terms of being passed, the same factors were somewhat at work.  Thousands of men had been exposed to young drinking during the war and to societies in which, at that time, alcohol was simply part of life and a matter of routine daily consumption.  And cigarettes had poured into the trenches during the war in no small part due to the stress of the situation, and the fact that cigarettes were easier to smoke than their competitors.

1919 cigarette advertisement with  youthful smoking veteran.

For whatever reason, cigarettes really are more dangerous than pipes or cigars, health wise, which doesn't mean any of them are safe.  Lung cancer rates would start to spike in the 1930s due to them.

It's odd to think that my father's father, who was from Iowa originally, was a lifelong Camel cigarette smoker, albeit "life long" is deceptive as he died in his 40s.

On the same day, telephone service was established from Florida to Cuba, and as that lays on the path to cell phones, it was also a retrograde movement. A look at somebody in a distant land, from what seems to be the distant past:

Sunday, March 28, 2021

March 28, 1921. Empires coming and going.

Street in Seattle on March 28, 1921.

Things went from bad to worse for Charles I, the last Austro Hungarian Emperor, when newly created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia warned Hungary that if the regained the Hungarian throne, they'd declare war on Hungary.

All of those countries, combined with Austria, had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and they feared that Charles I's restoration as King of Hungary would be followed by a claim to restore the Austro Hungarian Empire.

Winston and Clementine Churchill were the subjects of a reception at the Government House in Jerusalem.


Also present was Abdullah I and his entourage.  Abdullah's army had occupied Jordan without opposition.  He was a British client, but the situation was tense as his actions were not yet recognized as legitimate.

The U.S. launched the USS Corry, a Clemson class destroyer that would serve only nine years.  The ship had been ordered in World War One, like all of the ships then being commissioned, but finished to late to serve in the war.


The Corry was one of 60 ships decommissioned as too expensive to maintain at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Australian Department of Civil Aviation was formed as the Civil Aviation Branch of the Australian Defense Department.

An Easter Egg roll was held on the White House grounds.  Easter was the day prior in 1921.



Sunday, March 21, 2021

March 21, 1921. The New Economic Policy.


Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, a short run return to capitalism under state control.  It was essentially an acknowledgment of the complete failure of communism in the economy and darned near the complete failure of communism in general.

The policy was primarily an effort to revive agricultural production, which had fallen off dramatically. The mass of the Russian peasants were overwhelmingly opposed to Communism and were resisting collectivization.  80% of the Russian population was rural and support for Communism was nearly completely centered in urban areas, an interesting example of people basically voting for what they could get, as Communist appropriations benefited only the urban working class. Russian peasantry, in contrast, had viewed the Revolution as simply a chance to get formal ownership of the land they were working, a process that had in actuality been going on by default, but which was not yet completed, for some time. 

Lenin thought that ultimately collectivization would occur, but only after the NEP had built up rural areas over a period of decades.  He oddly acknowledged that creating a functioning capitalist economy, but under state control, would lift the Russian economy out of the basement, but he believed that by doing that the entire state would be educated in the benefits of Communism and then would convert to complete state ownership thereafter.  It was a peculiar belief, as it welded the reality of the present with a clinging belief that somehow collectivization would ultimately benefit everyone.

Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin, who had favored the NEP over objections like those of Trotsky, would reverse course and force collectivize agriculture, resulting in a massive man made famine.  This isn't the only area where Stalin would follow a path first suggested by his arch rival, and it should make fans of Trotsky, who have traditionally assumed he was a more benign malignancy than Stalin, pause.  In reality he was an even bigger fanatic.  At any rate, the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1920s through the early 1930s, which took that long, resulted in a massive death toll from starvation.  What remains surprising is that the Soviet populations didn't rise up in rebellion at the time.

Lenin fans have continued to note that Lenin, in his political will, suggested that Stalin be sidetracked and that if he had been, Communism would have succeeded.  This is probably completely incorrect, however.  In reality if the NEP had progressed in Soviet Russia a capitalist middle class would have developed. Where the country would have gone from there is unclear, but it wouldn't have been further into Communism.

Indeed, there's reason to look at modern Red China as a state employing what is essentially the NEP. The present leaders of that state have expressed the view that the NEP better represented what Communism was supposed to be about and have basically employed elements of it in their economy.  How that will play out for them remains to be seen.  At any rate, modern Red China's state run capitalism is similar to what the NEP imagined, and imagined would then go into full collective ownership.

Soviet gold backed note.  The NEP reintroduced gold backed currency in Soviet Russia.

The Constituent Assembly of Georgia held its last session, and then abandoned the country to the invading Soviet Union.

The British changed the Mandate for Palestine to allow for the creation of Transjordan, which is now Jordan.

The most successful Irish Republican Army raid in County Kerry occurred when the IRA ambushed a British troop train at Headford.  Like most IRA/British battles, there were low casualties.



Tuesday, March 2, 2021

March 2, 1921. Doomed rebellions and protomonarchies.

Anti Bolshevik sailors took the Kronstandt fortress, on an island, but accessible from the mainland in February due to frozen ice.

Striking miners in the Italian occupied Croatian city of Labin declared a communist republic for the town.  The rebellion is regarded as the first anti fascist rebellion in the world, but the reason for it being so regarded really isn't clear.  The city was under Italian governance at the time, but while fascism was rising in Italy, it had not yet come into control of the Italian monarchy.  The rebellion would last until April 8 when the Italian government put it down.


Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein relocated to Amman in anticipation of ruling the Emirate of Transjordan

Thursday, October 22, 2020

October 22, 1920. The formation of the Arab Legion (أل جيش أل عربي).

 Cap device of the Arab Legion

On this day in 1920 the British in Transjordan formed the Al Jeish al Arabi (أل جيش أل عربي), the Arab Army.  In English it was much more commonly called the Arab Legion, although the unit was never officially called that.


Glubb in 1940, the year after his appointment as the commander of the Arab Legion.

The unit combined the policing and military functions for the Transjordan.  It featured, at first, British officers and Arab enlisted men and was commanded from 1939 until March 1, 1956, by British career soldier and World War One veteran John Bagot Glubb, popularly known as Glubb Pasha.  Up until 1956 the unit continued to have a significant contingent of British officers, although by that time it had Jordanian officers as well.

Arab Legion 25 Pounder in action during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.

This created the bizarre situation in the later years of the organization under that name as Jordanian forces fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War under British command at its senior levels, even though the UK was not a combatant in the war and British officers were not supposed to play an active role in the war in disputed territory, something that proved impossible to adhere to in reality.  On March 1, 1956, cognizant of the problems this was creating, as well as the odd image it fostered, the Jordanians dismissed its British officers and renamed the unit into another variant of the term "Arab Army".  Today it is termed the Jordanian Armed Forces.

The British influence formed the unit into one of the best armies in the Arab world, a distinction it retains to this day.

Seattle street, October 22, 1920.

On the same day, candidate Warren G. Harding was posing for a sculptor.



Thursday, August 20, 2020

August 20, 1920. Football, News Radio, Ships and Transjordan

On This Date in Sports August 20, 1920, the American Professional Football Association, precursor to the NFL, formed.

The Akron Pros, one of the teams in 1920.

I don't care anything about football, but a lot of people do, and this marks a notable event.  Note that one of the players on the champion 1920 team depicted above, was black, meaning that in that very early season, football was integrated.  The drafting of the first black athlete into the NFL is generally regarded as having occurred in 1949, but in fact very early on blacks were part of the professional sport.

Advertisement for 8MK from August 31, 1920.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, 8MK (at the time) began broadcasting on this date in 1920.  The radio station, now WWJ, first broadcast on an amatuer license out of Detroit, where William E. Scripps, the newspaper publisher, started the station as a new radio station.

It's still in business and its still news radio for the Detroit area.

In the Great Lakes area, on the same day, the SS Superior City collided with the Willis L. King in Whitefish Bay, resulting in the loss of 29 lives.

Far outside the United States, the British representative in Palestine announced a proclamation extending his governance into Jordan. The British rapidly repudiated the effort and denounced it.


[August 20, 1920]  The high commissioner's first visit to Transjordan. Reading of "The Durbar", a proclamation annexing Transjordan, in Es-Salt

Saturday, April 25, 2020

April 25, 1920. Settlements that didn't settle.

Attendees at the San Remo Conference on this date in 1920.  Matsui, Lloyd George, Curzon, Berthelot, Millerand, Scialoja and Nitti.

This was the last day of the San Remo Conference in which the victors of the Great War, absent the United States, met to determine the fate of various territories left in their hands or at least believed to be left in their hands.  On this day, the issued the San Remo Resoution, which stated,
It was agreed –

(a) To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the proces-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine; this undertaking not to refer to the question of the religious protectorate of France, which had been settled earlier in the previous afternoon by the undertaking given by the French Government that they recognized this protectorate as being at an end.

(b) that the terms of the Mandates Article should be as follows:

The High Contracting Parties agree that Syria and Mesopotamia shall, in accordance with the fourth paragraph of Article 22, Part I (Covenant of the League of Nations), be provisionally recognized as independent States, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The boundaries of the said States will be determined, and the selection of the Mandatories made, by the Principal Allied Powers.

The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

La Puissance mandataire s’engage a nommer dans le plus bref delai une Commission speciale pour etudier toute question et toute reclamation concernant les differentes communautes religieuses et en etablir le reglement. Il sera tenu compte dans la composition de cette Commission des interets religieux en jeu. Le President de la Commission sera nomme par le Conseil de la Societe des Nations.

The terms of the mandates in respect of the above territories will be formulated by the Principal Allied Powers and submitted to the Council of the League of Nations for approval.

Turkey hereby undertakes, in accordance with the provisions of Article [132 of the Treaty of Sevres] to accept any decisions which may be taken in this connection.

(c) Les mandataires choisis par les principales Puissances allies sont: la France pour la Syrie, et la Grand Bretagne pour la Mesopotamie, et la Palestine.

In reference to the above decision the Supreme Council took note of the following reservation of the Italian Delegation:

La Delegation Italienne en consideration des grands interets economiques que l’Italie en tant que puissance exclusivement mediterraneenne possede en Asie Mineure, reserve son approbation a la presente resolution, jusqu’au reglement des interets italiens en Turquie d’Asia.
As noted, above, the Italian delegation reserved its assent given that the conference hadn't reached a resolution on its interests in Asia Minor.

The results of the conference were momentous and continue to play out today  The British took Palestine as a mandate and the French Syria.  The borders of these mandates were not determined.  The Turkish delegation purported to accept the decisions made at the conference.  The conference also, although not reflected in this resolution, accepted the independence of Armenia and set the monetary amount of annual German reparation payments.

While the US was not there, it continued to exhibit an influence, as the conference also accepted Wilson's proposal on Fiume, even if the Italians really didn't.


As the Cheyenne paper made plain, scandals that are more commonly associated with later eras in fact occurred in earlier ones. And Texas said no to Carranza.

In just a few short months the French would sustain a military defeat against insurgent Syrians and the British would accordingly rush to draw the borders of Transjordan, which is Jordan today, out of concern that the rebellion would spill into territory it was administering. That would set the borders for Palestine.  An insurgency already underway in Turkey would cause the decisions of any Turkish delegation to be questionable, but it did not act in any fashion to attempt to assert any claim to Mesopotamia (Iraq), or its former colonies to the south.  It would not accept, however, the independence of Armenia, which the conference had separately recognized, or the Greek role in Anatolia, which had been assured by the conference.  And Carranza's bid to control who became his successor was turning disastrous for him.

World War One's results were playing out in a different fashion at the Battle of Koziatyn, Ukraine in which a Polish cavalry division penetrated deep behind the Soviet lines.  Over two days it would envelop Soviet forces and destroy two Red Army divisions.

Elsewhere movies with rural settings were being released, both dramatic and comedic.




Thursday, October 10, 2019

The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

World War Two, for obvious reasons, looms large in our imagination as the biggest event of the 20th Century.  The biggest, and the most significant.

But are we wrong?  

It seems lately that the echos of World War One are resounding pretty loudly.

World War One smashed the old order and demolished the borders of centuries.  The interbellum tried to reconstruct them, but did so in a metastasized and imperfect form, giving rise to new malignant orders that sought to fill the voids left by the death of the old imperial ones.  World War Two pitted three forces against each other, fascism, communism, and democracy, with democracy and communism ultimately siding with each other against fascism. After the war, the results of the Second World War gave rise to a contest between the two victors, communism and democracy, against each other until the vitality of free societies and free markets drove the rigidness of communism to and beyond the breaking point.

And now that communism is dead and gone, buried alongside its evil cousin fascism, the old unsolved questions of the Great War are back.  The rights of small nations, including those with out countries, against the possessions of older larger ones.  The demise of great empires giving rise to smaller ones.  Nationalism of all stripes against everything else.

It's 1919 all over again.

Turkey didn't sign the Treaty of Sevres.

Indeed, rather than do that, it fought it out.

It can't be blamed.  The Greeks had a quasi legitimate claim to Smyrna, but only quasi. A lot of ethnic Greeks lived there, which is no surprise as Anatolia had been Greek. The Ottoman's were invaders to the region, finally taking it in the 1450s.  But it had a large Ottoman population that they were bloodily brutal towards and they engaged in conquest, with the help of their Western allies, in Anatolia proper, seeking in a way to reverse what was lost centuries prior.

The Italian claim, moreover, to islands off of Turkey was absurd.

But the Armenian claims to their lands weren't.

The region sought of Armenia marked for a plebiscite is Kurdistan.  The Syria that ran to the sea and down to Palestine was an Ottoman province carved away from the Empire.  So was the Mesopotamia, i.e., Iraq, that appears on the map.

In 1990, the United States intervened in the Middle East to force Iraq, the British post World War One creation, out of Kuwait, a desert province that the British had protected during their stay in the Middle East, launching operations, with the assistance of others, from that region of Arabia named for the Sauds, that Arabian family that spent the Great War and the immediate interbellum consolidating power at the ultimate expense of the Hashemites, that Arabian noble family who had made war on the Turks.  The British dolled out kingdoms to that family as consolation prizes, with the Hashemites taking Iraq and the Transjordan.  The French got to administer Syria, a region that it claimed an historical affinity to, with the British taking administration of Palestine and Egypt, both of the latter having been Ottoman provinces although Egypt was long administered by the British in an arrangement that nobody can possibly grasp.

And so now, the old fights, and the interbellum struggles, reappear.  The peoples not accorded nations would like to have them. The old empires would like to keep their domains.  Borders drawn by European nations, with the help of Woodrow Wilson, are treated as real, when perhaps they were never correct.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Meanwhile, in the Middle East . . .


. . . prisoners of war, including German prisoners of war, were coming into Jerusalem following yesterday's Battle of Abu Tellul, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which had seen Empire troops defeat Turkish and German troops.


The action had featured significant cavalry action by both the Turks and the Empire forces.

With all that was going on in France and Italy at the time, you have to wonder how much attention this was getting now outside of Constantinople, Cairo and Jerusalem.

Monday, April 30, 2018

Just in case you thougth that surely, with the German offensive still in full swing, all military effort was focused in France. . .

on this day in 1918, British Empire forces commenced the Second Transjordan attack on Shunet Nimrin and Es Salt in an effort to take control of the Jordan Valley.

Ottoman prisoners of war caught as part of this operation.

While the operation, which lasted several days, met with some initial success, Ottoman and German counterattacks would render it a tactical defeat with the captured ground being yielded.

Australian Light Horse following the retreat.

At least casualties were light, unless of course you were one of them.

And in the former domain of Imperial Russia, the Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic in Crimea came to an abrupt end when Ukraine invaded it with German backing.  A person would think the Germans too distracted to undertake something like that, but then as it was a Ukrainian enterprise and they were there already, perhaps not.

The territory today is officially part of the Ukraine but is occupied by Russia.

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Jerusalem surrenders to the British, December 9, 1917

Ottoman forces had withdrawn the day prior, but the town surrendered on December 9, 1917.

The Mayor of Jerusalem with two British sergeants.  It must have been muddy, based on the appearance of everyone's shoes.

The capture of the city marked the hallmark of Gen. Allenby's first campaign in the Middle East, which had seen a lot of dramatic fighting over the past two or so months.  It wouldn't be the culmination of Allenby's efforts by any means, but it was his first indisputable major success.

Crowd viewing the entry of British officers near the Jaffa Gate 

It also put the British in a sensitive position which they were never really able to work out, and which in some ways has never been worked out.  Alleby was sensitive to being seen as a crusader by the Arab population of the multi cultural city and strove to avoid that.  Be that as it may, it can't be ignored that an English, Christian, army was entering a mostly Arab, Muslim, town that had been evacuated by a Turkish Muslim leader who claimed to rule a caliphate.



British rule would prove to be relatively short, a little over thirty years, but controversial.  Prior to Allenby's entry the British had already extended promises to both the Arab Muslims as well as to the Jews regarding the ultimate fate of Palestine, promises which they were not later successful in reconciling.  The British promises extended to two out of the three major religions that have holy sites in the city, and perhaps tellingly the British, a Christian people not wanting to seem to be Crusaders, but an officially Protestant nation as well, did not seek to make promises of the same type to the minority Orthodox or Catholic populations, although they did of course protect the religious sites of all the religions located there.  The city had, at the time, a Muslim majority.


And as the British did not reflect either of those cultures themselves, their rule grew to be unpopular in various quarters with both.  Prior to World War Two the British would find themselves forced to put down an Arab independence movement and following World War Two it was faced with a Jewish independence movement in its League of Nation's mandate.  That was accompanied by growing Muslim unrest as the Jewish population of the mandate increased by the influx of Jewish refugees caused by World War Two.  Ultimately they simply left, which was probably the only thing they really could do.

 British guard at the Jaffa Gate

Even now, of course, the echoes of 1917 can still be heard.  The city was split between Israel and Jordan until the Six Day War in 1968, at which time Israel occupied the entire city.   Israel proclaimed the city as its capitol as early as 1949 but most nations have not recognized that claim.  The US recognized it in 1995, by Congressional resolution, but also provided that the embassy could only be moved after certain conditions were realized.  The Palestinian National Authority claims the eastern half of the city as its capitol while recognizing the western half of the capitol as the Israeli capitol.

 Turkish prisoners of war.

Just this past week President Trump declared that the American embassy would in fact be moved, fulfilling a campaign promise made by various Presidents before him, as well as by him, but which is guaranteed to be massively unpopular and likely result in violent protests.

And it all started on this day, in 1917.