The Geo-Political Background to the British Mandate and its Results.
Oliver Cromwell (1599 - 1658) was the head of the Puritan Forces who after a Civil War took control over England. The Puritans were basically Protestant Fundamentalists.
They were usually pro-Jewish. A few of them actually converted to Judaism.
Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector (virtual dictator but with Constitutional limitations) from December 1653 until his death in September 1658.
The Jews had been banished from England in 1290. A few had began filtering back in the 1500s. Cromwell gave them a de facto legal acceptance. He also spoke of the Jews being helped to create their own Kingdom in the Holy Land. In Britain from the time of Cromwell (if not even before that) onwards, a movement known as "Restorationism" grew up with the aim of returning the Jewish People to the Holy Land. This movement had sympathizers in America and Europe but it was mainly concentrated in Britain where it was supported by some very influential people.
"THE RAPE OF PALESTINE," by William B. Ziff, NY, 1938, is a valuable work. It was however written in order to arouse American Public Opinion against the British who then ruled over Palestine and were preventing Jews from entering it. It is naturally biased.
Even so here and there it has information of value.
Ziff tells us that:
In 1840s Lord Palmerston had compiled for his Government thorough material on Palestine, considering the possibility of exercising a British protectorate over that region in the Jewish interests.
By Lord Palmerston is meant Henry John Temple (1784 - 1865), "... a British statesman and politician who was twice prime minister of the United Kingdom... Palmerston dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain stood at the height of its imperial power. He held office almost continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865. .... He was highly popular with the British public."
Ziff also says:
# From the time the American scholar Robinson attempted to explore archaeological remains in the Holy Land in 1837, London has, through the Palestine Exploration Fund, concentrated on the study of every minute detail that related to Palestine. "Theirs," state De Haas and Wise,
"were the surveys, the compilation of flora and fauna, theirs too the enumeration and localization of the Bedouin tribes ; theirs the studies in local conditions, the compilation of customs and excise, estimates of population, speculation as to the origins of peoples, observations on everything that relates to the area between the River of Egypt and the cedars of Lebanon." #
In 1902 it was proposed to establish a Jewish settlement in El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula to the west of "Palestine" itself.
See:
El Arish.
Early British-Jewish Zionism. The Suez Canal, The Role and Rule of Egypt.
https://hebrewnations.com/articles/zionism/elarish.html
On the Jewish side:
The Jews had been expelled from the Holy Land in stage by the Romans. Control of the Land had gone from Romans, to the Eastern Romans (Byzantines), to the Arabs, to the Turks. Large portions of it had been turned into a virtual wilderness.
In the later 1700s Jewish interest in re-settling the area increased. The Zionist Movement began to take form in the 1800s. Following the direction of Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) the Zionist Movement was active in lobbying heads of State and VIPs in Britain and Europe. It also helped establish settlements of its own in the area alongside those of Religious Jews who were acting independently of it.
The Restoration Movement in Britain came to identify itself with Zionism. At that time the area of Palestine along with most of the Middle East was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Britain and France shared control of the Suez Canal and Britain ruled over Egypt.
Then came World War-1. The Ottoman Empire joined the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. With the impending defeat of Germany and Turkey it was necessary to discuss what would happen to the conquered areas.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 was a secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France. It had the assent of the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy. The aim was to define mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean.
France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Syria and Lebanon.
In addition to this there were other interests involved. The USA would want a say. The Italians had connections to the Christians in the area. Other powers might claim some sort of involvement in the fate of Jerusalem. The British had obligations (or felt they had) to the Arabs led by Hussein and his son Feisal and the Hashemite family of Mecca. These had led a revolt of the Arabs against the Turks and the British had committed themselves to them.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British in effect promised Palestine to the Jews. The Balfour Declaration of Britain had the support of France and Italy and also of the USA and may be also of Japan.
The Balfour Declaration more or less cleared the Table. All other interests in the area were no longer valid.
The Zionist had the impression that the Balfour Declaration included the area of Transjordan but the British would be careful to exclude it. They wanted to keep it as a "free" chip in the stack.
Wikipedia entry "Transjordan" tells us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Transjordan
On 21 March 1921, the Foreign and Colonial office legal advisers decided to introduce Article 25 into the Mandate for Palestine,[38] which brought Transjordan under the Palestine mandate and stated that in that territory, Britain could 'postpone or withhold' those articles of the Mandate concerning a Jewish national home. It was approved by Curzon on 31 March 1921, and the revised final draft of the mandate (including Transjordan) was forwarded to the League of Nations on 22 July 1922.. In August 1922, the British government presented a memorandum to the League of Nations stating that Transjordan would be excluded from all the provisions dealing with Jewish settlement, and this memorandum was communicated to the League on 12 August and approved by it on 16 September.
See:
The Hashemites.
How the modern State of "Jordan" and the Middle East came into being.