I heard a joke this past July 4th:

Isn’t it interesting that the only country in the world that doesn’t have an Independence Day celebration is Great Britain.

And I thought British humor wasn’t funny…

The first time I visited London was with my wife back in 1985. On our trip, we saw Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and all the standard touristy places. England has such a long history compared to the United States – but not so much compared to the Middle East. To make up for their lack of chronological record, the Brits managed to pick up some Middle Eastern relics along the way and brought them home. They put many of them on display in their British Museum — “souvenirs” collected during the height of the British Empire.

My favorite souvenir in the British Museum was the Rosetta Stone. Seeing it in person back in 1985 filled me with a sense of wonder — I wondered what it was doing in London.

A noteworthy part of our trip was attending the Royal Tournament in London, a tradition that no longer exists. We had a cousin living in London at the time, a British citizen and a first cousin of my wife’s father. She insisted we attend the Royal Tournament, explaining that it was a uniquely British spectacle that provided tribute to the British military throughout their history – something typical American tourists were unfamiliar with and unlikely to attend.

The Royal Tournament was a large indoor pageant sponsored by the British military. It featured competition, music, loud cheering, and an array of British soldiers in various British uniforms from past eras majestically marching in step, weapons flashing.

To my surprise, one contingent was composed of Arab soldiers. Leading them was a soldier carrying the flag of Jordan. The announcer celebrated their victories over Israel — all news to me.

As a Jewish American watching, I was both dumbfounded and disappointed. Why was Jordan being specially honored in the British Royal Tournament? Did Great Britain and Jordan share some special relationship that I knew nothing about? And why the anti-Israel bravado?

What I didn’t know then, I know now…

Before there was a United Nations there was a similar organization known as the League of Nations. Back in 1921 the League of Nations already had a Palestine Mandate and Great Britain had already been entrusted with administering it. The Palestine Mandate covered a large territory on both sides of the Jordan River, and many expected that both Jewish and Arab political aspirations for independence would eventually be accommodated because of it. But Great Britain had other plans.

In March of 1921, at the Cairo Conference, Britain decided that the territory east of the Jordan River would be excluded from the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine Mandate. When the League of Nations approved the Mandate in 1922, Article 25 gave legal credence to that decision, effectively closing nearly three-quarters of the Mandate to Jewish settlement.

That large territory, three-quarters of the original Mandate land, everything east of the Jordan River, was set aside by the British for the purpose of creating a state friendly to British interests. And that friendly nation would also feature their handpicked future King, Abdullah I, a Hashemite born in Mecca. He would rule over a new nation of mostly Arab inhabitants, and the country would be called Transjordan.

As Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies and future Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill is remembered for a well-known quip: “One sunny Sunday afternoon in Cairo, I created Transjordan with the stroke of a pen.”

With the emergence of Transjordan in the early 1920’s, the remaining left over land roughly equaled the size of New Jersey – hardly space enough, in my opinion, for two sovereign nations to securely emerge.

Nations cannot be simply created with the stroke of a pen! But Churchill’s famous quip revealed something deeper: Britain believed it had the authority to reshape the Middle East to serve British strategic interests. Transjordan was not simply an act of nation-building; it was an act of imperial nation-building. Britain was creating a friendly state and installing a friendly ruler in a region it expected to influence far into the future.

Transjordan, eventually to be called Jordan, was created out of the ashes of the former Ottoman Empire and the League of Nation’s Palestine Mandate. Great Britain was the driving force.

So while the world is busy assigning blame for which side, Jewish or Muslim, is most responsible for all the bloodshed in the Middle East, we need to expand the conversation and examine the role of the empire that designed the playing field. That empire was Great Britain, and the instrument that changed the Middle East was its colonial pen.