The United Kingdom's parliamentary vote recently to recognize Palestine along with Israel calls to mind an important – if little-recognized – point of history.

The Mandate for Palestine authorized by the League of Nations in 1922 included land that is now Israel, Jordan, Judea-Samaria/West Bank, and Gaza. In 1946 an exclusively Arab state was established (with the support of the U.K.) in the three-quarters of Palestine east of the Jordan River, then called Transjordan because it was across (trans-) the river. In 1949, after it captured some land west of the river in war with Israel, it changed its name to Jordan.

Israel declared independence in 1948 and fought for it successfully (suffering some 6,000 killed in action out of a population of about 600,000 Jews) against four Arab armies and local Arabs. The forces of Transjordan and Egypt were supported by the British. So as of 1948-1949 there have been two states in Palestine.

Jordan might more accurately be called Arab Palestine, since that is what it has been, an Arab state in Palestine, with no Jews allowed. Transjordan’s governing population were Hashemite Arabs who moved north from Arabia (now Saudi Arabia) after losing a civil war with the Arabian tribe that named their area: Saudi Arabia.

The second state in the former Palestine Mandate was called Israel, with a majority of Jews and many Arabs (both Moslems and Christians).

The call in recent years for another Arab state or two more in the former Palestine Mandate (the so-called “two-state solution”) is really a call for a third or a fourth state in the original Palestine, a three-or-four-state solution -- Israel, Jordan, and Palestine (possibly an entity in Gaza, another in Judea-Samaria/West Bank, or a combined one) not a two-state solution. The correct background history is ignored by most media and governments.

The facts that Jordan has usually been a pro-Western state and in recent years at peace with Israel, and that decent folks of the West (and Israel) would prefer it not be weakened, does not change the authentic history that it is a state ruled by Arab Moslems in Palestine, three-quarters of the former Palestine Mandate. There already is today an Arab state in Palestine.