You Live and You Learn

 It's evident how little I know about Palestine:

I asked Gemini the following:

Was Gaza under Egyptian control in 1964?

The response:

Yes, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military administration in 1964.

Egypt controlled the territory from the signing of the 1949 Armistice Agreements—following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War—until June 1967, when Israel captured the area during the Six-Day War (with a brief interruption during the Suez Crisis from November 1956 to March 1957).

Unlike Jordan, which formally annexed the West Bank in 1950 and granted its residents Jordanian citizenship, Egypt never annexed the Gaza Strip. Instead, Cairo governed the territory as a separate entity under an Egyptian-appointed military governor:

• 1948–1959: Gaza was nominally the seat of the Arab League-sponsored "All-Palestine Government," though real administrative and security power remained entirely with the Egyptian military. President Gamal Abdel Nasser officially dissolved this body in 1959.

• 1962 Constitutional System: In 1962, Nasser issued a constitutional decree for the Gaza Strip that established a Palestinian Legislative Council, though the Egyptian governor-general retained absolute veto power and ultimate executive authority.

• Events of 1964: Following the first Arab League summit in Cairo in January 1964 and the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in May 1964, Egypt facilitated the creation of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), which deployed units in the Gaza Strip under the overarching command and supervision of the Egyptian military.

I then asked: 

Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950? How did it lose control of it?

The response:

Jordan lost physical control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel over the course of three days in June 1967 during the Six-Day War, and formally relinquished its legal and administrative claims to the territory twenty-one years later in July 1988.

1. The 1950 Annexation ("Unification of the Two Banks")

Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Transjordan’s military (the Arab Legion) held the territory west of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem.

• In December 1948, a group of Palestinian notables and tribal leaders met at the Jericho Conference and called for King Abdullah I to annex the territory.

• In April 1949, the country officially changed its name from the Emirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to reflect its rule over both sides of the river (creating the term "West Bank" to distinguish it from the original "East Bank").

• On April 24, 1950, the Jordanian parliament—newly constituted with an equal number of seats for representatives from the East and West Banks—formally ratified the annexation and granted full Jordanian citizenship to all West Bank residents.

• International reaction: The annexation was widely rejected. Only the United Kingdom, Iraq, and frequently-cited Pakistan officially recognized the move, while the Arab League fiercely opposed it, nearly expelling Jordan until Amman agreed to characterize its rule as holding the land "in trust" pending a final settlement of the Palestine question.

2. How Jordan Lost Military Control (June 1967)

Jordan lost the territory because King Hussein entered into a defense pact with Egypt right before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, and was subsequently drawn into the fighting under false battle reports from Cairo.

3. The 21-Year "Twilight" Period (1967–1988)

Even after losing military control on the ground, Jordan did not immediately abandon its claim to the West Bank. For over two decades, Amman maintained an extensive institutional presence inside the Israeli-occupied territory:

• Jordan continued to pay the salaries of roughly 24,000 West Bank civil servants, teachers, and Islamic trust (Waqf) officials.

• West Bank schools continued to use the Jordanian curriculum, residents held Jordanian passports, the Jordanian dinar remained legal tender, and West Bank representatives continued to sit in the Jordanian Parliament in Amman.

4. Final Legal Disengagement (July 1988)

Jordan's formal claim to the territory was gradually eroded by the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian nationalism:

• 1974 Rabat Summit: The Arab League passed a resolution recognizing the PLO—not Jordan—as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."

• The First Intifada (1987): When the Palestinian uprising erupted in December 1987, anger was directed primarily at the Israeli occupation, but the grassroots movement also clearly rejected a return to Jordanian rule in favor of an independent Palestinian state led by the PLO.

• July 31, 1988: Recognizing that Palestinian national identity had permanently superseded the 1950 unification, King Hussein delivered a landmark televised address announcing the "severance of legal and administrative ties" with the West Bank. He dissolved the lower house of parliament (ending West Bank representation), cancelled Jordanian development plans for the territory, and transitioned West Bank residents from full Jordanian citizens to holders of temporary passports for travel purposes.

The only institutional link Jordan retained—which was later enshrined in the 1994 Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty and remains in effect today—is the Hashemite Custodianship over the Islamic and Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem, administered through the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

I'm sure there's more to the story than that especially the bit about Jordan being drawn into the fighting under false battle reports from Cairo. Anyway, I went on and asked the following:

I’m a little confused. I thought that when the state of Israel was established that the Palestinians were allocated Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, the original Palestinian territory was divided into Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

The response: 

That is one of the most common misconceptions about the conflict—and it is completely understandable why it happens. Because modern diplomacy regarding a "two-state solution" almost always centers on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it is easy to assume those two territories were the original diplomatic allocation for the Palestinians in 1947–1948.

In reality, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were never planned or allocated on paper. Instead, they were the accidental geographic remnants left over where the Egyptian and Jordanian armies happened to stop fighting when the 1948 war ended.

The map on the left below shows what the United Nations actually proposed in 1947, while the map on the right shows the reality on the ground after the 1949 ceasefires.

1. What Was Supposed to Happen: The 1947 UN Partition Plan

Before 1948, the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was governed by Britain under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which recommended dividing Mandatory Palestine into three distinct entities:

• A Jewish State (roughly 56% of the land): Stretching along the coastal plain around Tel Aviv and Haifa, the eastern Galilee, and the largely arid Negev desert in the south. 

• An Arab State (roughly 43% of the land): This was much larger than today's West Bank and Gaza. It consisted of three major regions connected by narrow crossover points: the entire Western Galilee (including Acre and Nazareth), a much wider central highland region stretching down to Beersheba, and a long southern coastal strip extending from Ashdod all the way to the Egyptian border and curving inland along the Sinai. (The Arab city of Jaffa was also included as an enclave). 

• Corpus Separatum (Jerusalem & Bethlehem): Because of its religious significance, Jerusalem and its surrounding villages were not allocated to either state, but were to be administered directly by the United Nations as an international zone.

2. Why the 1947 Plan Never Happened

The 1947 UN map remained purely theoretical:

• Rejection and Civil War: While the Zionist leadership accepted the UN partition plan, the Palestinian Arab leadership (the Arab Higher Committee) and the surrounding Arab states rejected it, arguing it violated the rights of the majority population living in Palestine at the time (who were roughly two-thirds Arab to one-third Jewish). Immediate intercommunal fighting broke out inside Mandatory Palestine. 

• May 1948—Statehood and Invasion: On May 14, 1948, as the last British forces withdrew, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The next day, the neighboring armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

3. How "Gaza" and the "West Bank" Were Actually Created (1949)

By early 1949, Israel had defeated the invading Arab armies and pushed well beyond the boundaries proposed by the UN in 1947, capturing the Western Galilee, Lydda, Ramle, Beersheba, and West Jerusalem.

Between February and July 1949, Israel signed separate bilateral Armistice Agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The borders drawn on those maps—known as the "Green Line" because they were drawn with green ink—were not political borders allocating land to Palestinians, but military ceasefire lines reflecting where the armies stood when the shooting stopped:

• The Gaza Strip (25 miles long, 4–5 miles wide): The Egyptian army had marched up the Mediterranean coast in May 1948, hoping to reach Tel Aviv, but was halted by Israeli forces at a bridge near Ashdod and pushed back into a narrow coastal pocket around the town of Gaza. When Egypt and Israel signed their armistice in February 1949, a line was drawn around the Egyptian front lines. That pocket of Egyptian-held territory became known as the "Gaza Strip." 

• The West Bank: Transjordan's British-trained military (the Arab Legion) crossed the Jordan River in May 1948 and took up defensive positions in the central hills of Judea and Samaria, as well as the Old City of Jerusalem. When Jordan and Israel signed their armistice in April 1949, the line separating the Israeli and Jordanian armies became the border of what Jordan subsequently named the "West Bank" of its kingdom.

Why People Think They Were "Allocated" to Palestinians  

 

Period	Territory Controlled By	What "Partition" Meant
1947 UN Proposal	Never implemented (British Mandate ending)	56% Jewish State - 43% Arab State - 1% UN Jerusalem
1949–1967 Post-1948 War	78% Israel - 21% Jordan (West Bank) - 1% Egypt (Gaza)	Zero independent Palestinian territory. The intended 1947 Arab state was absorbed partly by Israel, partly by Jordan, and partly by Egypt.
1967–Present Post-Six-Day War	Israel captures the remaining 22% (West Bank & Gaza) from Jordan and Egypt	International diplomacy (starting with the 1988 PLO declaration and 1993 Oslo Accords) redefines the "Two-State Solution" as Israel (78%) alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza (22%).

In short, the Palestinian state proposed in 1947 was wiped off the drawing board by the 1948 war—with Israel taking roughly half of the land that had been designated for the Arab state, and Jordan and Egypt holding the rest. It was only after Israel captured those Jordanian- and Egyptian-held pockets in 1967 that the "West Bank and Gaza Strip" came to be viewed internationally as the designated territory for a future Palestinian state. 

Let's remember this is Gemini's highly biased and pro-Israel account of what happened. In this account, the Zionist leadership accepted the UN Partition plan but the Arab Palestinian leadership did not. Of course, the Zionists would not have observed the partition and would have provoked hostilities one way or the other to justify their expansion. I'll leave it at that for now and try to find out more about what really happened.