Introduction
The story of Hebron during the 1948 Palestine War remains untold, obscured by the larger historical forces of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and refugee crisis that followed Israel's declaration of independence in May that year. This article examines the history and historiography of Hebron from the start of the war in mid-May 1948 until the departure of Egyptian troops on 30 April 1949.Footnote 1 This tumultuous one-year period – ‘al-‘ahd al-thuna'i’ (the Dual Era) – reflects an unusual configuration in which both Jordan and Egypt temporarily ruled over the city. The title ‘Dual Era’ comes from a single letter addressed to the Jordanian prime minister from the ‘Committee of Former Employees in Hebron’ (1951).Footnote 2 In this rare letter, Palestinian supporters of Egypt, now living under Jordanian rule, write seeking lost wages from the period of the Dual Era two years prior. Examining the Dual Era reveals an emerging Egyptian and Jordanian proto-pan-Arab nationalism where each country's locally based leaders competed for support from the Palestinian population in Hebron.
As a result of the war, both Jordan and Egypt gained territory in Palestine. Jordan took control of the West Bank, so named in 1950 by Jordanian legislators, while Egypt administered the small coastal region of Gaza. The armistice agreements between Egypt and Israel included protracted negotiations over the retention of certain cities. Hebron had been located in the Egypt sector during the war, yet was identified in the Egyptian–Israeli Armistice Agreement of 24 February 1949 as being subject to possible re-negotiation pending another armistice agreement, presumably between Israel and Jordan.Footnote 3 Israel seems to have known that Jordan would end up controlling Hebron regardless of the February armistice agreement. The violent protests by Palestinian residents, in March and April 1949 (analysed below through the diaries of Sami ‘Amr, a young Hebronite, and Muhammad al-Shrouf, from the neighboring village of Nuba) do not suggest that Egyptian officials based in Hebron were aware of Israel's and Egypt's negotiations. And, despite Lt Colonel Abdullah al-Tall's protestations that the territory Jordan would control had been agreed upon with Israel in advance, the Dual Era complicates that notion because Jordan still had to fight for political control of the city.Footnote 4 Hebron became a contested city, not between Israel and Jordan but between Jordan and Egypt.
This article relies on diaries by Sami ‘Amr and Muhammad al-Shrouf.Footnote 5 The scarcity of documents in Arab ArchivesFootnote 6 amplifies the importance of life writings for our knowledge of the period. The two diarists comment on the Dual Era, not by name but by describing incidents that reflect the period's tensions and by working through their political loyalties. This article also examines documentation written by a Palestinian Hashemite loyalist, who worked for Jordanian military governor Salih al-Majali and reported on divisions in Hebron. These documents and diaries illuminate aspects of the city's administration between Jordan and Egypt during the one-year Dual Era. Rarely co-operative and often antagonistic, Jordan and Egypt differed on the conduct of the war in Palestine as early pan-Arab nationalist tensions stirred through their actions in Hebron and forced Palestinians to take sides.
The historiographical record of the Dual Era
The historiography of the Dual Era is negligible.Footnote 7 Most of what is known comes from memoirs, eyewitness accounts and historical writings by Jordanian, Palestinian, Egyptian and British witnesses who chronicled their stories within approximately 10 years of the war in Palestine, others many years later.Footnote 8 Inter-Arab state disputes, including that between Jordan and Egypt, played out against the backdrop of the Arab–Israeli war. Arab rhetoric of uniting against a common enemy notwithstanding, the armistice agreements quietly came together and Israel achieved many of its territorial goals. Hebron's final disposition followed two armistice agreements and Jordan's success in convincing Egypt to remove its troops from Hebron. Jordan alone remained to rule the city, which left the Palestinians to face uncertainty yet again. Some Palestinians decided to leave with the Egyptian troops.
Almost immediately after Jordan's troops entered Palestine, the goal of Jordan's government leaned towards governance of the new territory rather than preventing the birth of the new Jewish state.Footnote 9 On 19 May 1948, the Jordanian minister of defence appointed Mustafa al-Rifa‘i as governor of Hebron just days after the departure of the British official on 15 May 1948.Footnote 10 Glubb Pasha, the British commander who led the Arab Legion for 17 years, states in his Soldier with the Arabs that the government appointed military governors to Hebron, along with Jerusalem, Ramallah and Nablus, so as to continue a civilian administration following the departure of the British.Footnote 11 Maan Abu Nowar, another officer in the Arab Legion, writing more than 50 years after the war, comments that the role of Jordanian military governors after ‘15 May 1948. . .[was] to provide the necessary services, maintain law and order, and protect the lives and properties of the inhabitants of those areas under their control’.Footnote 12 From the war's outset, the Jordanian government viewed the presence of the Jordanian military in central Palestine as a means of maintaining law and order through the perpetuation of the administration vacated by the British Mandate.
Hebron quickly became a military and political hotbed. Jordan and Egypt passed control of it back and forth in the first several months of the war. According to Glubb, Arab Legion forces initially took control of Hebron, but they had been stalled while trying to hold the Bethlehem sector when an Egyptian army column arrived in Hebron on 22 May, ‘demand[ing] to take over the sector’. Glubb added that the Legion's troops secured permission to leave and left the sector's defence to the Egyptians to avoid a dispute with them at a time of war. Glubb did not comment on it, but it seems that Jordan's military governor remained in the sector after Jordanian troops left the region.Footnote 13 When Hebron came under Egyptian control, Jordan's military responsibility for that city ceased. However, the representative for the prime minister of Jordan on 29 June 1948 appointed Salih al-Majali as replacement for al-Rifa‘i in his position as military governor (hakim askari) in Hebron at which time Egyptian forces controlled the city.Footnote 14
According to Salih al-Majali, in his memoirs compiled by his son, he was asked to take up a dangerous position as Hebron's military governor in 1948 and would not agree to do so unless the king accepted several conditions. The king granted him a military rank, but al-Majali does not confirm that the king granted him the requested military force, which Glubb said had been removed when Egyptian troops entered the sector. Upon arrival, al-Majali met with the Egyptian military governor and learned that the Egyptians controlled all aspects of the city, including policing. However, following discussions, they agreed that ‘all of the important political, military and administrative decisions’ would henceforth be done co-operatively in the ‘name of the two kings, Abdullah and Faruq’. Stamps to authenticate official decisions could be issued from either country, so citizens could choose which country's stamp would be affixed to their documents. The two countries would have shared control over money and internal security. Al-Majali does not offer any critique of the period and nothing of the difficulties that would arise for Hebron's residents in March 1949 (see below). While al-Majali writes rather positively of this shared experience, Glubb writes rather dismissively of the Egyptian role in the Dual Era.Footnote 15
The Egyptians, Glubb claims, had little interest in co-operation. He adds that the Egyptians adopted a partisan role that sought to punish Palestinians in Hebron if they demonstrated support for the Jordanian state and that Egypt was prepared to establish pro-Egyptian political parties in Hebron.Footnote 16 Although the militaries did not co-operate, the Jordanian Arab Legion would return to protect the city of Hebron when Egyptian forces in southern Palestine were attacked by Israel in October 1949.Footnote 17
Egyptian leaders sought to avoid military conflict in Palestine in 1948 but felt pushed into war as a result of popular opinion in Egypt. Members of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had already left to fight, independently, in Palestine, and by continuing to sit on the sidelines the Egyptian government feared public critique.Footnote 18 When Egypt's King Faruq finally decided to enter the war, he did so with two goals. Although he may have wanted to prevent the Zionists from taking over Palestine, he seemed more interested in how military action would bolster his image at home. More precisely, he wanted to prevent King Abdullah from gaining territorial and political advantages as a result of Jordan's participation in the war. King Faruq had his own political problems within Egypt, but in the wider Arab world Egypt rivalled Jordan and Saudi Arabia in their designs for regional power.Footnote 19 Although King Abdullah had preferred to incorporate Syria into his kingdom, he settled for Palestine when the war gave him that opportunity. Faruq thought that if Egypt entered the war, then he could simultaneously halt Abdullah's expansion and elevate Egypt's standing in the Arab world. Abdullah's Arab Legion, led by Glubb Pasha, also proved stronger than the Egyptian army. The Arab Legion held on to large parts of Palestine, although it faced recrimination for losing important Palestinian cities, such as Lyd and Ramle.Footnote 20 Egypt's army faced serious challenges from the Israeli forces, and with little help from other Arab armies Egypt lost significant battles. As a result, Egypt retreated to a small sector of coastal Palestinian territory that came to be known as the Gaza Strip. The political leadership of Jordan and Egypt met at various times during the war, including in Hebron, where they shared control of the city. There, both Jordan and Egypt maintained a military governor from May 1948, and both maintained troops from the end of October after Jordan sent troops to aid Egypt's forces cut off by Israel after its attack on Egypt in the Naqab.Footnote 21 Although the government appointed a military governor, Jordan's Arab Legion had left the city in May, according to Glubb, when Egypt's troops arrived, but returned in October to secure the city when Egypt's troops faced difficulty securing their position in the south against Israeli forces.Footnote 22
Complicating the situation was the fact that an Egyptian detachment composed of Muslim Brotherhood members, led by Ahmad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, reached Hebron on 20 May to a warm welcome from the city's notables, who had previously asked for Brotherhood assistance. The conflict between the Jordanians and the ‘volunteers’ (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood troops) took root as the Jordanians ‘occupied the city’ of Hebron and based their headquarters in the Police Station, according to Kamal al-Sharif.Footnote 23 The representatives of Jordan and Egypt in Hebron both sought to raise their country's flag on the city's flag pole, a flag being a prominent symbolic display of a country's presence and intentions for national sovereignty.Footnote 24 According to al-Sharif, the Jordanians not only raised their own flag in Hebron but they prevented the Muslim Brotherhood from raising theirs. Al-Sharif notes that the city's Palestinian residents began to divide into two camps: those with allegiance to Jordan and those with allegiance to Egypt. He adds that Glubb became very angry.Footnote 25 Glubb confirms al-Sharif's perception, when he mentions in his memoirs that he thought Egypt had uncharitable intentions, seeking to ‘penalize any inhabitants [Palestinians] who showed any regard for Jordan’.Footnote 26
Abdullah al-Tall, a Jordanian officer in 1948 and negotiator at the armistice talks, also recounts the interests of Jordan in Hebron in his controversial account of the war written 10 years later from Cairo, where he had taken refuge after losing confidence in King Abdullah during the negotiations and calling him out as a traitor.Footnote 27 In his Karitha Filastin, al-Tall remarks that Jordan's intentions had become clear by mid-October. At that time, he notes, Glubb had sent Arab Legion troops to Hebron to ‘extend Jordanian influence on this important region at a time that it was under the control of the Egyptian Army’.Footnote 28 Between Jordan and Egypt, the tension was most acute in Hebron as the two sides lobbied for support among the Palestinian population.Footnote 29 The Jordanians, like the Egyptians, ingratiated themselves with the city's elite. That month, King Abdullah convened a congress in Amman to build support for the unification of Palestine with Jordan. Some, including the city's mayor, Shaykh Muhammad ‘Ali al-Ja‘bari and other notables, supported King Abdullah and the Jordanians, while others supported King Faruq and the Egyptians. Major Lochte, the British military commander leading the Arab Legion troops in Hebron, quickly raised the Jordanian flag while lowering the Egyptian flag, a story that differs slightly from the one that Kamal al-Sharif tells in his Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun fi Harb Filastin. Al-Tall saw the matter of the flag dispute as petty, but offers more detail than al-Sharif does. He claims that Lochte also removed the Palestinian flag, but the matter of flags was ultimately solved by co-operation of the Egyptian officers, including Egyptian Captain ‘Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur and Commander Lutfi Wakid, along with the Jordanian military governor. They reached a solution whereby all three flags would be raised.Footnote 30 The nationalist tension between Egypt and Jordan was on full display by the late 1950s when al-Tall published Karitha Filastin. By that time, al-Tall was in exile in Cairo, yet he explained to his readers that the Egyptians had supported the Palestinian population during the most distressing period of the war reinforcing Palestinians’ divided loyalties between Jordanians and Egyptians. These barbs against the Jordanians came at a time when al-Tall's relations with the Hashemites had deteriorated due to his implication and conviction in abstentia in King Abdullah's assassination in 1951.
The documentary record of the Dual Era
Few historical records exist to provide details as to how the administrative apparatus in Hebron functioned under Jordanian–Egyptian control.Footnote 31 One report in the Hashemite Archives dated 30 September 1948, written by Palestinian Hashemite loyalist ‘Ali al-Khatib, offers some candid views of the situation under both a Jordanian military governor, Salih al-Majali, and an Egyptian military governor, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur.Footnote 32 Al-Khatib addresses his report to the head of the Diwan al-Maliki (Royal Court) in Amman, but seems to have worked closely with the office of Salih al-Majali. Of the three main topics covered in the report, ‘Egyptian rule in the south of Palestine’ is most pertinent to this article.
Al-Khatib observed and experienced some problems in Dual Era Hebron and was, it seems, indebted to the governor. The report notes al-Khatib's praise for al-Majali, who had an important effect on the ‘loyalist coalition’ that led them to support the Hashemites.Footnote 33 Al-Khatib offered his profound thanks to the government, via al-Majali, for helping him with his recent arrest at the hands of ‘our Egyptian brothers’, an incident he blamed on the ‘opposition’ and ‘corrupt communists’.Footnote 34 Salih al-Majali had stepped in to release him from detention. Al-Khatib does not delineate a separation of powers between the Egyptian and Jordanian military governors in Hebron, but the report does identify lines of responsibilities associated with each regime.Footnote 35
Al-Khatib placed his fealty in the Jordanians while subtly expressing his antipathy for Egyptian rule in Hebron and for Abu Nur. Navigating what seems to be the complexity of his position, at the beginning of the report he notes his appreciation of the Egyptians and how impressed he is by Egypt's place at the forefront of the literary revival (i.e. the nahda). Yet, he also complains that some Egyptians have been agitating against Palestine from outside of the country, specifying the Arabian Peninsula. He informed the Diwan that he tried to solve the problem by writing letters to those whom he thought responsible for instigating the trouble, both inside and outside of Palestine, to no avail.
Al-Khatib wrote to the head of the Diwan in Amman regarding several actions that the Egyptian military governor in Hebron had undertaken that had affected both Jordanians and Palestinians in deeply harmful ways. These actions fell under the purview of municipal administration, which Abu al-Nur controlled as military governor. According to al-Khatib, Abu al-Nur fired two Palestinians working in the tax administration, for which he saw no justification unless one considers the fact that they had been co-operating with the Jordanian military governor. Further, the Egyptian governor persecuted a third Palestinian in the magistrate's court, implying Egyptian control over the court. Finally, he deprived a fourth Palestinian of his salary in the Land Registry Department. Al-Majali offers no comments in his memoirs on these divisive actions. He lacked military support and may not have been able to respond as forcefully as he might have wished. Abu al-Nur may have made certain administrative decisions to endear himself to particular segments of Hebron's Palestinian population, but such decisions also had the effect of alienating those who were pro-Hashemite.Footnote 36
‘Ali al-Khatib describes Hebron in his report as a ‘Middle East Berlin’, recognizing already in September 1948 that the city had been divided between a ‘Jordanian governor and an Egyptian governor’. The following issues appear to have troubled al-Khatib: (1) the potential spread of communism and the actions of the Egyptian military governor, (2) corruption in the city and (3) clamouring among political parties and an increase in family partisanship. He saw those as ‘object[s] of delight for the opposition’, by which he means the Zionist Jews, who by this time had declared an independent state in part of Palestine and continued to fight against the Arab states, including Egypt and Jordan, in other parts of Palestine. Al-Khatib felt that being occupied by these matters was a waste of time. But worse than that, he thought that it ‘revived long dormant feuds’ among people in the city that could eventually lead them to turn the Egyptians and Jordanians against one another when they should be focused on fighting against the Zionist enemy.
The tense relations between the Egyptians and Jordanians are apparent in Abu al-Nur and the Egyptians’ actions following King Abdullah's move in September 1948 to ‘raise customs between the East Bank of Jordan and the West Bank’. Abu al-Nur responded to the king's raising of customs by giving an order that would ‘prevent the entry into Egyptian-influenced territories of any goods that did not come from Egypt, with the exception of a few luxuries, soaps, and salt’.Footnote 37 In addition, Ibrahim Bey Hafiz, an Egyptian official responsible for Bethlehem, Hebron and Beersheba before being transferred back to Egypt, spoke about education to a large crowd of locals in the Office of Social Affairs in Hebron. He said that the Egyptians were ready to implement a curriculum change in the Palestinian schools in accordance with and under the guidance of the Mufti of Jerusalem (Hajj Amin al-Husayni, likely, as of September 1948 based in Gaza, then relocated to Cairo) to compel them to follow the Egyptian curriculum. From these two orders, al-Khatib inferred ‘that the south is becoming parts of the Land of the Nile. I don't know, by God, what is right.’Footnote 38 This perspective by a Hashemite loyalist concerning the Dual Era offers the most detailed, critical account of the functions of municipal government during a time of war. Al-Khatib's account suggests that the Hebron government functioned in a partisan manner. The Hebron diaries discussed below offer further insight into the Dual Era from a personal viewpoint.
The Dual Era through personal diaries
The following analysis of Sami ‘Amr's and Muhammad al-Shrouf's respective diary entries gives perspective on the Jordanian–Egyptian Dual Era as it unfolded during and after the war months. Sami kept an unpublished diary about Hebron from January through the end of April 1949, which documents his own family situation and his work as a municipal employee of the Dual Era. In addition, Muhammad al-Shrouf, a policeman during the British Mandate period, wrote for many years, and very clearly supported the Egyptians.Footnote 39 These two men's accounts, in particular the younger Sami, highlight the tensions between the Egyptians and Jordanians. In addition, Sami was building a home for his family (a wife and infant son) during this period. He writes prominently about his work for the municipality in his short diary, which he needed in order to complete his new home.Footnote 40 Muhammad al-Shrouf was, unlike Sami, a landowner, but during the Mandate period he supplemented his income by working as a policeman. Sami writes in February 1949 that the struggle in Hebron between the Jordanians and Egyptians ‘continue[d] at its peak despite the fact that the Egyptians have assumed the policing duties and [were] paying the salaries of the administrative employees of the municipal authorities’.Footnote 41 Al-Shrouf went with some fellow policemen from the Mandate period for an interview with the Egyptian station's sergeant on 25 February. On 26 March, he signed a contract to work as a policeman in Hebron, and noted that his salary for February and March 1949 came from the Egyptians. In an entry from Sami's diary in March 1949, he makes clear that the Jordanians offered him two months’ salary for his co-operation. Possibly in an effort to entice him to inform on friends and family who supported the Egyptians, the Jordanians told him that the salary was given ‘on the basis that [he] co-operate with them’.Footnote 42 With a young family to support, a home to finish and influenced by friends, Sami took the money. The next day, with his conscience clearly weighing on him, he writes that he ‘regretted’ this decision.Footnote 43 He consulted with the Egyptian governor, who agreed with him that he should return the money and ‘cut [his] ties with the Jordanians’.Footnote 44 Soon after, Jordanian and Egyptian soldiers visited Sami's office (an Egyptian-controlled office) and intimidated the Palestinian workers there. The Palestinian employees who supported the Egyptians responded the next day with a strike that pitted the two sides against each other, as documented by Hashemite loyalist ‘Ali al-Khatib several months earlier. Sami reports that members of the al-Ja‘bari family, long-time Hashemite loyalists, opened fire on the protestors whose goal was to reach the Egyptian governor at his base in the city's hospital.Footnote 45 By the end of the month, the Jordanian government sent the minister of the interior from Amman to deal with the rising tensions in Hebron. The minister failed to calm the situation at the local level, so the two military governors worked to pacify the situation. The Egyptian governor requested that people be allowed to leave without being harmed, a request that went neglected as Jordanian soldiers marched through the town to arrest Palestinian supporters of Egyptian rule. Sami lists members of his own family who were targeted for their political positions: Mukhlis ‘Amr and Fakhry Hammuri. Both sought refuge with the Egyptian governor at his hospital headquarters.Footnote 46 These individuals represent two types of Palestinians who supported Egypt during this period but who, at the end of the Dual Era, made different choices. Mukhlis ‘Amr remained in Hebron under the Jordanians. He was a journalist and one of the founders of the Communist party of Palestine. His political activities landed him in prison, and he later fell ill with stomach cancer and died in 1957 after being released by the Jordanians on mercy grounds. When Egypt withdrew from Hebron, Fakhry Hammuri left for Gaza with the Egyptians. He remained there for his entire life and never returned to his hometown of Hebron. Fakhry died sometime around 1962.Footnote 47
The end of the Dual Era
Ultimately, the confusion over administrative and political control in Hebron was sorted out by the Jordanian–Israeli Armistice Agreement signed on 3 April 1949.Footnote 48 Hebron was originally part of the UN Partition Plan's Arab state. Although, technically, it fell under Jordanian control according to the armistice agreement, Hebron also remained under de facto Egyptian control. To clarify, the Egyptians had reached their armistice agreement with the Israelis on 24 February 1949 (which included a clause about Hebron and Bethlehem) when most Egyptian forces were safely behind agreed upon lines in Gaza. The exception to that was a military governor and forces, of uncertain number, which remained in the Hebron–Bethlehem area following Operation Yoav in October. The Jordanian–Israeli negotiations moved between Rhodes and the local environment when Israel's negotiator, Elias Sasson, returned from Rhodes in December 1948 to try to move the talks forward with King Abdullah. The talks were mediated by Lt Colonel Abdullah al-Tall, Israeli General Moshe Dayan and a British advisor. During these talks, which preceded the formal armistice talks, Sasson passed a message to King Abdullah via his intermediary, Abdullah al-Tall, regarding the disposition of Hebron. Sasson advised ‘the king to make efforts to obtain the withdrawal of Egyptian forces from the south of Jerusalem and Hebron so as to save himself from the difficulties and political trouble that their presence was liable to cause’.Footnote 49 The Jordanian–Israeli Armistice Agreement said little about the city of Hebron, and focused primarily on specifying the demarcation lines for each of the countries’ armed forces. By contrast, the Egypt–Israel armistice, signed a few months prior, addresses the Bethlehem–Hebron area, noting that
the provisions of this Agreement shall apply to the forces of both Parties [Egypt and Israel] in each such locality [Bethlehem and Hebron], except that the demarcation of the Armistice Line and reciprocal arrangements for withdrawal and reduction of forces shall be undertaken in such manner as may be decided by the Parties, at such time as an Armistice Agreement may be concluded covering military forces in that area other than those of the Parties to this Agreement.
Israel appears to have laid the groundwork for the Jordanians to take over the Hebron region when circumstances permitted by inserting a provision for the latter's takeover of the city into the Egyptian–Israeli Armistice Agreement.Footnote 50
Multiple sources discuss the Egyptian pullout from Hebron (and Bethlehem) in response to the Jordanian negotiators’ visit to Cairo seeking an Egyptian withdrawal of forces.Footnote 51 Following an agreement, the Egyptian troops left Hebron on 30 April 1949. Jordan–Egypt Relations (a volume of compiled news and government reports in The Hashemite Papers) recounts developments between Egypt and Jordan during 1949. The volume documents some disjunction between the two sides, particularly evident through the reporting of al-Asās, a partisan Egyptian newspaper. The newspaper printed a 27 April 1949 speech by Jordanian Prime Minister Tawfiq Pasha Abu al-Huda that thanked the Egyptian government for its co-operation in Hebron and Bethlehem. Abu al-Huda confirmed that because the armistice agreement had been signed, Jordan would now administer these regions. As these reports clarify, the Jordanian–Israeli Armistice Agreement did not solidify Jordan's control; Egyptian troops remained in Hebron. By 30 April 1949, Hebron had become part of the Kingdom of Jordan after the Jordanians convinced the Egyptians to depart.Footnote 52 The rhetorical animosity in the news accounts and reports in the few pages of the Jordan–Egypt Relations volume, which addresses Zionism rather than control of Hebron per se, anticipates future hostilities that would unfold between Egypt and Jordan during the following decade. Would it be Jordan or Egypt, and their respective brands of Arab nationalism, that of the Hashemites or Nasser, that would better represent the Palestinians during the decade of the 1950s as calls came to reclaim Palestine?
Egyptian troops did not withdraw from Hebron until nearly three months after Egypt and Israel had signed their armistice agreement and nearly one month after Jordan and Israel had signed their armistice agreement. Some Palestinian supporters of Egyptian rule in Hebron left for Gaza with the Egyptians, never to return to Hebron, while some left for Gaza and returned.Footnote 53 Some who had worked as civil servants for the Egyptian forces in Hebron (and Bethlehem), and whom they considered ‘good and just’, raised complaints about not being permitted to work because they had come from the now-Jordanian areas to Gaza with the Egyptian army.Footnote 54 The Egyptians now ruling Gaza after 1948 did not accept the Palestinians’ claims simply because they had been loyal to them in Dual-Era Hebron. The Egyptians had not asked for additional civil servants to come to Gaza, and, in fact, had asked them to remain in the now Jordanian-controlled Hebron (and other towns) because the new Egyptian administration in Gaza could not handle employing Palestinian civil servants from all of those areas. Those who came anyway ‘were refused because they came without request or need, and there [was] no money in the budget to pay for additional salaries’.Footnote 55 Some supporters of Egypt stayed in Hebron and tried to find a modicum of stability in the Jordanian kingdom, but, two to three years later, still found themselves without work, and they petitioned the Jordanian government for help in reclaiming their salaries from the period of the Dual Era.
The Dual Era returns
On 14 March 1951, the ‘Committee of Former Employees in Hebron’ sent a letter to the Jordanian prime minister seeking compensation from the Egyptian side of the Dual Era for work done during the month of April 1949.Footnote 56 This six-point-letter encapsulates the Dual Era period in which Jordan and Egypt struggled for hegemony in Hebron and for support from the local Palestinian population. The proto-nationalist tensions from this period would open wide within seven to eight years, during the premiership of Sulayman al-Nabulsi (1956–57) when he sought relations with Egypt that threatened the king but also inspired the West Bank population. Based on this letter, there is little indication that this group of individuals ever sought compensation previously for their work during the month of April 1949. The writers of the 1951 letter introduce themselves as ‘We, the former employees of the Dual Era – the Jordanian Egyptian – who did not receive a salary for the month of April 1949 from the Egyptian Administration.’ This appeal to the ‘Egyptians of the Dual Era Administration’ suggests that despite what al-Majali states in his book about shared control over financial matters, the Egyptians still seemed to be responsible for paying the salary for ‘Dual Era’ employees. The letter, addressing six concerns of the signatories, a number of which are discussed here, mainly focused on how the group could convince the PM to assist them in recouping their salary losses from Egypt during the Dual Era.
The first point the committee makes is that ‘the Egyptian government promised to pay this salary within a month of its withdrawal, but it did not fulfill its promise’.Footnote 57 With the war over, the armistices completed, the Egyptian troop pullout finalized, the unification of two banks of the Jordan voted on in the parliament (1950) and King Abdullah promoting a message of unity, these people felt comfortable enough in the kingdom to inquire with the prime minister about the salaries of a cadre of people who had worked in this unusual situation of Dual Era Hebron to ensure the continued running of the city's bureaucracy during the war. Salary payment concerned not only high bureaucratic officials; lower-level, younger employees and policemen, Sami ‘Amr and Muhammad al-Shrouf, also wrote about the subject in their diaries. The issue of who paid the salaries remains ambiguous.
The second item on the letter writers’ list pertains to co-operation and collaboration between the two countries of the Dual Era. Salih al-Majali's memoir indicates that Jordan and Egypt had agreed to facilitate bureaucratic and administrative measures for Hebronites during the Dual Era, though the implementation seems erratic or incomplete based on sources presented here. When hostilities broke out in Hebron in March 1949 among Hebron's Palestinian population, Sami writes in his diary that the Egyptians asked the Jordanians not to harm the population.Footnote 58 Egypt's eventual troop departure, according to Muhammad al-Shrouf and Abdullah al-Tall, seems to have been well co-ordinated with the Jordanians. However, the Egyptians left without making a final salary payment to Dual Era employees. Now, two years later, in consultation with the current Egyptian government, the letter drafters wrote to Prime Minister al-Rifa‘i that agreement had been reached between them and the Egyptian government for payment. But the Egyptians seem to have placed a condition on the payment: they wanted to send a representative to Hebron and Bethlehem to make the payments in person, and ‘according to their official methods’, which are undefined in the letter. Surely this would have been unpalatable to the Jordanian government, which had just managed two years prior to end an official Egyptian presence in those two important southern Palestinian, now West Bank, Jordanian cities. To make the transaction seem more palatable to the prime minister, the letter's authors mention that the amount is not small and that, while the former Dual Era employees are in need of the funds, some of what they will gain will return to ‘our [Jordanian] government’ by way of the Treasury as repayment on a loan to the attorneys of the District of Hebron for the month in question. The Archives contain no response from the Jordanian prime minister but we can be sure he did not need Egyptian officials to return in an official capacity, particularly if to make payments to Palestinian–Jordanian former officials. The concise but complex language used in the letter to the prime minister may be playing on the new idea of unification as a means to show support for the kingdom, while at the same time these individuals were seeking their own financial interests from a time when they lent support to the Egyptians as the rulers in Hebron.
In the third item on the list, the letter authors claim that the money would considerably aid their financial situation. This point causes one to pause because the monthly salary for an administrative employee during wartime could not have been an exorbitant sum. Yet, as correspondence with Samir ‘Amr, son of 1949 diarist Sami ‘Amr, makes clear, one of the signatories to the letter, Shaykh Fathy al-Hammuri (related to Sami by marriage), did not work for two years following the Dual Era as a kind of punishment by the Jordanian government before they forgave him and returned him to a highly respectable position: Imam of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Gaining this lost income, thus, would have been most welcome. Shaykh al-Hammuri had served as Bash Katib, chief of the clerks of the court, the title he used to sign the letter. He served in this position both during the Dual Era and before that during the British Mandate. While Shaykh Fathy stayed in what became Jordanian territory after the Egyptian departure, his two brothers, Fakhry and Fahmy, went with the Egyptians to Gaza. It is unclear if Shaykh Fathy was punished because his brothers left with the Egyptians or because the Jordanians needed to send the public a message due to Shaykh Fathy's position in the city's religious affairs. Once the Jordanians assigned him to the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1951, he reclaimed his prestige. Nevertheless, Shaykh Fathy's sister claims that her brother never received any compensation from the Egyptians as a result of the letter.Footnote 59
The letter writers imply that there were impediments to receiving compensation from Egypt via an official sent to Hebron and Bethlehem. If the Hashemite government could ‘be in contact with the generous Egyptian government and make clear to them that there is no objection to a representative coming, if that was the obstacle’, the letter writers would be most grateful. The writers claimed not to understand what the obstacle was. However, in the final item on the list, if one reads between the lines, one can gather why the Jordanians likely prevented the Egyptian representative from coming to deliver compensation, which would: ‘show. . .what good this generous [Egyptian] aid will do going back to the [Dual Era] employees’. The Jordanians would not have wanted an Egyptian representative to bring financial compensation, deliver it by hand and perhaps have newspapermen present to witness the event and snap photographs that would appear in the papers. Such a public display could have delivered the Egyptians a public relations success during a decade that would turn hostile for Egypt–Jordan relations in the kingdom. If one reads the letter on the basis of financial necessity alone, it is convincing. Palestinians had suffered considerably as a result of the 1948 war and many had gone for periods of time without work, including those at the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum. Yet, implicit in it for the Jordanian government is Egypt's underhanded way of scoring political points with the Palestinians in the West Bank, something that the Jordanians no doubt wished to prevent.
Conclusion
The Dual Era in Hebron marks one of the more unusual episodes in the history of the Palestine War. As far as I have been able to determine, in no other Palestinian city (except Bethlehem) did the local population feel the tug of war between two major Arab states contending for local control while simultaneously fighting against the Zionist/Israeli adversary.Footnote 60 The decade after the Dual Era would mark a great turn of events in both Egypt and Jordan, as well as for the Palestinians in the Hashemite Kingdom. The competition for Palestinian support in Hebron between Jordan and Egypt during the brief period of the Dual Era would expand to cities throughout Jordan. In 1952, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser and the Free Officer's Movement, which included former Egyptian military governor in Hebron, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur, brought 150 years of Egypt's monarchy to an end along with British imperial rule in the country. King Hussein began to rule Jordan in 1953 after his grandfather's assassination (1951) and his father's short reign (1951–52). Hussein and Nasser faced major challenges domestically and regionally, as well as with the United States and the Soviet Union. Although they had opposing visions for the region, Hussein made efforts to work with Nasser. The Dual Era foreshadows and rehearses the Arab nationalist competition between Egypt and Jordan that escalated during the second half of the 1950s, nearly costing King Hussein his throne.
