In 1937, the Peel Commission conceded that there was ‘an irrepressible conflict … between two national communities’, with no common ground between them.39 The commission proposed a partition plan that would give 20 per cent of the best areas of Palestine to the Jews, while the Arab territories would be linked to Transjordan, the territory east of the Jordan river that had been separated from Palestine in 1923 and made a state under King Abdullah, another son of Sharif Hussain.
