This chapter maps the emergence and development of the police as part of the Jordanian state’s institutional infrastructure. Starting with a brief overview of policing in early Muslim societies and policing in Transjordan under the Ottoman Empire, the chapter then focuses on the organisational development of the police (in towns and the countryside) within the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha and the British Mandate until the separation of the police from the military in 1956 and the creation of the Public Security Directorate (PSD). The discussion of various police roles within the Legion indicates that while coercion featured prominently in the early days of the state, the police were concerned not only with ‘repression’ or ‘law-enforcement’, but also with social ordering. The chapter’s second section highlights and seeks to make sense of a series of seeming paradoxes within the contemporary PSD relating to ideas about it as a civic service or a quasi-military force, as a guardian of conservativism, and/or a heralder of modernity; and as being at once ubiquitous and /or ‘laissez-faire’.

The 1948 war is regarded by Israel as its war of independence in which it managed to repel attacks by all the neighboring Arab States. The Arab population of Palestine regard the war as a catastrophe, al Nakba, that caused the exodus of some 750, 000 Arabs. As a result of the 1948 war, Israel occupied the Western Galilee and Beersheba, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza strip, all territories allocated to the proposed Arab State. Israel and Jordan divided Jerusalem between them. International law issues arising from the war include complaints from both sides of deliberate killing of civilians, clearly a violation of the laws of war. Expulsion of civilians, where it occurred, was justified by Israel as an act of legal military necessity, this is disputed by the Palestinians who viewed it as an illegal act. A smaller number of Jewish civilians were expelled from areas held by Arab forces.A legal issue in dispute is whether the objection of the Arabs of Palestine to partition allowed them to use force and whether the intervention of the neighbouring Arab States was a legitimate exercise of the right of collective self-defence.