A little country in a big neighbourhood, Jordan is often an afterthought when one thinks about the turbulent Middle East, a status Jordanians are content with. However, the country’s vulnerable location means Jordanians can never truly be at ease. In any region, neighbours are economically reliant on each other. For Jordan, which has a service-based economy and lacks natural resources, this can not be more true. It follows that any crisis in a neighbouring country has adverse impacts on the East Bank of the river. War in Iraq and Syria has cut off valuable markets from Jordan and brought in waves of refugees that the Kingdom’s infrastructure can barely manage. The stable neighbours are Saudi Arabia, which may condition aid on the Kingdom making certain domestic and foreign manoeuvres, and Israel/Palestine, the focus of this investigation.
Jordan has not seen internal conflict since the clashes of 1970 and ‘71, but every conflict and genocide in the countries around it is felt deeply on an emotional level. The borders that White diplomats drew just over a century ago are relatively new. There are profound familial and cultural ties between Jordanians and their neighbours, chiefly with Palestinians. Think tanks make a game of estimating the percentage of Jordan’s Palestinian population, as if the higher the percentage, the further they can prove their point (this will be touched on later). It’s irrelevant, because Jordanians of all origins feel great affinity with the Palestinian cause. There are obviously Palestinian refugees and their descendants, descendants of Palestinians who came voluntarily prior to the occupation, and East Bank Jordanians who have married into Palestinian families. There are entire clans and tribes with members on both banks of the river. Even those who are “fully” Jordanian are outraged at the genocide occurring just 150 kilometres away. People all over the world are. But for Jordanians, the geographical and personal proximity is a significant factor. Palestinians and Jordanians speak similar dialects, eat similar food, practice the same religions and enjoy the same music. When Jordanians read or hear about atrocities in Palestine, the overwhelming feeling is imagining that it is their own family that are being ethnically cleansed, just a few short miles away.
Jordan’s close connection with Palestine has had two important implications in the last decade. One is mass public discontent with the fact that Jordan is in the security umbrella of the U.S., who are funding this genocide, and more specifically, with Jordan’s Peace Treaty with Israel. Jordan has some economic relations with the Zionist state, including a gas deal that stemmed from ISIS’ previous domination of Western Iraq and parts of Syria. Protests have occurred since October and are generally increasing in size and intensity as the death toll in Gaza surges. The other consequence of Jordanian-Palestinian brotherhood, is the right wing Zionist opinion that Palestinians should be expelled to Jordan, and Jordan should be the Palestinian state, an inherent contradiction! This is a nightmare scenario, for it would liquidate the Palestinian cause and possibly cause precariously-positioned Jordan to collapse.
How are these two tied? Israel’s ideology is backwards and illogical, so they have shifted their brain power into figuring out means through which they will achieve their goal. The goal in question: as much of Palestine as possible with as little Palestinians in it as possible, as Ilan Pappé rightly put it. Jordan’s effective security apparatus is why the country remains stable, and as such, is the reason why Israel has not yet pushed West Bank Palestinians off their land. At the same time, Israel surely knows it is deeply unpopular in Jordan and the Arab World. My thesis is as follows: Israel is organizing an online disinformation campaign to denigrate Jordan, principally through playing up the Kingdom’s ties with Israel and fomenting discontent in the country, so it can be unstable, and the “alternative homeland” plan can be put into motion. Jordanians are frustrated at their country’s foreign policy and their woeful economic situation, and through the observation of historical and current patterns, one will find that Israel seeks to benefit from this equation. Israel uses bots, fake news and influencers to advance its goal, all while making the “Jordanian option” a mainstream opinion amongst Israelis. This will be discussed in the third part of this article. The first two parts will assert that an alternative homeland, or worse, Israel outright annexing parts of Jordan, is an option that Israeli policymakers have entertained and even acted upon. This opinion is becoming commonplace as Israeli politics has shifted in the direction of expansionist fascism. As a result, Jordanians, Palestinians, and anyone interested in their cause must be aware of this scenario.
Historical attitudes of Zionists towards Jordan: 1919-50
One could replace “Palestinians” in Pappé’s quote with “Arabs” more broadly. It is abundantly clear that the Zionist movement has had designs for Jordan since the end of the First World War. Some of these schemes involved the expulsion of Palestinians to Transjordan to make room for Jewish settlers, and others outright proposed expanding East of the Jordan River. For instance, this was the map that the Zionist delegation showed for a Jewish homeland at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
The Zionist ideal would absorb almost every part of Jordan that is fertile and suitable for human settlement. In the end, Palestine became a priority with the mass Jewish immigration that occurred during the Mandate period, but Zionist visions of Jordan are mentioned a number of times by Ben Gurion. At the onset of the 1948 war, Israel’s founder stated:
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today — but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” (The Birth of Israel, by Simha Flapan, page 53)
Even before the Nakba, Ben Gurion had put ideas of population transfer into motion
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.” (5 October, 1937, from Ben Gurion’s memoirs)
As history showed, the Israelis captured the Negev during the 1948 war, destroying numerous villages and expelling thousands in the process. Most of the resultant refugees ended up in Gaza and Jordan.
From a meeting of leading Zionists in October 1936:
“If it was permissible to move an Arab from the Galilee to Judea, why is it impossible to move an Arab from the Hebron area to Transjordan, which is much closer? . . . There are vast expanses of land there and we [in Palestine] are over-crowded . . . We now want to create concentrated areas of Jewish settlement [in Palestine], and by transferring the land-selling Arab to Transjordan, we can solve the problem of this concentration.” (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris, 46)
Likewise, Jabotinsky, Zionist militaman and founder of the revisionist movement, at first advocated for a bi-national state across both banks of the river, where “Arabs would be the minority.” He then conceded that population transfers to Transjordan were necessary to establish the Jewish state. (Morris, 45)
Earlier that year, Menachem Ussishkin, founder of the Jewish National Fund (the shell company Zionists used to expropriate land), declared: “What we can demand today is that all Transjordan be included in the Land of Israel. . . on condition that Transjordan would be either be made available for Jewish colonization or for the resettlement of those [Palestinian] Arabs, whose lands [in Palestine] we would purchase.” (Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, by Nur Masalha, 51)
Do bear in mind that at this time, a British Commission had proposed that the Jews be given 20% of historic Palestine, whilst the other 80% be absorbed into Transjordan. Ben Gurion convinced his colleagues to accept the plan, for it would serve as a stepping stone for conquering the rest of Palestine and “possibly Transjordan” as well. (Morris, 47) The next part will prove that Israel’s future leaders took Ben Gurion’s words to heart, and tried to infringe on Jordan’s sovereignty as the country became independent.
