On 12 August 2025, during an interview with Israel’s i24NEWS, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu renewed his identification with the vision of “Greater Israel”, which includes, among other areas, the West Bank.
Netanyahu did not set out the borders of the state envisaged by this vision during the interview. However, maps, texts and statements by other Israeli officials have highlighted additional territories that fall within its scope, most notably Jordan.
Commenting on Netanyahu’s remarks, Ari Baiman, a former deputy director of Israel’s Shin Bet security service and an active member of Commanders for Israel’s Security, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that the statement endangered relations with existing peace partners and undermined hopes for further normalisation with Arab and Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia.
Baiman’s view, however, does not necessarily carry much weight among other members of Israel’s occupation government, nor is it sufficient to erase Jordan from maps of “Greater Israel” or ignore its presence within them.
From the First Zionist Congress in 1897 to the present day, Jordan has remained the “absent presence” in Zionist thought.
This begins with biblical promises and maps, passes through displacement plans and the rhetoric of an “alternative homeland”, and reaches the maps and statements of Bezalel Smotrich.
The history suggests that Smotrich’s rhetoric extends beyond the remarks of a politician seeking attention. It reflects a deeply rooted doctrine inherited across successive generations of Israeli political leadership, on both the right and left, although with important differences.
Some have viewed Jordan as territory to be absorbed into “Greater Israel”. Others have treated it as a demographic solution through the “alternative homeland” project. Some have sought the Jordan Valley and river as strategic security depth, while others have regarded Jordan as an economic corridor towards an Abraham Accords regional order.
Against this background, the following examines Jordan’s place in the Zionist imagination, its presence in biblical texts, its appearance in early and modern maps, and the evolution of Israeli discourse towards it, leading to the ambitions that emerged after 7 October and renewed dreams of expansion east of the Jordan River.
Jordan on the Pages of the Tanakh
Before Transjordan became a state drawn on political maps, it appeared as a river and surrounding territory in religious texts and later as a geographic space within the Zionist imagination.
Early biblical books describe the Jordan River as the dividing line between two banks, or between two and a half tribes on one side and the remaining tribes on the other.
Although the two areas occupy different positions in the biblical narrative, both banks form a single geographic sphere in which tribes of the Children of Israel settled before entering the land of Canaan.
This appears in Numbers 32, where the tribes of Reuben and Gad, followed by half the tribe of Manasseh, requested settlement in the lands of Gilead and Bashan east of the Jordan River after the defeat of Kings Sihon and Og.
From that point onward, Jewish literature repeatedly referred to the area as “Ever HaYarden”, meaning “beyond the Jordan River”.
According to the Biblical Archaeology Society, Jordan, described as “the other biblical land”, contains numerous locations whose presence in Jewish literature can be divided into four principal categories.
The first is the land of battles and conquests, including Bashan, Heshbon, Gilead, Dibon and Ashtaroth, all associated with military victories, prophets and the division of territory among the tribes.
The second includes the lands of neighbouring peoples that repeatedly entered religious and political conflicts with the Children of Israel, including Moab, Ammon and Edom.
The third category is associated with locations connected to the life of Moses before entry into Canaan, including the valley and plains of Moab.
According to the biblical account, the area was the setting for the speeches of Deuteronomy and the renewal of the covenant. Balaam was summoned there to curse the Children of Israel, and the episode involving the worship of Baal described in Numbers also took place there.
Some sites fall into more than one category and carry differing theological and symbolic meanings.
Bashan symbolises power and fertility, Gilead healing, while Edom represents the historic enemy and is the subject of numerous prophecies in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Obadiah, connected to its position during destruction.
Moab and Ammon, meanwhile, represent the recurring tension between kinship and hostility.
Locations and territories east of the river are mentioned between 740 and 800 times in the Hebrew scriptures across most books of the Tanakh, from Genesis to Malachi. Some appear more than once within a single verse and in singular, plural and derivative forms.
According to the Biblical Archaeology Society, this makes the area one of the most frequently referenced geographic regions in the biblical narrative after Jerusalem, Judah and Samaria.
Israeli interpretations attribute this prominence partly to the region’s association with the final years of the Prophet Moses, peace be upon him.
It includes Mount Nebo, from which he is said to have viewed the Promised Land; the first territories conquered by the Children of Israel; the homeland of Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh; the cave of Lot, where Lot and his daughters are said to have sheltered after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; Madaba, which contains a mosaic map of the Holy Land; and the ancient kingdoms of Moab, Ammon and Edom, which repeatedly formed the setting for conflict with the Children of Israel.
With such a substantial presence, Jordan, or the lands east of the river, was never marginal within Jewish literature.
It formed a foundational element of the biblical narrative and later became a cornerstone of early Zionist discourse, which treated Transjordan as a complementary extension of the “Land of Israel”, even as political positions towards the idea changed over time.
This conception draws on three different levels through which the territory east of the Jordan appears within borders described in biblical texts.
At the first level, territory east of the river falls within the scope of the “Promised Land”, mentioned in Genesis as a divine promise to Abraham.
Jordan is not named directly in this passage, either as a river or territory, but the borders described encompass areas east of the river and beyond: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”
At the second level, the eastern bank appears as the first land possessed by the Children of Israel according to Numbers and Deuteronomy.
After the defeat of the king of the Amorites and the king of Bashan, territory east of the river was allocated to two and a half tribes, including Gilead, Bashan, Heshbon, Dibon and Ashtaroth, areas corresponding today to large parts of northern and central Jordan.
The third level concerns the full extent attributed to the united kingdom under David and Solomon, which included Moab, Edom, Ammon, Gilead and Bashan.
Some were placed under direct rule, such as Edom; some through war, such as Ammon; and others through tributary relationships, such as Moab. All were nevertheless considered part of the territory ruled by the Children of Israel at that time.
Jordan: The Other Bank of Settlement
Because of these differing historical and biblical layers, Transjordan remained present as part of biblical history, although its political interpretation never achieved full consensus within Jewish thought.
Most of these regions did not remain continuously under Israelite control and existed for long periods as independent kingdoms.
This debate coincided with the rise of early settlement ideas and, later, the emergence and development of Zionism.
At the time, the borders separating Arab countries had not yet been drawn. Zionism benefited from this uncertainty by promoting the idea of a “national home” without a fixed territorial definition, allowing it to claim an area larger than what might otherwise have been available.
At the same time, this left Zionist ambitions dependent on British and international policy and on the positions of individual political leaders.
During the first phase of settlement between 1882 and 1896, before the First Zionist Congress and supported by Edmond de Rothschild, all settlements were concentrated west of the Jordan River, specifically within the Jerusalem Mutasarrifate and the Beirut Vilayet.
These included Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov, Rosh Pina and other settlements associated with the First Aliyah, which focused on establishing Jewish agricultural settlement in areas where Ottoman authorities permitted Jews to reside.
Transjordan was not entirely outside consideration during this period.
Its territory was viewed as potentially more suitable for Jewish settlement because of cheaper land prices and a smaller population.
In his book The Longing for Jewish Settlement in Transjordan, 1871-1947, Zvi Ilan wrote that the first person to advocate Jewish settlement east of the Jordan was British Royal Engineers officer Sir Charles Warren, who arrived in the region in 1867 as part of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Based on his surveys and research, Warren recommended beginning Jewish settlement in the Gilead region east of the Jordan, which he preferred to areas west of the river.
He also called for establishing a Jewish settlement company in Transjordan that could operate beyond Ottoman scrutiny of Jewish expansion and begin by leasing land from the Ottoman state.
Later, pioneering settler Yehoshua Yellin also advocated settlement east of the Jordan.
In 1871, he established a company to develop and cultivate land in Ghor Nimrin, north-east of the Dead Sea, as preparation for Jewish settlement.
Yellin entered agreements with several sheikhs of the Arab al-Nimr tribe living in the region, but the project failed to achieve its intended results.
Another settlement plan followed in 1879.
British traveller Laurence Oliphant, after visiting the region and writing The Land of Gilead, proposed a plan to settle Gilead and establish an autonomous Jewish political entity there through diplomacy, British pressure on the Ottoman sultan, or the purchase of land for a substantial sum.
Unlike earlier initiatives, Oliphant’s ambitions reached the Ottoman Sublime Porte and Minister of State Khayr al-Din Pasha.
However, his persistent contacts with European governments and appeals for their consuls to pressure the Ottomans into accepting his proposal generated suspicion about his intentions and stopped the project at an early stage.
The failure of the scheme did not remove Transjordan from the Zionist imagination.
It remained present within historical and religious conceptions, while political, administrative and economic obstacles prevented incorporation of territory east of the river.
When Theodor Herzl convened the Zionist Congress, he did not define the borders of the future Jewish state, an ambiguity that researchers have regarded as deliberate and whose purposes became clearer later.
This uncertainty allowed an early experiment in Jewish settlement east of the Jordan by a group of Jewish immigrants who settled near the Zarqa River, close to Jerash.
They established two agricultural settlements in an area referred to in the Bible as the Jabbok River and later added a third settlement near Salt in 1898.
Local inhabitants soon became aware of the settlers’ intentions and attacked them, ultimately resulting in the evacuation of all three settlements and the departure of their inhabitants.
The experience reinforced within Zionist thinking the conclusion that settlement east of the Jordan depended on Ottoman weakness and that priority should remain with settlement west of the river.
The Zionist movement therefore waited for a more favourable political environment.
That opportunity emerged after the First World War, which ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the redrawing of the borders of the Levant.
British Promises and the Battle Over Borders
The contours of the new period began with correspondence between Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Makkah and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, during 1915 and 1916.
The correspondence formed the basis of British promises of Arab independence in exchange for Arab participation in the war.
In October 1915, McMahon acknowledged Britain’s acceptance in principle of an independent Arab state after the war.
The agreement excluded certain territories through vague geographic formulations without explicitly naming Palestine or Transjordan, an ambiguity that later became the subject of British-Arab disputes involving Prince Abdullah.
On 3 January 1919, Prince Faisal bin Hussein, representing the Arab movement, and Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, signed an agreement that in principle endorsed cooperation between the proposed Arab state and a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Faisal made implementation conditional on Britain fulfilling its promises of Arab independence.
Under the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement, both sides agreed on economic cooperation, encouragement of Jewish immigration into Palestine, joint development of the region commercially and politically, and protection of holy sites.
The agreement did not explicitly define the borders of Palestine or the status of Transjordan.
According to the memoirs of politician Awni Abd al-Hadi, Faisal’s advisers were shocked that he had signed a document for a foreigner in a language he did not understand.
Faisal defended the decision by saying that “the document included the demand for the independence of the Arab lands in Asia, beginning with a line running north from Alexandretta and Diyarbakir and reaching south to the Indian Ocean, with Palestine falling within these borders”.
The text of the agreement itself did not confirm this interpretation.
A month later, Zionist leaders used the agreement at the Paris Peace Conference as evidence before the American delegation that their plans for Palestine had received Arab approval.
They then presented the first official Zionist proposal for the future borders of Palestine at the Paris Peace Conference on 3 February 1919.
It called for the eastern frontier to extend alongside the Hejaz Railway as far as the Gulf of Aqaba.
Such a boundary would have given the proposed “national home” control over large areas of Transjordan, along with water sources, agricultural lands adjacent to the Jordan River and major transport routes.
At the same time, Arab territories formerly under Ottoman rule were granted the right to separate from the empire but were placed under British and French mandates supposedly to assist them towards “independence”.
Despite the map submitted in Paris, the boundaries of the Arab territories in Asia remained undefined.
This enabled the Zionist movement to emphasise natural frontiers and seek the inclusion of territory equivalent to 10 per cent of the land east of the Jordan River.
These demands remained without the approval of the major powers until the San Remo Conference in April 1920, which endorsed the Balfour Declaration and charged Britain with implementing it in Palestine “within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, Britain and France”.
While the possibility of incorporating Transjordan into the Jewish national home remained open, resistance movements in Syria and Lebanon and fears that they might spread east of the Jordan, particularly amid King Faisal’s support for rebels in Iraq and the Levant, pushed Britain into negotiations with Faisal in London in December 1920.
The aim was to stabilise the wider region.
During this period, the Zionist movement, through British High Commissioner for Palestine Herbert Samuel, attempted to persuade Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill to fully occupy Transjordan and apply there the same policies imposed in Palestine.
Samuel exceeded the authority given by the Foreign Office, travelling to Transjordan and meeting around 600 tribal leaders before declaring the territory part of Mandatory Palestine.
This prompted the foreign secretary to issue instructions preventing any administrative connection between Transjordan and Palestine, saying: “Mr H. Samuel wants Trans-Jordan open to the Jews and annexed to Palestine.”
The British position was not principally driven by fear of Jewish control. Rather, it reflected concern over expanding French influence at the expense of British interests.
On the basis of assurances offered by King Faisal, Britain pursued another path that took shape when negotiations shifted from Faisal to Prince Abdullah, who began direct talks with Churchill.
During those talks, Abdullah proposed that the best solution to regional problems would be a single government for Palestine and Transjordan under Arab leadership.
Churchill rejected the proposal on the grounds that his government was committed to fulfilling its promises to the Jews.
The talks, held in Jerusalem from 28 to 30 March 1921, resulted in the establishment of an emirate under Abdullah bin Hussein, the formation of a military force with British assistance to consolidate security, and the appointment of a permanent British representative whose advice would be sought.
Abdullah also pledged to prevent military operations from being launched from Transjordan towards Syria or Palestine.
Transjordan thereby achieved a degree of stability and began its path towards independence before Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
Following the talks, Churchill recognised Abdullah bin Hussein as Emir of Transjordan in March 1921 within an autonomous Arab administration supervised by Britain.
In 1922, he issued what became known as the Churchill White Paper, excluding Transjordan from the area designated for the Jewish national home and placing it under Abdullah’s authority.
According to Israeli researcher Yoav Alon in his book The Shaykh of Shaykhs: Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan, the Zionist response to the Churchill White Paper was for the Jewish Agency to seek the purchase of Jordanian land rather than wait for Britain to authorise settlement east of the Jordan.
In his account of Mithqal al-Fayiz, an influential tribal leader who possessed extensive lands, Alon writes that Britain’s exclusion of Transjordan from the Jewish national home led the Jewish Agency to attempt to exploit the emirate’s economic difficulties.
The effort centred on Mithqal himself, who was looking for a buyer for some of his lands while maintaining contacts with Jewish Agency representatives and engineers who surveyed his properties.
Details of those communications leaked to Palestinian newspapers, generating a public controversy that ultimately derailed the plan.
By the end of the 1920s, the boundaries of the Jewish national home had largely settled in the mainstream Zionist imagination on the western bank of the Jordan River.
This coincided with a series of meetings and understandings involving Prince Abdullah bin Hussein, who later became Jordan’s first king, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion.
Abdullah affirmed his acceptance of the Balfour Declaration and of the newly drawn division between the eastern and western banks.
His position, however, failed to convince every current within Zionism.
The changing maps and borders across different periods reveal that the central disagreement inside the Zionist movement concerned the feasibility and method of incorporating Transjordan.
Should it occur gradually or all at once?
The strategic importance of the area itself enjoyed much broader agreement.
The dispute over methods and timing would continue in different forms during subsequent decades.
Jordan: From Jabotinsky’s Dream to Ben-Gurion’s Pragmatism
Under Article Four of the British Mandate, the Jewish Agency established its headquarters in Palestine to prepare for a Jewish national home and operated as an unofficial Jewish government under the mandatory authorities.
This represented a major advance towards the “Zionist dream”.
The exclusion of Transjordan from the area designated for implementation of the Balfour Declaration, however, caused a deep split within the Zionist movement.
Supporters of the mandate believed it offered an opportunity to obtain Prince Abdullah’s recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine in exchange for abandoning Zionist settlement claims east of the Jordan.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, by contrast, led the current that rejected any such compromise and demanded a Jewish homeland covering both Palestine and Transjordan, by force if necessary.
Jabotinsky’s ambitions emerged before the independence of the Emirate of Transjordan.
His thinking was influenced by his participation in the 1918 occupation of parts of the area while serving with the 38th Battalion of the Jewish Legion.
He later expressed these ambitions in a series of articles published in Haaretz throughout 1920.
This experience contributed to Jabotinsky’s rejection of the 1922 Churchill White Paper.
He argued that Jews had settled east of the Jordan even before Palestine and that the region therefore formed an inseparable part of the “Land of Israel”.
From this rejection emerged a new Zionist movement known as Revisionist Zionism.
Its program placed at its centre the objective of “creating a Hebrew majority in the Land of Israel on both banks of the Jordan River”.
The movement also adopted the slogan: “The Jordan has two banks, this one is ours and the other one too”, which later became an anthem of the far-right Betar movement.
Revisionist activity intensified despite Britain’s prohibition on Zionist settlement east of the Jordan.
Jabotinsky attempted to persuade members of the Zionist National Council to demand that the mandatory government create a dedicated Jewish military force attached to British units stationed in Transjordan.
The objective was to establish a Zionist presence there in military form first, until circumstances allowed it to be converted into other forms.
Jabotinsky’s enthusiasm for settlement in Transjordan led him to consider it more suitable than Palestine itself.
He relied on Herbert Samuel’s description of Jordan as “politically empty”, its large territory and relatively small population compared with Palestine.
He also believed that Arab nationalist sentiment among its inhabitants was, in his assessment, weaker than among Palestinian Arabs.
Jabotinsky further argued that the smaller number of Islamic holy sites in Transjordan would make settlement easier than in Palestine, where shrines and religious sites were widespread, allowing the territory to absorb greater numbers of Jewish settlers.
He wrote that “the Land of Israel is the land in which the Jordan River lies in the middle, not on its border”.
Transjordan therefore remained present in Betar songs, including the line: “If I forget you, O Transjordan, may my right hand forget me.”
The same conception appeared in the emblem of the Irgun organisation, which displayed a map encompassing Palestine and Jordan beneath a hand holding a rifle and the slogan “Only thus”.
It also extended into the activities of the Jewish State Party, which demanded that Transjordan be returned to Palestine on the grounds that the two banks constituted “one geographic, historical and economic unit”.
The Revisionist movement consequently rejected Britain’s declaration of Transjordan’s independence in 1946 under Prince Abdullah bin Hussein, maintaining that the territory remained part of the Jewish national home.
The movement formed an alliance with Mizrachi and the General Zionists, which declared its absolute rejection of “tearing Transjordan from the body of Palestine, to which it is connected by historical, geographic and economic ties”.
The alliance argued that “the establishment of an independent state in Jordan without the consent of the Jewish people constitutes a violation of international law”.
In practice, Britain’s declaration of Jordanian independence on 25 May 1946 and the installation of Abdullah I as king also benefited the Zionist movement.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Abdullah was the only Arab ruler who accepted the 1947 United Nations partition resolution proposing the establishment of one Jewish and one Arab state in Palestine.
This was part of the pragmatic benefit Ben-Gurion saw in accepting the mandate framework and separating Transjordan from Palestine.
His position intersected with other strategies, including land purchases for settlement east of the Jordan under commercial and economic development projects, and later the idea of using the territory as a primary destination for the expulsion of Palestinians.
In his diaries, Ben-Gurion wrote of the necessity of using force to push the Arabs “towards the east”.
Under the first approach, the Jewish Agency began investing in Transjordan through the Ghor al-Kabd project in 1933.
It leased land in the area for 33 years, renewable twice, for £2,000 annually, with the stated purpose of agricultural development and local employment.
The agreement was to enter into force after the removal of “political difficulties”, a phrase referring to popular resistance and Jordanian rejection of the project.
A second project sought Jewish settlement in Ghor al-Safi, south-east of the Dead Sea, in 1934, linked to an attempt to obtain a concession for potash extraction.
Two years later, the plan was connected to Pinhas Rutenberg’s electricity generation project and was regarded as a forward base for Jewish entry into Transjordan.
The settlement design distributed populations suspiciously along both sides of the Zarqa River valley, with Arabs concentrated on its southern bank and Jews in the area opposite the Beisan Valley and Baqura.
British administration policy and unrest surrounding the electricity company project prevented the plan from developing into direct settlement.
Ben-Gurion then moved increasingly towards the idea of Jordan as an “alternative homeland” following the removal of Palestinians.
According to Palestinian historian Nur Masalha in his study The Zionist Conception of Transfer, the transfer of Palestinians to Transjordan was central to the settlement thinking of several Zionist founding figures.
The concept envisioned a gradual process beginning with pressure on Palestinians to move east of the Jordan, followed by the seizure and consolidation of control over all Palestinian land, and eventually expansion towards the eastern bank accompanied by the removal of its inhabitants further into the Arab world.
An early expression of this plan emerged in 1930 during private talks with Arab officials following the 1929 Buraq uprising and the publication of the Shaw Commission report, which found that expanding Jewish settlement was dispossessing Arabs of their lands and livelihoods.
The Zionist side subsequently proposed offering a £1 million Palestinian loan to the Colonial Office to finance the transfer of Palestinian peasants into Abdullah’s Emirate of Transjordan.
The proposal returned in 1937 during the Peel Commission.
Moshe Sharett, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann supported expanding the plan to encompass all Palestinians.
In the same year, Ben-Gurion wrote to his son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places, and if we have to use force, not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan of their property, but in order to guarantee our right to settle in these places.”
According to Masalha, 12 Zionist transfer plans were formulated and presented between 1937 and 1948, with Transjordan as their principal destination.
Two rejected transferring Palestinians either to the Arab section of Palestine or to Transjordan precisely because both areas fell within Zionist territorial ambitions.
This approach continued despite Jordan’s official position towards partition and subsequent developments on the ground.
According to Ahron Bregman in his 2003 book A History of Israel, Jordan took a notable position when the Jewish state was declared in 1948.
Its forces crossed the Jordan River into the area of Palestine allocated to the Arabs by the UN partition plan.
Bregman argues that the move served as cover for an understanding between King Abdullah and the Zionist leadership to divide Palestine between them.
According to the author, Jerusalem posed the main difficulty because the partition plan placed it outside both Arab and Jewish sovereignty.
Both sides’ insistence on controlling it led to clashes between Jordanian and Israeli forces, ending with Jordanian control of the Old City and Jewish Quarter, the detention of men, and the expulsion of women and children into western Jerusalem.
Following the 1948 war, as Jordanian authority extended into the West Bank in preparation for formal annexation, the kingdom came to encompass both the eastern and western banks of the Jordan River.
In 1949, the name “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” replaced “Transjordan”, and the shorter name “Jordan” became common thereafter.
Jordan as an Alternative Homeland for Palestinians
According to researcher Sami Abu Jalloum, satisfaction with Jordan’s official position accepting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine remained confined to particular wings within Zionism.
In a “victory speech” following the 1948 war, Menachem Begin addressed Zionist crowds in Jerusalem, saying: “We have an opportunity to reach the Jordan River and beyond. We are facing illiterates who do not know the reasons that made them fight.”
He also demanded the annexation of eastern Jerusalem to the Jewish state.
This repeated an earlier position he presented before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, when he called for expansion across both banks of the river.
“Our country is very small,” he said, “but both banks of the Jordan may provide sufficient space for millions of Jews who wish to immigrate now and those who will come in the future.”
He also argued that Jordanian independence could not guarantee “Hebrew independence in the Land of Israel”.
The immediate priority at that stage became control of the West Bank, the transfer of its inhabitants eastwards and seizure of the Jordan River’s water sources.
These objectives aligned with a succession of proposals, beginning with the Sharett Plan of 1956, which sought to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict through reciprocal adjustments to armistice lines in exchange for resettling Palestinians in Arab states and involving them in the use of Jordan and Yarmouk River waters.
The Dayan Plan followed in 1959, proposing a confederation with Jordan that would secure control over Jerusalem and allow a future shift in the demographic balance through growth of the Jewish population.
This approach continued until the Arab defeat in 1967.
After that, Zionist projects shifted from negotiations over land and water towards the displacement of Palestinians and restriction of their demographic growth, alongside rejection of fixed and permanent borders.
This was reflected in Yitzhak Rabin’s 1974 remarks calling for conditions that would encourage Palestinians to “voluntarily” migrate from the Gaza Strip and West Bank to Jordan over a period of 10 to 20 years.
Ariel Sharon later became the leading advocate of the concept after establishing the Likud bloc.
He promoted the idea that “Jordan is the place where Palestinians can express their national aspirations”.
This was regarded as the first integrated Israeli political, demographic and security project concerning Jordan, based on turning the kingdom into a Palestinian-majority state while the land west of the river became part of the “complete Land of Israel”.
Sharon’s formula later became known politically as “Jordan is Palestine”.
He stated it openly in a 1981 interview: “I believe the starting point for a solution is the establishment of a Palestinian state in that part of Palestine that was separated from what became Israel in 1922 and is now known as Jordan. The only foreigners there are the members of the Hashemite family in whose name King Hussein rules, and I do not care who administers Jordan.”
Sharon repeated the idea the following year in an interview with journalist Oriana Fallaci.
Asked about denying Palestinians their national rights, he replied: “They get a homeland; it is Palestine called Jordan. The Palestinian question has puzzled me for 12 years, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Jordan is the only solution. What matters to me is that Palestine already exists, so there is no need to create another one.”
The view of Jordan as an alternative homeland for Palestinians was also echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who declared: “There are no Palestinians, only Jordanians.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir similarly backed Sharon’s position in 1983, saying: “The establishment of a second Palestinian state west of the river is a recipe for chaos.”
With the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, and under Arab pressure supportive of Yasser Arafat, King Hussein moved quickly to announce Jordan’s legal and administrative disengagement from the West Bank in 1988 and transferred Palestinian representation to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The move was presented as a response to the broader Arab position.
At the same time, it had a pre-emptive dimension, removing the legal and historical argument used by proponents of “Jordan is Palestine” and opening the way for a two-state solution rather than absorbing Palestinians into Jordan.
Two years later, Arab peace initiatives with Israel began, while Israeli positions remained largely unchanged.
Shamir continued to hold to the idea that “Jordan is Palestine” following a peace initiative launched by King Hussein, although he avoided stating it openly so as not to antagonise the king or intensify his concerns.
This illustrates how the concept functioned tactically, being publicly expressed or concealed according to diplomatic circumstances rather than maintained as an openly declared policy at all times.
Wadi Araba and the Reinvention of Strategic Depth
This diplomatic balancing continued even after the 1994 Wadi Araba Treaty formally ended the state of war between Jordan and Israel.
Paradoxically, the treaty reformulated the logic of “strategic depth” in diplomatic form.
Rabin continued to support creating conditions for Palestinian migration and retaining control of the eastern frontier on the basis that it represented a “natural and defensible border”.
In the water sector, the treaty consolidated Israeli interests in Jordanian water through its second annex on water arrangements, the first detailed legal framework governing the water relationship between Jordan and Israel.
The annex permitted Israel to pump 12 million cubic metres from the Yarmouk River during summer and 13 million during winter, with Jordan receiving the remaining flow.
Jordan also agreed to allow Israel to pump an additional 20 million cubic metres in winter in exchange for summer transfers to Jordan from the Jordan River.
The annex further provided Jordan with 10 million cubic metres of desalinated water annually, reinforcing Israeli control over Jordan’s water sources.
That control had effectively begun with operation of Israel’s National Water Carrier in 1964 and later extended into the Yarmouk basin and the diversion of its waters.
The Wadi Araba Treaty defined Jordan’s shares of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers while leaving Israel with effective control over quantities and flow.
The consequences of this arrangement began to appear a decade after the treaty was signed.
Alongside these water ambitions, Israeli efforts to portray Jordan as “Palestine” continued.
In April 2001, Ariel Sharon again declared: “I have never believed there should be two Palestinian states. The one thing that has never changed in my worldview is that Jordan is Palestine.”
In 2012, Knesset member Aryeh Eldad, one of the leading figures of Israel’s nationalist right, revived the proposal in political and legal terms, calling for “the establishment of the State of Palestine on the eastern bank of the Jordan River”.
His proposal came amid the Arab Spring and Israeli assessments of the stability of neighbouring monarchies, and was widely rejected by Palestinians and Jordanians.
Bezalel Smotrich, from a family associated with the Irgun and one of the leading figures of Israel’s settler far right, revived the concept again in 2017 through a project titled the “Decisive Plan”.
Smotrich rejected the two-state solution and offered Palestinians three options: voluntary emigration by Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and areas inside Israel beyond what he called the “complete Land of Israel”; residence under Israeli sovereignty without collective national rights; or a security confrontation targeting those he described as “terrorists”.
The idea re-emerged in 2019 within the American and regional proposal for resolving the Palestinian question known as the “Deal of the Century”.
The plan undermined the two-state framework and Palestinian political rights in territories occupied in 1967, generating Jordanian fears that the kingdom could effectively be pushed towards the “alternative homeland” scenario.
King Abdullah II responded firmly, stating that “Jerusalem and the future of Palestine are a red line for Jordan” and that “the kingdom’s position on the alternative homeland and resettlement is fixed and will not change”.
At the same time, reports continued to circulate about confederal or administrative arrangements that would hollow out an independent Palestinian state in favour of a formula incorporating Jordan, particularly after the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020.
Jordan on the Front Line: From the Abraham Accords to 7 October
By the end of 2020, the UAE and Bahrain had signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, followed by Sudan and Morocco, as part of a broad regional normalisation campaign sponsored by the first Trump administration.
This wave pushed the earlier experiences of “cold peace” with Egypt and Jordan into the background.
Jordan had normalised relations with Israel 26 years earlier through the Wadi Araba Treaty, only to find itself marginalised as states pursuing “warm normalisation” moved to the centre of the regional agenda.
Jordan continued implementing its treaty obligations, most notably a 15-year gas import agreement signed in 2016 and arrangements to receive water allocations.
At the same time, it insisted on reclaiming the Baqura and Ghumar areas after Israel’s legal usufruct rights expired.
The momentum behind Abraham Accords normalisation moved the Israeli right away from Jordan, at least diplomatically.
Research centres, however, continued urging decision-makers to keep the kingdom within the normalisation architecture because of its role in regional security and economic networks and its central position in the Palestinian question.
Jordan was viewed as essential to the success of any new regional order and as a potential link between Israel and the Gulf, and eventually between Iraq and Arab ports.
Israeli studies therefore connected Jordan to electricity interconnection projects, energy routes, railways and commercial corridors emerging under the Abraham Accords and argued that the kingdom’s stability was essential to their sustainability.
The actual political trajectory moved differently.
Jordan was concerned by proposals to transfer custodianship over holy sites in East Jerusalem, efforts to liquidate the refugee issue and the possibility that Israel might reverse its decision to suspend annexation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.
It therefore kept its distance from the accords and their participants.
When Israel hosted the Negev Summit in 2022 with the foreign ministers of Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, Jordan declined to send its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi.
The Abraham Accords directly affect Jordanian stability because they create separate bilateral relationships between individual Arab states and Israel without producing meaningful progress on the Palestinian front.
They leave millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan without resolution and ignore the particular nature of the Jordanian-Israeli relationship, which differs fundamentally from Israel’s relations with Arab countries not connected to Palestine geographically, socially, economically and politically to the same degree.
The Israeli right exploited this gap to intensify expansionist rhetoric towards Jordan at the beginning of 2023.
Smotrich, by then finance minister, delivered a speech to pro-Zionist activists in Paris while standing behind a podium displaying the Irgun emblem and a map incorporating Palestine and Jordan.
“There is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” he said.
After 7 October: Jordan as an Eastern Security Frontier
This rhetoric escalated after 7 October 2023 under the justification of security and fears of another “flood” coming from the east.
What Israeli discourse termed threats from the “eastern front” included arms smuggling, Iranian intervention and possible infiltration.
Measures of territorial control expanded to include construction of a wall along the Jordanian border, greater powers for the military and settlers, and confiscation of large areas of Palestinian land reclassified as “state land”.
Within this framework, Jordan increasingly appeared as both strategic depth and a potential destination for the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank, serving Smotrich’s project to impose full Israeli sovereignty west of the river while reducing the Palestinian population and geographic presence as far as possible.
Jordan was also expected to help prevent weapons from reaching the West Bank and stop the development of a security vacuum extending from Syria and Iraq through Jordan’s northern frontier towards Israel.
The Jordan Valley returned to the centre of Israeli security discourse as a defensive frontier that Israel should retain under military control.
At the same time, Jordanian agricultural areas in the valley were subjected to wastewater flows, recurring fires and pollution caused by water and waste discharged from the Israeli side towards Jordanian territory.
Israel also established more than 18 projects diverting Jordan River water towards agricultural projects in the Negev desert.
After approximately 1,000 dunams of agricultural land in the Jordan Valley along the border with occupied Palestine were burned, Mahmoud al-Oran, secretary-general of the Jordanian Farmers Union, called on the Jordanian government to approach international courts and bring cases against the occupation.
Jordan thus found itself alternately treated as a buffer state, a dumping ground for occupation waste, and, during Israeli-Iranian escalation between 2024 and 2026, a first line of air defence and an important component of the Israeli security architecture.
This became one of the principal conclusions drawn by Israeli research centres from the first Israeli-Iranian confrontation.
They argued that continued military coordination with Jordan constituted a strategic asset that should be preserved despite unprecedented political tensions between the leaderships of the two countries.
According to these centres, the kingdom functioned as an early warning and air-defence network protecting Israeli airspace from Iranian missiles and drones.
Jordan officially maintained that it was defending its own airspace and not Israel.
Israeli research centres described this position as “positive neutrality”.
The developments coincided with the fall of the Assad government in Syria and Jordan’s relationship with the new authorities there.
The kingdom consequently became an intermediary whose security interests overlapped with Israel’s approach to the Syrian arena.
In practice, efforts by Damascus to reassure Jordan and emphasise the importance of its stability also served Israeli interests.
Even in emerging areas of Jordanian-Syrian cooperation, such as gas, energy and transport, Israeli analyses increasingly treated Jordan as a partner in any new economic or security arrangements in the Levant.
Jordan became a junction at which issues involving Syria, Gaza, the West Bank and Iran converged.
Its strategic importance consequently increased, while gas and water agreements with Israel acquired a security dimension linking Jordan’s economic stability to the stability of Israel’s eastern frontier.
Regional connectivity projects involving railways, transport routes and economic corridors also entered discussions over Jordan’s strategic value.
These included the India-UAE-Israel-Europe corridor and alternative routes that gained prominence after disruption in the Red Sea and Houthi attacks.
Jordan came to be seen as the safest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.
At the same time, the war on Gaza intensified political tensions.
Popular demonstrations spread inside Jordan, while individual operations were launched from its territory.
These developments generated concerns over the future of the peace treaty and security coordination, but did not alter the rhetoric of Israel’s political right, including official statements.
“Greater Israel” Returns to Official Discourse
In January 2025, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Arabic-language account published material containing a map presented as representing “historic Israel”.
The map extended into parts of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and triggered broad Jordanian and Arab condemnation.
Months later, in August, Netanyahu was asked during an interview with i24NEWS about the idea of “Greater Israel”, while the interviewer held an amulet depicting a map of the “Promised Land”.
Netanyahu replied that he felt “very” connected to the idea and added that he saw himself as carrying out a “historic and spiritual mission”.
Months earlier, Smotrich was quoted during a documentary television interview as saying that Jerusalem’s future involved “expanding towards Damascus”.
He presented a vision encompassing Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
This rhetoric extended to the Zionist-leaning US ambassador Mike Huckabee, who, during an interview with broadcaster Tucker Carlson, expressed no objection to Israeli control over Arab territory extending from the Nile to the Euphrates.
“It’s fine if they take it all,” he said.
During the same period, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declared support for anything that gave Jews a large territory, a strong state and a safe refuge, adding that “the borders of the Land of Israel are the borders of the Bible”.
Arab, Muslim and regional states condemned statements by Netanyahu, Smotrich and Huckabee.
Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani described Netanyahu’s remarks as “a blatant provocation that escalates regional tensions and threatens the sovereignty of states”.
Despite the condemnations, the statements continued to resonate strongly in Jordanian and broader Arab public consciousness.
A Last Attempt in the Final Minutes
Shortly after Netanyahu’s remarks, Jordan appeared to experience genuine concern, particularly as support for the Israeli far right grew and American rhetoric increasingly aligned with it.
The kingdom restored compulsory military service for the first time in more than three decades.
Around 6,000 young men were selected by lottery to serve for one year in a program combining military training with national education.
Observers linked the decision to growing fears of Israeli expansionism.
This was almost the only substantial Jordanian countermeasure.
Cooperation between the two sides continued even at the height of hostile rhetoric.
Ariel Kahana, political analyst for Israel Hayom, consequently argued that claims of deteriorating relations exaggerated the situation and ignored the “half-full glass” represented by strategic interests that made the relationship between the two countries difficult to destabilise.
According to Kahana, Israel provides Jordan with strategic backing that helps it confront challenges, supports the survival of the Hashemite kingdom, effectively rejects the slogan “Jordan is Palestine”, acknowledges Jordan’s position in Jerusalem through Hashemite custodianship, sells the kingdom gas, supplies around 10 per cent of its water needs, and enables European goods to reach Jordan through Haifa port and border crossings.
Jordan, in return, plays a role in calming Palestinians at Al-Aqsa Mosque and across the wider region and provides Israel with “strategic depth”, which Kahana considers its most important role.
Ultimately, Jordan finds itself, as a result of overlapping pressures, trapped within a Zionist imagination repeatedly drawn towards expansion and domination.
It is constrained by geography, a struggling economy, a demographic structure in which Palestinians form a major component, and the Jordan River, whose waters remain the subject of Israeli ambitions.
It is also pressured by its position between Arab states pursuing warm normalisation and an Israeli state that seeks to domesticate its strategic role, alongside a history repeatedly repurposed by Zionist thought and a future in which ambitions appear to extend beyond normalisation.
Throughout all of these transformations, Jordan has remained present in Zionist conceptions: as an extension of the “Promised Land”, a field for settlement, an alternative Palestinian homeland, strategic depth, a security partner, an economic junction, or a first line of defence against crises stretching from Iran to Iraq and Syria.
Its functions have changed, its roles have shifted and ambitions towards it have evolved from decade to decade.
Yet within Israeli official, religious and popular discourse, Jordan has remained the “absent presence”, invoked whenever the Zionist imagination seeks new boundaries for expansion and extremism, and pushed into the background whenever security, economic or political necessities impose different priorities.
