Why West Bank annexation is a direct threat to Jordan

When Israel’s security Cabinet voted last week to extend Israeli control over areas under Palestinian administration, Amman heard more than a policy announcement — it heard an existential threat. For Jordan’s King Abdullah, the move crossed what he has called his “red lines”: no displacement of Palestinians, no alternative homeland, no liquidation of the Palestinian cause. All three are now in jeopardy, and with them, Jordan’s stability.
Jordan was quick to condemn the decision, describing the measures as “illegal” and “aimed at entrenching settlements and imposing Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.” The Palestinian Authority, Arab and Muslim countries, as well as the EU and UN, joined in the condemnation.
In a lukewarm reaction, US President Donald Trump reiterated his objection to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, but stopped short of denouncing the measures or calling on Israel to rescind them. To underscore the unambiguous meaning of the measures, Israel’s Energy Minister Eli Cohen told Israeli radio that the steps amounted to implementing “de facto sovereignty,” adding that they “actually establish a fact on the ground that there will not be a Palestinian state.”
“We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a joint statement with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
But aside from the terminal blow that the PA has received, effectively annulling the Oslo Accords and all the agreements that followed with Israel, the Israeli decision reverberated in Amman, raising fears that King Abdullah’s “red lines” concerning the Palestinian issue have been crossed.
As recently as February last year, the Jordanian monarch repeated what has been dubbed the three royal nonnegotiable nos. The three red lines are interconnected. While the current Israeli far-right government has been implementing measures to speed up the colonization of West Bank territory, this latest decision is now seen as the most critical Israeli claim to the West Bank since the 1967 war.
Among the most serious steps that Israel has taken is to make land records in the West Bank public and to allow non-Arab individuals to directly buy land from Palestinian owners. The measures include widening the Israeli civil administration’s mandate to extend to areas directly under the sole control of the PA, especially the so-called Area A — the urban Palestinian centers that were supposed to remain under full Palestinian civil and security control under the Oslo Accords.
These measures are viewed in Jordan as accelerating the elimination of any Palestinian state by sealing the fate of the Oslo Accords, bringing down the PA, and extending Israeli law to the occupied West Bank — that is, sovereignty through annexation.
By doing so, Israel appears to have achieved a major geopolitical goal: to have legal control over the land, from its point of view. Its measures delink the territory, which is slated for the establishment of a future Palestinian state, from the people. That leaves the demographic issue: the fate of 3 million stateless Palestinians who will soon be living on Israeli land. 

Israeli army raids have crippled the Palestinian economy.

Osama Al-Sharif

The recent Israeli measures come as the culmination of a series of radical steps that Israel has taken in the past two years. These include demolishing major parts of Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and rendering over 40,000 Palestinians homeless, extending its full control over Area C, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank, and removing its Palestinian inhabitants. Israel has also set up over 1,000 barricades all over the West Bank, cutting off towns and villages, in addition to sanctioning tens of so-called illegal outposts as full-fledged settlements.
Daily Israeli army raids of most West Bank villages and cities have crippled the Palestinian economy. The PA is almost bankrupt. Israel has looked the other way as armed Israeli settlers waged a wave of terror against Palestinians in their villages and fields. These collective measures aim at pushing Palestinians to despair so that they choose to leave, and the only destination available to them is Jordan.
In Amman, the Israeli scheme is being read loud and clear. The collapse of the two-state solution awakens existential fears of the Likud’s decades-old claim that Jordan is Palestine.
There are at least tens of thousands of West Bankers who hold Jordanian nationality or have temporary Jordanian passports. Since the fall of the West Bank, which was part of Jordan, Amman kept the bridges over the River Jordan open. Jordan maintained a claim to the West Bank until 1974, when the Arab League recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. It was only in 1988 that King Hussein decided to disengage legally and administratively from the West Bank, though that decision was never ratified by parliament.
One strategic reason for Jordan to sign a peace treaty with Israel was to demarcate the borders with Israel and the Palestinian territories and bury any notion of the so-called “alternative homeland.” King Abdullah has hinted on a number of occasions that Jordan may suspend that treaty if Israel annexes the West Bank, especially the Jordan Valley.
By separating land rights from the people who inhabit it, Israel’s far-right aims to expel Palestinians from the West Bank through a combination of economic strangulation, terror campaigns, home demolitions, and mass land confiscation or purchase. Israel has demonized UNRWA and finally banned it from providing its essential services in the occupied territories as it sought to cancel refugee status and, through it, the right of return under UN resolutions.
Jordan is home to the largest number of Palestinian refugees outside the occupied territories, and it has campaigned to keep the UN agency alive and funded. The possible collapse of UNRWA represents another step in Israel’s effort to erase the Palestinian national identity and force host countries to resettle Palestinian refugees.
During Trump’s first term of office, the State Department replaced references to the occupied Palestinian territory with the disputed territory. Now Israel has taken that extra step of claiming full sovereignty over the West Bank. That is de facto annexation, even if it is not declared through an official announcement.
There have been some outrageous Israeli suggestions regarding the fate of West Bank Palestinians. Katz has historically supported the idea that Jordan is the appropriate national home for Palestinians, a view often termed the “Jordanian option” in Israeli right-wing discourse, aiming to relieve Israel of responsibility for the Palestinian population.
Another interim proposal suggests that Jordan reclaims its administrative role over Palestinian population centers in the West Bank until a more permanent solution is found. Such a role suggests that Jordan would replace a defunct PA.
King Abdullah and the Jordanians are united in rejecting such proposals. The king’s red lines should be taken seriously by Israel. Unlike in any other country, the annexation of the West Bank poses a major national security threat to Jordan — one that King Abdullah is prepared to escalate tensions to prevent.
The stakes could not be higher. If Israel proceeds with full annexation, Jordan may find itself, at a future stage, forced to choose between accepting millions of displaced Palestinians or suspending its peace treaty with Israel — a move that would fundamentally reshape the regional order. For now, Amman is watching, waiting, and warning that its patience has limits.

• Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman.
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