Israel annexation plan: Jordan's existential threat (original) (raw)
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The Danger to Jordan of a Palestinian State
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands to lose more than any other party from the establishment of a State of Palestine. While the potential dangers and complications for Israel of such a state could be significant, Jordan would face threats to both its social stability and its foundational idea: that it governs the Arab population on both banks of its eponymous river. In addition to the substantial political and security difficulties such a state would create for Jordan, it could also jeopardize its continued viability by shifting the locus of political leadership for a majority of Jordanians away from Amman and towards Ramallah.
Israel’s spatial and a-spatial strategy of dispossessing the Jordan Valley’s Palestinian Inhabitants
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The Jordan Valley's territorial extent is defined for this study as an elongated stretch of border area, located west of Jordan's boundary with the West Bank, Palestine. This region along with the West Bank was conquered by the Israeli Army during the June 1967 War and has been held by Israel since. Almost 88% of its 200,000 Palestinian population then living in the region were expelled and turned overnight into refugees in Jordan and elsewhere. In the subsequent 56 years since, the region, declared by Israel as a highly militarized zone, has often been discursively publicized as the front line of Israel's eastern defense. This paper seeks to refute such a notion that indirectly gave Israel justification to subject the remaining Palestinian inhabitants residing there (currently numbering ca. 60,000) to a harsh discriminatory regimen of surveillance and control under military occupation. At the same time, the Israeli government has over decades privileged the ca. 10,000 incoming Jewish settlers, now living in some 30 Israeli Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley. Employing a grounded theory approach in our study provided an opportunity for the local Palestinians to have their voices heard, shedding needed analytical light on their difficult situation on the ground.
Jordan: The Death of Normalization with Israel
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Many would count Jordanian-Israeli normalization among the victims of the new intifada. Three factors, however, had brought about the death of normalization in Jordan well before October 2000: Israeli intransigence, a regime crackdown on the opposition, and the failure of economic benefits to buy popular support. King Abdullah has inherited a situation where he has turned towards the US rather than Israel as his major foreign policy partner.
Jordan and Palestine: Union (1950) and Secession (1988)
Jure Vidmar and Lea Raible (eds.), Research Handbook on Secession (Edward Elgar, forthcoming), 2019
This chapter revisits the decision by King Hussein of Jordan in 1988 to recognise the right of the Palestinian people to secede from Jordan to establish an independent state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Surprisingly, international legal scholarship on the separation of the West Bank from Jordan, and on the relationship between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from 1967 to 1988 is slim. So is the state of scholarship on the Act of Union of 1950 that brought Jordan and Palestine together from 1950-1988. It is argued that the recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to establish a state separately from Jordan in 1988 is an important contribution to the debate as to whether a Palestinian state has been established in the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.
A raft of legislative proposals introduced in the Knesset over the last several years has raised the specter of Israeli annexation of additional West Bank territory. One bill would provide for nearly automatic application of new Knesset legislation to Israelis residing in the West Bank. 1 A second would authorize the expropriation under certain circumstances of privately-owned Palestinian land for incorporation into Israeli settlements, extending the Knesset's reach to the regulation of West Bank land use by non-Israelis. 2 A third, entitled the "Maale Adumim Annexation Law," provides for the full application of Israeli law in Israel's largest West Bank settlement, as well as in an adjacent twelve square kilometer area called the "E1 Zone," 3 one of the few remaining land reserves available for the development of Palestinian East Jerusalem. Whether these proposals will become law, and survive constitutional challenges, is far from assured. Whatever their fate, however, their advocates have expressed determination to press ahead with a legislative agenda focused on incremental annexation of West Bank territory. As former Jewish Home Member of Knesset Orit Struk explained in 2014, the aim is "the application of Israeli sovereignty gradually over the areas of settlement in Judea and Samaria, … in keeping with the idea that the entire process of Zionism is a gradual process." 4 This incremental approach presents international lawyers with difficult legal and strategic questions. How should a process of "creeping" annexation-in which a putative acquisition of territory is undertaken not in one fell swoop, but gradually through a pattern of oblique and sometimes informal measures-be characterized under international law? Does the sum of its parts rise beyond a violation of the jus in bello to contravene the jus ad bellum? What kinds of responses should it elicit from the international community? As we mark a half century of Israeli occupation and settlement in the West Bank, I submit that Israel's annexation of parts of the West Bank is not merely a specter or an implausible scheme by fringe elements on the far right of Israel's political spectrum. It is already reality-in fact if not, fully, in law-and it should be treated accordingly by the international community. This essay begins by exploring the concept of de facto annexation in international law. I then consider the extent to which it is an appropriate way to characterize Israel's presence in the West Bank and outline its implications with respect to third state responsibility.
Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity
Journal of Palestine Studies, 1995
Since the annexation of the West Bank in 1950, the population of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has been composed of two major communal groups: Transjordanians and Palestinians. Tensions between the two, a persistent if suppressed feature of domestic politics, were finally allowed more open expression in 1989, as the country embarked on a path of political liberalization. Despite the long history of the troubled relationship, however, Palestinian-Transjordanian tensions remain largely unexplored,' except, to a limited extent, as a direct function of PLO-Jordanian relations. The interaction of both internal and external factors in sustaining or exacerbating intercommunal tensions becomes particularly apparent when examining the recent conjunction of three processes: economic reform, political liberalization, and peacemaking. The first two, by promising to alter the domestic balance of political and economic power, portend a change both in relations among citizens and between Laurie A.
Atlas of Jordan - History, Territory and Society
This chapter of the Atlas of Jordan focuses on the relations between Jordan and Palestine, and more particularly on the spatial, socioeconomic and political impacts of the annexation of the West Bank (formerly Central and North Palestine) by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950 and of the severance of all administrative and legal links between Jordan and the West Bank in 1988. It also addresses the role of UNRWA in its management of the Palestine refugees. The chapter is equipped with yet unpublished maps and relevant statistical tables
From Jerusalem to the Rest of the West Bank: Israel's Strategies of Annexation
Review of Middle East Studies
Since 1967, despite international legal restrictions, Israel has sought to annex Eastern Jerusalem. Fifty-one years later, it publicly declared in its Nation State Law: “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” In the West Bank, Israel initiated on the ground changes that furthered annexation without formally declaring any part of it as annexed. For decades, Al-Haq has documented the gradual encroachment of occupation by successive Israeli administrations. And yet the Palestinian leadership failed to successfully utilize the law to support its case. Nor could the 190 states, parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, be convinced to enforce the provision in the Convention which bids the High Contracting Parties to “ensure respect for the present convention in all circumstances.” During the Oslo negotiations, Israel succeeded in leaving Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements outside of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Given these patterns across nearly a h...