Jordan’s red line: Annexation as a harbinger of Palestinian displacement

Jordan’s mounting fears about the future of the West Bank and its Palestinian residents are no longer discussed only in think tanks and off-the-record briefings. The specter of Israeli annexation and the mass transfer of West Bank Palestinians to Jordan is being discussed by newspaper columnists, as well as security and foreign policy establishments.

The question is no longer whether Israel is seeking de facto annexation, but how far Amman is willing to go to stop it — and at what cost.

Since the Hamas-led attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the wars that followed — in Gaza, then Lebanon, then Iran — Israel has used international distraction as cover to accelerate the pace of its land grab and the internal displacement of Palestinians.

The far-right Israeli government has shifted gears toward de facto annexation by applying Israeli law over the West Bank, undercutting the Palestinian Authority, accelerating the building of settlements, and retroactively legalizing the settler outposts that have sporadically appeared.

In recent months, Israeli soldiers have looked on as illegal settlers wage an unprecedented wave of terror in towns and villages, killing and injuring Palestinians, destroying crops, stealing cattle, and torching property.

The result is the slow displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities from their land, which is then taken by settlers for future settlements.

Jordan has consistently condemned Israel’s actions in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Many other countries have done the same. But Israeli authorities have brushed aside the criticisms and, as the country enters election mode, the government has stepped up its policies of land expropriation and the demolition of Palestinian homes and businesses, especially in refugee camps, while allowing the settlers to go on the rampage without any accountability.

Jordanian and Palestinian officials have explicitly accused Israel of exploiting regional tensions, and the preoccupation of the international community, to impose new facts on the ground.

Israel is believed to be in a race against time to create an irreversible, de facto annexation before the Palestine question can be bumped back to the top of the world’s political agenda. The fact that Israel has a sympathetic administration in Washington, despite President Donald Trump’s repeatedly stated opposition to annexation, has emboldened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist Cabinet members.

For Jordan, annexation of the West Bank would almost certainly turn existential fears into reality by reducing the Palestinian issue to one of demographics.

Of the approximately 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, thousands are believed to hold Jordanian identity papers, or even citizenship, a legacy of the country’s historic ties to the territory before its decision in 1988 to administratively and legally disengage.

Jordan has managed some impossible balancing acts in the past.

Osama Al-Sharif

Jordan has endured the price of Israel’s usurpation of Palestine over many decades; waves of refugees in 1948 and 1967 were absorbed, upsetting the country’s delicate demographic balance.

Where the West Bank is concerned, Israel wants to export the cost of its occupation to its neighbors, particularly Jordan. This is not a hypothetical situation; as thousands of West Bankers already hold Jordanian papers, the country would be the default destination should a population transfer take place.

Jordan has already been strained by decades of hosting Palestinian refugees, whose right to return Amman defends fiercely. Jordanian officials know their country could not absorb a potential mass exodus from the West Bank without igniting a domestic crisis over the demographic balance, and threatening its national identity.

Any suggestion of a population transfer, voluntary or forced, would be read domestically as the death of hopes for Palestinian statehood, and of Jordan’s own role as custodian in Jerusalem.

But more importantly, it would turn the Palestinian issue into a Jordanian one. A West Bank that becomes part of “Greater Israel” would leave Jordan bordering not a partner in peace but an expansionist state with the explicit ideological claim, as voiced by ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, that Jordan itself is the alternative Palestinian homeland.

While the Israeli security establishment has warned that the government’s policy in the West Bank is a ticking time bomb that threatens to detonate a third intifada, there is a belief in Jordan that this is precisely what the far-right Israeli government hopes will happen.

It would use any potential Palestinian uprising in the West Bank as an excuse to carry out the massive destruction of refugee camps, forcing tens of thousands of people to move to cities or other urban centers, which would become besieged ghettos and force “voluntary” displacement to the east.

Having considered the possibility of this dismal scenario for years, the most drastic option available to Jordan would be to downgrade or suspend its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Such a decision is not a remote possibility; King Abdullah himself had described the relationship with Israel as a “cold peace” that keeps “getting colder,” and grassroots antinormalization pressure has only intensified across the country, especially in light of the war in Gaza.

The king previously set out three red lines that must not be crossed regarding the issue of Palestine, one of which was that Jordan would never become an alternative Palestinian homeland.

Israel has already put its economic ties with Jordan on the line. It suspended gas exports to the country during the 2025 and 2026 conflicts with Iran, citing “security reasons,” and refused to renew an expanded annual water shipment to Jordan. This triggered calls from Jordanian activists to scrap the energy and water agreements altogether, rather than remain vulnerable to Israeli blackmail attempts.

Suspending the peace treaty would be a double-edged sword. It would signal that Jordan was prepared to treat annexation of the West Bank as an existential red line, but the risks are potentially severe.

The treaty includes water sharing arrangements that Jordan, one of the most water scarce countries in the world, could not easily replace. It also underwrites the security and intelligence cooperation that has maintained the stability of Jordan’s eastern and northern borders amid the chaos in Syria and Iraq, and is bound up with the US military and economic aid that props up Jordan’s fragile economy.

Even in the midst of nearly three years of war in Gaza, Jordan, along with Egypt, has stopped short of freezing its peace treaty with Israel, instead opting to set out the red lines that might trigger such a move. A unilateral suspension of the treaty without Arab and wider international backing carries risks, and Jordan would consider such a step only as a last resort.

A less drastic but potentially more sustainable path is for Jordan to lead a coordinated Arab-European campaign of legal and economic pressure on Israel. Such a campaign would push for binding sanctions — anchoring such action in the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion and UN Resolution 2334 on the illegality of the Israeli occupation and settlement activity — in coordination with European governments that are already warning businesses to avoid any involvement in settlement projects such as E1, adjacent to East Jerusalem.

Such an approach would chart a path that preserves ties with Washington while raising the diplomatic and financial costs of annexation. The downside is lack of immediacy; such campaigns are slow and, if history is any guide, from Oslo to the Abraham Accords, Arab diplomatic pressure alone has rarely derailed Israeli settlement policies.

Both paths risk antagonizing the Trump administration and US lawmakers, who broadly speaking are sympathetic to Israel, which could threaten the US aid and security guarantees Jordan depends on. Yet inaction carries its own risks, as regional chaos provides cover for Israeli expansionism, facts on the ground quickly become irreversible, and the specter of population transfer grows increasingly real.

For now, Jordan might opt for a more calibrated escalation, quietly signaling the possibility of treaty-related penalties as a deterrent while launching a diplomatic and legal campaign, and using each new provocation, from the E1 plans to refugee camp demolitions, to build the international coalition it will need if suspension of the peace treaty ever becomes necessary.

Jordan has managed some impossible balancing acts in the past — but the margin for error, like the physical space left for a Palestinian state, is shrinking fast.

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

X: @plato010