Argument · heard from pro-Israel voices
“Jordan is Palestine — the Palestinians already have their state.”
Britain cut Transjordan out of the Palestine Mandate in 1922 — most of the Mandate's territory — and handed it to an Arab emir. Most Jordanians are of Palestinian origin. So the Arab state of Palestine already exists east of the river; the West Bank question is solved by Amman.
Common pro-Israel argument — made by Geert Wilders, Ariel Sharon
Where it's been said
“There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan.”
“What counts for me is that a Palestine already exists, so there is no need to create another one.”
Traps in play:◆ Which territory?◆ Which Palestine?
Why people find it convincing
- Transjordan was part of the British Mandate for Palestine until 1921–22, when Britain set it up as an emirate under Abdullah and exempted it from the Jewish national home clauses (Article 25). It was the larger part of the Mandate's area.
- Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950 and gave its Palestinians Jordanian citizenship; for 17 years 'Palestine' west of the river was ruled from Amman, and nobody founded a Palestinian state there.
- A large share of Jordan's citizens — often estimated at around half or more — are of Palestinian origin, many of them 1948 and 1967 refugees and their descendants.
- The PLO itself once tried to take over Jordan (1970), which shows that its leaders saw Jordan as part of their arena.
What's true
The Mandate once included Jordan, and Jordan and the Palestinians are deeply intertwined.
Transjordan was carved out of the Palestine Mandate by British decision (Cairo 1921; the Article 25 memorandum of September 1922), which is why some Zionists — Jabotinsky's Revisionists above all ('two banks has the Jordan') — regarded the split as a first partition. Jordan ruled and annexed the West Bank from 1948/1950 to 1967, and a large part of its population is of Palestinian origin. Ariel Sharon made 'Jordan is Palestine' Israeli policy talk in the early 1980s.
primary documentTransjordan memorandum (Article 25 of the Palestine Mandate), League of Nations, 16 September 1922 (1922) ⚠
Exempted Transjordan from the Jewish national home provisions. Share of the Mandate's area (commonly given as ~77%) to verify.
pressOriana Fallaci, interview with Ariel Sharon (1982) ⚠
'…a Palestine already exists, so there is no need to create another one' — verify outlet (Washington Post, August 1982?) and wording.
What's left out
Neither Jordan nor the Palestinians accept it — and people are attached to places, not acreage.
Jordan is a Hashemite kingdom with its own national identity; its governments reject the 'alternative homeland' (al-watan al-badil) idea outright, and fear it as a plan to push West Bank Palestinians east. In 1988 King Hussein formally cut Jordan's legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, leaving it to the PLO. In 1970 ('Black September') Jordan's army fought the PLO and drove it out — hardly a Palestinian state. And for a Palestinian family from Jaffa, Hebron or Nablus, a homeland is a place, not a quantity of land somewhere in the region: Amman is not home in the way those towns are. The share of Jordanians of Palestinian origin is politically sensitive and estimates range widely (from about 40% to over 60%), depending on who counts whom.
Traps here:◆ Which territory?◆ Which Palestine?
primary documentKing Hussein, address on disengagement from the West Bank, 31 July 1988 (1988) ⚠
Jordan cuts legal and administrative ties with the West Bank.
Where it leads if pressed
If Palestinians already have a state across the river, the millions west of it have no claim to stay — which is 'transfer' by another name.
The argument's practical consequence is not a renamed map but a population question: what happens to the Palestinians of the West Bank (and Gaza)? If their state is Jordan, their rights where they live become optional, and the next step is pressure to move there — the scenario Jordan fears most. Taken seriously as history, the 1922 split does raise a fair point: every border in this conflict was a choice, including the river as the line in 'from the river to the sea'. But that point opens a discussion about the whole Mandate — including options where Jews and Palestinians share a far larger frame — rather than closing one by declaring the Palestinians already housed.
Traps here:◆ Which territory?
The usual reply — and its own traps
Arguments travel in pairs. Here is what the other side typically answers. Check whether both lean on the same trick.
heard from pro-Palestinian voices“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”