Jordan really doesn't want to host a Trump wave of Palestinian refugees

Neither does Egypt, but for Jordan it's existential.

In 1994, Jordan signed the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel under American auspices. At one level, the peace treaty didn’t change that much — Jordan and Israel had long quietly cooperated over the administration of the West Bank, and then-King Hussein had a long history of private meetings and cooperation with Israeli leaders. Like the Abraham Accords a quarter century later, the Jordan-Israeli peace treaty mostly made public and institutionalized a longstanding strategic alignment rather than making peace between enemies. Yesterday, though he likely doesn’t realize it, Donald Trump just put that treaty at serious risk by suggesting that Jordan accept the single most important thing the treaty was meant to prevent.

For Jordan, the peace treaty meant something more than normalization with Israel and securing its place in the Oslo process: for the first time, it locked in an Israeli commitment — backed by Washington — that there would be no attempt to solve the Palestinian issue at Jordan’s expense by pushing Palestinians into Jordan, toppling the monarchy, and calling the East Bank the Palestinian state. As Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi put it yesterday, reciting the long-standing formula: “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

President Trump threw all of this into the air yesterday with his suggestion that Gaza should be “cleaned out”, with Jordan and Egypt hosting the millions of Palestinians who would be displaced into forced exile. Trump mused that the displacement could be temporary or permanent; everyone with the slightest familiarity with Middle Eastern history knows that the displacement would be permanent. Naturally, the extreme right wing settler and former national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir welcomed the initiative — as, no doubt, does a wide swathe of Israelis keen to put an end to the Gaza problem once and for all, remove the Palestinian population and renew the process of settlements.

Sure, driving out the Gazan population would be a war crime, obviously and fundamentally in violation of the most basic international law and norms, and would fully confirm the premises of the “genocide” findings of the International Court of Justice. Sure, it would establish a precedent to do the same in the West Bank. Sure, both Jordan and Egypt reject it, but since when has Trump cared what allies think — and he likely sees them as totally dependent on the US and in no position to refuse. And sure, it would violate the ceasefire agreement so painstakenly negotiated by the outgoing Biden administration. But it feels like the time passed long ago — under Biden, not just under Trump — when America or Israel cared about things like ceasefire agreements, international law or war crimes when it comes to Palestine.

The idea of forcing out the Gazan population isn’t new, of course. It surfaced early in Israel’s war on Gaza, proposed - farcically - as a humanitarian initiative to get civilians to safety while Israel got on with its utter decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure and people in the name of battling Hamas. The idea was quickly shot down by Egypt, which - for the only time I can remember - suggested that an expulsion of Palestinians into the Sinai would put the Camp David Acccords at risk. Egypt has rejected the suggestion again, quite forcefully; it views the movement of a large number of Palestinians into its territory, presumably including Hamas sympathizers and members, as a major national security threat and a violation of its sovereignty.

For Jordan, the prospect of forcibly absorbing a million Palestinians isn’t seen as just a security threat or an economic burden — concerns which, presumably, might be addressed with offers of big bundles of cash from the Gulf. It is existential. Jordan, always cash-strapped and already deeply enmeshed in the global refugee regime through its hosting of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees over the years, is no stranger to drawing on “strategic rents” in the form of refugee assistance and international NGOs. But what Trump proposes would be different. A wave of Palestinian refugees of that magnitude would not just be another refugee burden - it would upend Jordanian politics and inflame the most sensitive and dangerous political identity cleavage in the country.

For many decades after losing the West Bank to Israel in the 1967 war, Jordan faced tremendous pressure from the Israeli right to solve the Palestinian issue by establishing an alternative homeland for the Palestinians on the East Bank. In 1970, the Jordanian military massacred untold numbers of Palestinians in the infamous Black September civil war, driving the PLO out of Jordan into Lebanon. But expelling the PLO did not resolve major questions of political identity. Palestinians from the West Bank (but not Gaza) had been granted full citizenship when Jordan assumed control of the West Bank after 1948. While many Palestinians remained impoverished and controlled in refugee camps, many others thrived and developed into the core of the Jordanian business community and middle class. For two decades after losing the West Bank, Jordan still hoped to return — viewing itself, not unreasonably, as the appropriate negotiating partner for a “land for peace” deal with Israel, even after grudgingly accepting the 1974 Arab Summit resolution declaring the PLO to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

This all came to a head in 1987, when the Palestinian Intifada threatened to spread to the East Bank. In 1988, Jordan formally and conclusively “severed ties” with the West Bank, ending its claims there in return for Palestinian political parties and movements keeping the East Bank calm. Identity politics erupted in the following few years, as a limited democratic opening in 1989 opened up the space for an exciting, robust emergent print public sphere — the topic of my dissertation and first book. Jordan spent the first couple of years of the Madrid peace process jockeying with Israel over how Palestinians would be represented in the Jordanian peace delegation (until Oslo took everyone, including King Hussein, by surprise and put an end to all that). And hanging over it all was the very real fear in Amman that the Israeli right wing — especially Ariel Sharon, but also Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the extremists in the settler movement — would decide to end the challenge of the Intifada by expelling Palestinians into Jordan and calling Jordan Palestine.

That was the context for the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. Jordan fully normalized relations with Israel. What it got in return was that American-guaranteed commitment that Israel would not seek to impose the ‘alternative homeland’: “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine.” And that’s what Trump’s musings about pushing Jordan to host a massive new wave of Palestinian refugees puts into question: not just the security and economic viability of the Kingdom, but reopening core questions of the country’s identity and existence… and throwing into question the single most important American and Israeli commitment to Jordan.

An aggressive new form of Jordanian nationalism has emerged over the years, asserting the Jordanian identity of the state, pushing to keep Palestinians in a kind of second class citizenship, and at times questioning whether the Hashemites — who only came to Transjordan in the 1920s — were real Jordanians. (They also grumbled about the Palestinian origins of King Abdullah’s wife Rania, which plays into recent crises surrounding the royal succession.) They won’t welcome a million new Palestinian refugees. The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood has evolved over the years, in large part due to fierce repression by the palace, away from a loyalist opposition towards a Hamas-allied movement drawing on an increasingly Palestinian constituency. If Trump actually tries to move forward with his (illegal and inhumane) plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and settle Palestinians in Jordan, don’t expect Jordan to be easily bought off or bullied into going along — it will not end well.

This post is a standalone in response to urgent current events - look for regular MENA Academy content later this week.