Jordan's first ambassador to Israel warns of threat to kingdom’s stability, one year into Gaza war

Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza

Jordan's first ambassador to Israel has warned that the country, in its one year of war in the Palestinian territories, is aiming to create the “right conditions” for the mass displacement of Palestinians, threatening the political underpinnings of the kingdom.

Dr Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister and prominent scholar overseeing the Middle East research at Carnegie, cautioned that Jordan cannot afford a new wave of refugees, which could result from the escalation of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in tandem with the Israeli assault in Gaza.

A new Palestinian refugee wave “threatens Jordan in that it would empty the Palestinian territories of their population, thereby allowing Israel to achieve what it wants: control over the land without the people on it,” Dr Muasher told The National in his office in Amman on Thursday.

For the past five decades, Jordan, which has a defence pact with Washington and is a major recipient of US aid, has remained stable as civil wars tore through the Levant and other parts of the Middle East.

A large proportion of the kingdom’s inhabitants are of Palestinian origin. “The central existential issue is the preservation of Jordan and its system,” Dr Muasher said. “This is being threatened by people who were on the fringe of Israeli politics 30 or 40 years ago,” he explained.

Dr Muasher was referring to ultranationalist Israeli politicians who have ascended “to the centre” of power in Israel, holding major portfolios in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came to power in December 2022.

Mr Netanyahu has ordered intensified incursions into the occupied West Bank, during which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the war in Gaza began on October 7. He has done little to stop deadly settler violence, while Israel claims its operations are aimed at eliminating militants.

The attacks are raising fears that “Israel might be thinking of a mass transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, if the right conditions can be created,” Dr Muasher warned. Mass transfer, he noted, would shrink the Palestinian majority in the occupied West Bank, making it easier to “build more settlements and kill the very two-state solution idea that the international community supports".

Addressing the UN General Assembly in New York last week, King Abdullah said Jordan will not become an “alternative homeland” and any forced displacement of Palestinians would be a war crime.

The late King Hussein concluded a peace treaty with Israel in October 1994. The deal has been a central plank of Jordanian foreign policy, as the kingdom continued to support Palestinians' rights. Dr Muasher, who has a doctorate in computer engineering from Purdue University, helped negotiate the treaty and became Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel.

Many Jordanians are descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes when Israel was created in 1948, and during its expansion in the 1967 war. Most of the rest of the population are members of tribes and clans who existed before the kingdom was founded as the British Protectorate of Transjordan in 1921.

A central role of the monarchy has been to balance the two main components of society, helping to maintain national cohesion since a 1970 civil war resulted in the expulsion of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation from Jordan to Lebanon.

“It would change the identity of Jordan as we know it. But neither Jordanians of Palestinian origin nor the rest of the country want that to happen,” Dr Muasher said.

“They want to preserve Jordan as a state as we know it, and they don't want Palestinian land to be emptied of its inhabitants.”