The Promised Land of Jordan

On October 7, 2023 a non-state entity called Hamas, which the U.S. government declared a terrorist organization in 1997 (followed by Canada, under Jean Chrétien, in 2002) attacked the Israeli border, or armistice line, with Gaza in the southwest of the country.

The attackers used motorcycles, boats, paragliders, and drones to overwhelm Israeli border forces. Then they engaged in an orgy of violence, beheading children and killing as many Israeli citizens as they could until the attackers were either killed or captured by late coming Israeli forces. They also took Israeli hostages back to Gaza.

any of the Hamas terrorists, mostly young men in their twenties, were on drugs. They had no problem killing men, raping and torturing women, and massacring children as they had been brought up and indoctrinated to regard Jews as sub-human. Not surprisingly, one of the most widely translated books in the Arab world is Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (I have seen it for sale in bookstalls in Cairo).1

Nevertheless, the international left have declared that this latest attack, however Nazi-like, can be justified because, due to Israel’s “occupation,” the “Palestinian people” do not have a homeland and so, in their eyes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

But the entire premise, applied by the left in Canada and elsewhere to the Palestinian problem, is false.

For more than one hundred years there has already existed a fully Palestinian Arab Muslim potential state in the faux “Kingdom of Jordan.” In this essay I will describe its origin, nature, and potential.

Before I do so, even though it will become clear that the Palestinian people already have a fully functional national homeland in the heart of the modern Arab Middle East and which comprises much of the Biblical Land of Israel, this means little to many in the contemporary Arab world.

That is because the majority of Muslim Arabs are not really nationalists in the modern sense. Most Arabs actively or passively encourage jihad and want to return the Near East back to the first one hundred years of Islam, when Arab dynasties ruled an empire from Morocco (or indeed, some of the time, southern Spain) to Central Asia. Which dynasty is or was in charge does not really matter to jihadis, as long as Muslims are the rulers.2

One of the key elements of traditional jihad is a widespread Muslim belief that any piece of land which was once under Muslim authority, can never be allowed to revert to the authority of its original owners. Or if it does, it must be reclaimed.

And so when one reads the Hamas Charter it is clear that it is a charter for a jihad dedicated to the destruction of the world’s sole independent Jewish state, Israel.3

Theirs is a religious war, not one of national liberation, but here’s the rub: When the supporters of the jihad against Israel speak English, they usually use Western terms like “national liberation,” especially on American and Canadian campuses. And so, at least for Westerners, it is important to show that the people who have recently come to call themselves Palestinians, do actually have a selfdeclared homeland in Jordan.

The land of Israel, on both sides of the Jordan, what Christians and Westerners have referred to as “The Holy Land,” is one of the most mapped and studied areas in the entire region. This is largely because during the 19th century, Britons and to a lesser extent Europeans and Americans turned both secular and religious eyes to the land which gave birth to their religion or religions, various expressions of Christianity.

Western Christians, driven by their faith and their secular-scientific ideals, wanted to use the techniques of modern history, comparative linguistics, and archaeology to learn as much as they could as to the material and historical context of the rise of Judaism and Christianity. And so, they formed the Palestine Exploration Fund, which with Imperial Ottoman permission allowed them to map the region on both sides of the Jordan and to excavate key sites. 4

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First published in Geoffrey’s Journals 2023