The kingdom on Israel's longest border ruled the West Bank for nineteen years, fought two wars, then made a peace that has held for thirty. A country that is mostly Palestinian by origin, yet chose to be Jordan, and now guards Jerusalem's Muslim holy sites by agreement with the Jewish state.
Jordan's story quietly dismantles two myths at once. It held the West Bank and East Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967 and built no Palestinian state there, because the grievance was never only about that land. And though most of its people are of Palestinian origin, Jordan fought the PLO to keep its own nationhood, then signed a durable peace with Israel and became its quiet security partner.
Jordan invaded in 1948 and lost in 1967. In between, it held the very land a Palestinian state would sit on, and did nothing of the kind with it.
1948 · The War of Independence
Transjordan's British-led Arab Legion invades and seizes the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It expels every Jew from the Old City, destroys the Jewish Quarter's synagogues, and bars Jews from the Western Wall for nineteen years. In 1950 Jordan annexes the West Bank, a move almost no country recognises.
1948–1967 · The nineteen years
For almost two decades Jordan rules the West Bank and Egypt rules Gaza. In all that time no Palestinian state is created, offered, or demanded. There is no "occupation" to protest, no settlements, no checkpoints. The land alone, it turns out, was never the whole grievance. The point no one explains →
June 1967 · The Six-Day War
Israel warns Jordan to stay out of the war it did not start. King Hussein, bound by a pact with Nasser and trusting false Egyptian reports of victory, shells West Jerusalem and attacks anyway. Within days Jordan loses the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Jews return to the Western Wall.
By 1970 the PLO had built a state within Jordan, running its own checkpoints and openly challenging the throne. In September 1970, King Hussein moved against them. In bitter fighting his army crushed and expelled the PLO, which fled to Lebanon to begin the cycle there. The meaning was plain: a kingdom whose population is largely Palestinian by origin chose to remain Jordan, not to become "Palestine." The slogan "Jordan is Palestine" is rejected most fiercely in Amman.
Jordan renounced its claim, then made formal peace, and Israel handed it something telling in return.
1988 · Letting go
King Hussein formally renounces Jordan's claim to the West Bank, ceding the Palestinian cause there to the PLO and clearing the way for his own peace with Israel.
26 October 1994 · The Wadi Araba treaty
King Hussein and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sign the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, the second between Israel and an Arab state. It settles the border and the bitter question of water, opens full relations, and binds each side not to let its land be used to attack the other.
The custodianship
The treaty affirms Jordan's special role as custodian of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa compound, administered by the Jordanian Waqf. Israel, the sovereign, leaves day-to-day control of Islam's third-holiest site in Muslim hands, by choice. So much for "Al-Aqsa in danger." The Al-Aqsa libel →
Like Egypt's, the peace is cool in public and warm in the back rooms that matter. It has held through every storm.
Jordan and Israel run deep intelligence and security cooperation, share water and energy, and depend on each other for stability along a long, quiet frontier. The Gaza war strained the public mood, and Amman recalled its ambassador, yet the treaty stood. The clearest sign came in April 2024, when Jordan helped shoot down the barrage of Iranian drones and missiles flying over it toward Israel. A neighbour that once invaded now helps defend the same skies.