Demographic, Environmental
and
Security Issues Project
DESIP

Shahak 1992: “Israeli Grab Of Jordanian Territory”: and the possible implications of Sharon’s “real plans” for Jordan

April 2002

by Ronald Bleier

A means by which the Israelis quietly captured sovereign Arab territory during peacetime was explained by the late Israel Shahak in a report he wrote in 1992, “Israeli Grab Of Jordanian Territory”.[1] He based his report on articles which had recently appeared in the Israeli press which detailed how the Israelis began stealing Jordanian territory by a method which Israeli journalists termed as “pushing the border eastward.”[2] In 1992 Israeli military censorship allowed for the first time (for reasons unexplained) journalists to report on the details of how the Israelis extended sovereignty over territory at the Jordanian-Israeli border running from the Dead Sea to Eilat, the area called Wadi Arava in Hebrew. (This border dispute was settled by the 1994 Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty on terms extremely generous to Israel.).

Will Jordan also become occupied territory?

The “pushing” of the border into Jordanian territory which began in relatively small steps in 1950, reached “new levels of intensity “ in the 1970s when Ariel Sharon headed the Southern Command. Shahak explained that in his opinion, in 1970

"the Israeli army must … have wanted to provoke Jordan into armed defense of its territory in order to have a pretext for rapid escalation of the conflict through the usual succession of retaliation and counter-retaliations of gradually increasing force, to the point where an Israeli invasion of Jordan aimed at the conquest of its entire territory would have been possible. Sharon who, oversaw the land-grabs at this stage, never concealed his appetite for conquering Jordan, supposedly to establish ‘a Palestinian state’ there, but really to occupy it in the same way as the presently Occupied Territories."

If Shahak was correct about Sharon’s real intentions for Jordan, then it is not unlikely that he still harbors the same dream. If so, the most likely first step would be for the Israeli government to continue the drive the current crisis in such a way as to expel perhaps many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into Jordan.

Note: Exactly this method of provocation leading to escalation is the way the Israelis successfully forced the 1967 War on the region -- by prodding Syria into defensive actions, by shooting down Syrian planes over Damascus, and provoking Egypt into coming to Syria’s aid. We see a similar pattern today, where the Israelis provoke actions by the Palestinians in order to maintain extremely high tensions, make negotiations impossible and place a curtain over their repression and land confiscation.

Ronald Bleier, Editor DESIP
The Demographic, Environmental and Security Issues Project (DESIP)
http://www.igc.org/desip

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[1] “Israeli Grab of Jordanian Territory” by Israel Shahak, From the Hebrew Press: Monthly Translations and Commentaries from Israel, by Israel Shahak, December 1992, Volume IV, no. 12, pp. 47-54.

[2] The three articles Shahak cites are:

1. “It does Not Belong to Us”, Ze’ev Tsahor, Hadashot, November 2, 1992

2. “At the Very Least, Ask the SettlersMoved Eastward,” by Yehuda ” Alex Fishman, Hadashot, November 6, 1992

3. “The Border Litani, Ha’aretz, November 6, 1992.

The End

Demographic, Environmental
and
Security Issues Project
DESIP