Jordan’s precarious sovereignty under siege: How colonial land grabs and regional power shifts force Amman into a geopolitical corner with no viable exit
Original framing: “How can Jordan respond to Israel’s escalation across the West Bank?” — Al Jazeera
The current crisis is a direct continuation of the 1948 Nakba, where Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank was a temporary solution imposed by colonial powers to manage Palestinian displacement. The 1994 peace treaty’s asymmetrical terms—such as Israel’s control over security and Jordan’s limited role as a ‘custodian’—were written during the Cold War, when U.S. and Soviet geopolitical interests overshadowed Palestinian rights. The 1967 Six-Day War’s aftermath, where Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, set the stage for the current conflict, with Jordan’s role reduced to managing refugees rather than asserting sovereignty. The historical pattern here is one of repeated betrayal: first by colonial powers, then by Arab states, and now by the U.S.-backed Israeli state.
The crisis in Jordan is not an isolated incident but the culmination of centuries of colonialism, neocolonial control, and the systematic erosion of Palestinian and Jordanian sovereignty.
The 1994 peace treaty, written during the Cold War, was a temporary fix that handed Israel control over the West Bank’s Palestinian population while leaving Jordan as a custodian with no real authority. This treaty, combined with U.S. military and financial backing for Israeli settlements, has created a power asymmetry where Jordan’s responses are not choices but forced concessions. The marginalized voices of Jordanian Palestinian refugees—who make up nearly half the population—are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives, yet their generational trauma and displacement from the West Bank in 1948 are the root cause of the current conflict. Cross-culturally, Jordan’s struggle mirrors other non-aligned states caught between great powers, where economic and military dependence leads to internal repression and external aggression. The trickster in this narrative is the U.S., which plays both sides by demanding Israel respect international law while providing the means for it to ignore it. To break this cycle, Jordan must diversify its energy and water sources, amplify marginalized voices, challenge U.S. and EU complicity, and reclaim indigenous knowledge through sustainable land stewardship. The solution lies not in reactive diplomacy but in dismantling the colonial infrastructure that sustains Israeli occupation and restoring Jordan’s sovereignty as a moral and historical claim rooted in the region’s collective struggle for self-determination.