The creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, argues Abe Haak, would immediately create political instability on the other side of the Jordan—especially if the state were established unilaterally and under the control of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party. In the worst-case scenario, a civil war would erupt between Fatah and Hamas, both of which have strong bases of support within Jordan, and the Jordanian government would have to intervene in cooperation with Israel—thus undermining its own authority in the eyes of its people. But, writes Haak, the potential problems run even deeper:
It is a fact that most Palestinians are Jordanian and most Jordanians are Palestinian. More precisely stated: a majority of those who self-identify as Palestinians inside and outside Jordan carry a Jordanian passport—including Mahmoud Abbas and [the former Hamas leader] Khaled Mashal; and a majority of Jordan’s resident population self-identify as Palestinians. This has been Jordan’s chronic conundrum since the late 1950s, when Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser began actively incubating a separatist Palestinian nationalism in direct challenge to Jordan’s formal custody of West Bank Arabs. Simply put, the putative Palestinian national identity was the result of an Egyptian anti-Hashemite campaign begun in the late 1950s and institutionalized with the creation of the PLO at the Cairo Arab Summit of 1964.
This anti-Hashemite campaign was at the core of Jordan’s most dangerous cascade of crises in 1959, 1967, 1970-71, 1986, and 1988. . . . [T]he national identity of Jordan and its political viability will be difficult to sustain if a majority of its citizens owe political allegiance to a foreign, neighboring state. Such a state would be able to . . . steer the affairs of Jordan by mobilizing a sizable part of the citizenry to do its bidding if its interests conflict with those of the Jordanian government. . . .
[T]he entire edifice of the Palestinian national movement is a political construct of Jordan’s Arab enemies that was meant to make the country ungovernable by the late King Hussein. . . . These organizations have always claimed to represent a majority of Jordan’s citizens, a dangerous claim for any country. For Jordan, such a claim becomes intolerable when concretized in an adjacent state whose leadership has a history of serially attempting to sabotage Hashemite rule.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/danger-jordan-palestinian-state/