Israel's eastern border if it captures the West Bank in 1949

Had the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 lasted longer and thus Israel would've been able to conquer the entire West Bank, where would Israel end up drawing its eastern border?

I expect Israel to annex the entire West Bank if most of the Arabs there would have fled, but what if most of the Arabs in the West Bank would not have fled? Then where would Israel draw its eastern border?

In the second scenario, annexing the entire West Bank might be problematic for Israel since there would be a lot of Arabs there and Israel is going to be concerned about preserving its Jewish majority. Thus, which parts of the West Bank would Israel annex and what would Israel do with the rest of the West Bank in this scenario?
 
Remember in 1948 the Jordan River was the border of the Palestine Mandate, TransJordan was just that - across the Jordan River. IMHO if Israel gets to the Jordan, thus "owning" most of the Mandate, that is where things will stay. The Arab population of the West Bank was not that large, and you can expect that a significant number of the Muslim Arabs will leave, the Christian Arabs will probably be more inclined to stay. If a significant number of Arabs leave the West Bank, the size of the Arab minority of Israel 70 years later will be much smaller than OTL and a higher percentage of that population will be Christian. It is worth noting that in the last 20-30 years the Christian Arabs of the West Bank have been emigrating as as non-Muslims their position under the PLO governance has been difficult.
 
Had the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 lasted longer and thus Israel would've been able to conquer the entire West Bank, where would Israel end up drawing its eastern border?

I expect Israel to annex the entire West Bank if most of the Arabs there would have fled, but what if most of the Arabs in the West Bank would not have fled? Then where would Israel draw its eastern border?

In the second scenario, annexing the entire West Bank might be problematic for Israel since there would be a lot of Arabs there and Israel is going to be concerned about preserving its Jewish majority. Thus, which parts of the West Bank would Israel annex and what would Israel do with the rest of the West Bank in this scenario?

Israel won't push past the Jordan river. Conversely, it will push all the way up to it if they can. In the south, they'll probably stay inside the line separating Cisjordan and Transjordan Palestine.

Using OTL population numbers for Israel and the West Bank after the war, Israel should have no trouble keeping its Jewish majority, especially once refugees start pouring in from DP camps and Arab countries. In this case, we can expect that a lot of the Arabs who OTL ended up expelled into Jordan will probably be expelled further, and probably some of the Arabs in the West Bank will flee as well, so the "problem" is even less.

Of course, there's implications elsewhere. Though there won't be more Palestinians in Jordan ITTL than OTL (in fact, there might even be a little less), they're gonna be angrier than OTL and might well end up successfully deposing the Hashemite monarchy like nearly happened OTL.
 
Israel won't push past the Jordan river. Conversely, it will push all the way up to it if they can. In the south, they'll probably stay inside the line separating Cisjordan and Transjordan Palestine.

I agree with this.

Using OTL population numbers for Israel and the West Bank after the war, Israel should have no trouble keeping its Jewish majority, especially once refugees start pouring in from DP camps and Arab countries.

I'm talking more in the long-term here. Sure, Israel is going to have a solid Jewish majority in 1949 even with the West Bank, but when Arabs are having eight or ten children on average whereas Jews have three or four, one can understand why Israel would become very anxious about the long-run.

In this case, we can expect that a lot of the Arabs who OTL ended up expelled into Jordan will probably be expelled further, and probably some of the Arabs in the West Bank will flee as well, so the "problem" is even less.

Is Israel actually going to expel a lot of West Bank Arabs, though? I mean, I could imagine some overenthusiastic Israeli commander expelling the Arabs of Jericho due to its strategic location, but most of the West Bank is pretty hilly and thus I'm not sure that it would be easy to remove a lot of people from there. In this regard, the West Bank can probably be compared with the Galilee--where a lot of Arabs stayed behind in 1948-1949 and which is also pretty mountainous.

This Times of Israel article mentions how the Israeli government was apparently afraid of putting too many Arabs under Israeli rule in 1948-1949:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-trump-era-begins-what-does-israel-actually-want-in-the-west-bank/

"In December 1948, during a lull in the fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, the cabinet ministers of the newly declared Jewish state gathered in Tel Aviv to consider a final military push to expel the Egyptian army from the country’s south and Iraqi troops from the northern West Bank cities of Qalqilya and Tulkarem, both of which lie scarcely nine miles from the Mediterranean coast and form Israel’s perilously narrow coastal waistline just north of Tel Aviv.

During the cabinet meeting, interior minister Yitzhak Gruenbaum phrased a question that has plagued Israelis ever since: Is it wise to take control of territories with large Palestinian populations? Israel’s expansions up to that point in the war were into areas that were either sparsely populated to begin with, or from which Arab populations had largely fled; or into places of such desperate strategic significance, such as Lod and Ramle, that Israeli forces simply expelled some of the Arab residents.

The historian Benny Morris described Gruenbaum’s concern as stemming from the understanding that Israel “could not hold territory packed with Arabs.”

The question returned even more forcefully a few months later, when Yigal Allon, the most successful field commander of the nascent IDF, urged prime minister David Ben-Gurion to order the conquest of the West Bank, an operation he thought could be concluded in a matter of days. This was particularly true after a February ceasefire with Egypt freed up a great deal of Israel’s over 100,000 troops to contend with a Jordanian fighting force in the West Bank of perhaps 12,000. Again Israel’s leaders demurred, and for the same reason: Could a Jewish nation state afford to extend its sovereignty over large non-Jewish populations?

In other words, the West Bank as it is defined today — a distinct territory that is neither Israel nor Jordan — was not, as is commonly believed, forged by Jordanian military success in holding the Israelis at bay in the 1948-49 war. It was created, rather, by the Israeli fear of the consequences that might flow from absorbing large numbers of Palestinians. That concern has not waned in 70 years. It is still the primary argument on both right and left against annexation of the West Bank and for the establishment of a Palestinian state."

For some reason, the Israeli leadership in 1948-1949 doesn't appear to have had a lot of confidence that a lot of West Bank Arabs are going to flee or that Israel was easily capable of expelling a lot of West Bank Arabs.

Of course, there's implications elsewhere. Though there won't be more Palestinians in Jordan ITTL than OTL (in fact, there might even be a little less), they're gonna be angrier than OTL and might well end up successfully deposing the Hashemite monarchy like nearly happened OTL.

Does this trigger an Israeli military intervention into Jordan?
 
Remember in 1948 the Jordan River was the border of the Palestine Mandate, TransJordan was just that - across the Jordan River. IMHO if Israel gets to the Jordan, thus "owning" most of the Mandate, that is where things will stay. The Arab population of the West Bank was not that large, and you can expect that a significant number of the Muslim Arabs will leave, the Christian Arabs will probably be more inclined to stay. If a significant number of Arabs leave the West Bank, the size of the Arab minority of Israel 70 years later will be much smaller than OTL and a higher percentage of that population will be Christian. It is worth noting that in the last 20-30 years the Christian Arabs of the West Bank have been emigrating as as non-Muslims their position under the PLO governance has been difficult.
Since the West Bank was hilly terrain, I'm unsure that a massive number of West Bank Arabs would have fled. In this TL, the West Bank might have looked similar to the Galilee--which was captured by Israel, had mountainous terrain, and retained a lot of Arabs after Israel captured it. If anything, I suspect that there might be even less Arab flight from the West Bank in this TL than there was from the Galilee in our TL considering that an Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1949 might have been relatively quick if the information above about military numbers (over 100,000 Israeli troops versus 12,000 Jordanian troops) is accurate.

What's interesting is that, AFAIK, most of the West Bank's population in 1967 stayed there instead of moving to Jordan. Also, once Israel got control of the Triangle area at the end of the Israeli War of Independence in 1949, its Arab population appears to have stayed behind there as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(Israel)
 
Also, this old post by Minchandre is valuable for this discussion:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-1949-do-most-of-the-arabs-there-flee.411892/

Probably. I suspect that the OTL Gaza Strip would get almost entirely depopulated, as the nearby region was OTL, though maybe with some people sticking to Gaza City itself.

Expect more Arabs to hang on in the OTL West Bank, where the rough terrain makes it both less likely that they'll flee fighting on their own, and harder and less likely that the Israelis will expel them. Caveat is that the Israelis will make a point of clearing the Jordan Valley as completely as possible, though it's fairly unpopulated by Arabs in 1948 anyway. Jericho, strategically located and of great cultural importance, is a prime candidate for "local commanders to be overenthusiastic contrary to orders".

This will also have knock-on effects, of course. All these Palestinians are going somewhere; this could well tilt the delicate balance in Jordan or Lebanon.

As for Konrad Sartorius's point...no one outside of the Arab (and, to a lesser extent, Muslim) world really cared about the Palestinians in 1948; they only began to be a cause celebre in the late 60s (especially after Israel won the Six Day War). While there might be movements to get Israel to establish a right of return for Palestinians, there's definitely not going to be anything 2-statey, and, frankly, considering how much modern media focuses on the Occupied Territories rather than the UNWRA camps in neighboring states, I'm not sure that people will care very much. It's possible that greater Palestinian population in Jordan will overthrow the Bedouins and establish East Palestine or something, which will have its own implications, but hell, even if that happened, it would probably just help Israel's legitimacy in this regard anyway, since "Hey, the Palestinians have their own state, right over there! It's on 78% of Mandatory Palestine! That's fair, right?"
 
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