What if Jordan still held much of the West Bank at the end of the Six Day War?

[raharris1973]

There are probably a few different PoDs to do this, maybe some from the Jordanian side, but I'll start off the bat with an Israeli based PoD.

The mercurial Moshe Dayan halts the offensive early, just after taking the Old City of Jerusalem. His rationale is not wanting to destabilize Hashemite Kingdom and not wanting too absorb an "excessive" Palestinian population.

Here were the battle lines at 1000 hours on 7 June, 1967, when the conquest of Jerusalem's Old City, including the Wailing Wall, was complete.

By this point the Israelis had slightly "thickened" their border along the central coast and had taken East Jerusalem, and the significant Jordanian-Palestinian towns of Jenin, Qalqilya and Ramallah.

However, the majority of West Bank land, and the significant Jordanian-Palestinian towns of Tulkarm, Nablus, Jericho, Hebron and Bethlehem were not yet occupied.

Dayan's revised guideline is that there should be no infantry or armored assaults on those remaining population centers and that any remaining threats for Jordanian forces should be silenced mainly by artillery or air strikes. Levi Eshkol defers to Dayan's judgment, even if Cabinet member Menachem Begin and some other officers complain.

Meanwhile, operations continue apace in the Sinai, and the war still concludes with the final Israeli operation to seize the Golan Heights.

In the ATL, Jordan will have a much harder time disowning itself from the Palestinian issue like it did between 1974 and 1984.

How is Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian history changed by this?

Are there any knock-on effects of significance for the Yom Kippur or Lebanon Wars? What about knock-on effects related to Camp David negotiations with Egypt in the 1970s, or other diplomacy between Israel and its neighbors in the 1990s?

 

[sloreck]

If Israel has Jerusalem and some surrounding area, and has added some depth in the middle, they have dine well. I expect most of the Arabs in the areas the Israelis have at this point left, including some but not all of the Arabs in Jerusalem and are now on the wrong side of the cease fire lines. Israel can perhaps let a few back, if and when there is a settlement with Jordan, and as a sweetener Hussein can be recognized as the Muslim guardian of the Dome of the Rock etc. Israel does not have the problem of the West Bank with the large Palestinian population and radical Jews creating unauthorized settlements. A peace with Hussein makes Jordan responsible for keeping order in the West Bank, and it can have limitations on forces on the West bank and maybe some monitors, like in the Sinai.

In many ways, this is a better outcome for Israel.

IMHO like OTL Jordan stays out of Yom Kippur War.

 

[Wendell]

Personally, it's much more interesting to have Israel capture all of Jerusalem in the 1948 war.

 

[DocJamore]

There is a much higher chance of the PLO overthrowing the Jorden monarchy in this timeline unless the monarchy bends over backwards to support the Palestinian cause over its own citizens.

 

[raharris1973]

If Israel has Jerusalem and some surrounding area, and has added some depth in the middle, they have dine well. I expect most of the Arabs in the areas the Israelis have at this point left, including some but not all of the Arabs in Jerusalem and are now on the wrong side of the cease fire lines. Israel can perhaps let a few back, if and when there is a settlement with Jordan, and as a sweetener Hussein can be recognized as the Muslim guardian of the Dome of the Rock etc. Israel does not have the problem of the West Bank with the large Palestinian population and radical Jews creating unauthorized settlements. A peace with Hussein makes Jordan responsible for keeping order in the West Bank, and it can have limitations on forces on the West bank and maybe some monitors, like in the Sinai.

In many ways, this is a better outcome for Israel.

IMHO like OTL Jordan stays out of Yom Kippur War.

Israel still has an an occupation issue in the Gaza Strip. I wonder if in this TL Egypt and Israel might agree on the territory going back to Egypt in the Camp David settlement.

This may not be better for Palestinian nationalist objectives, but Palestinians living in the continued Jordanian West Bank should be better off than OTL, avoiding the intifadehs, settlement movements and ongoing security crises of the Israel occupation. If we're going by OTL Jordan as a guide, with generalized stability and internal peace, only punctuated by brief exceptions like Black September.

We have to figure out if or how a showdown with the PLO (Black September) goes down differently in this TL, before we even get into the Yom Kippur War.

On the Yom Kippur war itself - I would agree with Sloreck the default assumption should be Jordan stays out.

Why would Jordan behave differently and choose to participate? Is having territory on the West Bank of Jordan somehow going to make Amman feel obligated to participate?

There is a much higher chance of the PLO overthrowing the Jorden monarchy in this timeline unless the monarchy bends over backwards to support the Palestinian cause over its own citizens.

Well two things - Palestinians had Jordanian citizenship so were co-citizens along with the tribesmen and residents who had lived east of the Jordan for generations.

On Jordanian regime vulnerability -

I guess the thinking is they are more vulnerable because they have more Palestinian land and especially Palestinian people.

Possibly so, although the Jordanian government could suppress PLO organizations with much less negative international scrutiny than Israel.

Also even in OTL even though Jordan lost Palestinian land, and a lot of Palestinian people, they still had a lot of Palestinian people, possibly a majority, even without the land.

Having the people without the land as in OTL could in some ways have been the worst of both worlds. At least in this TL the Jordanian government can still benefit more from Bible-related tourism revenue throughout the West Bank, especially in Bethlehem.

 

[sloreck]

Jordan was pretty much the only Arab country which gave "Palestinians" any political rights or citizenship. For example there were quite a few Palestinians in Kuwait, from low level employment to professionals. They, however, had no political rights, could not become full citizens, and had limited access to government services. If need be the government can limit the ability of the Palestinians to change things through the ballot, and the military is quite loyal to the monarchy. If Israel and Jordan have reached an accommodation like OTL, and the King is still the guardian of the Muslim holy places, you can be sure should there be a black September ewvent the Israelis will help out as needed.

 

[raharris1973]

If Israel and Jordan have reached an accommodation like OTL, and the King is still the guardian of the Muslim holy places, you can be sure should there be a black September ewvent the Israelis will help out as needed.

Of course the timing of everything could be an issue. In OTL Black September happened 24 years or so before Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Jordan could still find it politically impossible to make a deal with Israel until after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and possibly after the end of the Cold War. So, in the interim, Jordan could not have formal arrangements with the Israelis about Al-Aqsa, and the Israelis would be dealing ad hoc with the local waqf.

---Also, the original map is taken from a youtube showing where the battle lines were every two hours, and is taken basically from the idea that the war on the Jordanian front starts as in OTL and the Israeli campaign does, but it comes to a fairly abrupt stop after the Wailing Wall & East Jerusalem are reclaimed.

If events of the campaign, or deliberate planning a bit different, we could end up with a different map.

Here is one alternative-

and another