It might seem strange, at first glance, that Jordan — a country hit by roughly 300 missiles and drones during the war with Iran — would be more worried about Israel than about Iran.

 Looking at things from Amman's perspective makes the picture clearer: Iranian missiles can be intercepted, and a war with Tehran can end in a political settlement or a regional understanding. 

The gradual swallowing up of the West Bank, coupled with Palestinian displacement becoming part of the political reality, would leave Jordan facing a problem that doesn't end when the war does. 

That's the central argument made by Sean Yom, a political science professor at Temple University who has followed Jordanian politics for years, in a piece for Foreign Policy titled "Jordan Fears Israel, Not Iran." Yom argues that the West Bank, and the growing likelihood of its annexation, represents an 

existential threat for Amman. For Jordan, the question isn't whether Israel will annex the West Bank tomorrow. 

The more urgent question is: what happens when Palestinian displacement becomes a natural byproduct of annexation, settlement expansion, and the dismantling of Palestinian geography? That's the point where the issue stops being an Israeli-Palestinian conflict and becomes a direct matter of Jordanian national security.

 For Jordan, the West Bank isn't just occupied territory on the other side of the river — it's a border that is geographically, politically, security-wise, and socially sensitive in the extreme, and any radical change there will reach Amman whether it wants it to or not. 

Israel has spent years expanding settlements and consolidating control over large parts of the West Bank, and through 2026 Jordan kept warning against Israeli moves to impose sovereignty over occupied land, arguing that settlement and annexation undermine the two-state solution and change the legal and demographic reality on the ground. These aren't just routine diplomatic statements — in Amman, the calculation is entirely different.

 The annexation of Area C, which makes up roughly 60 percent of the West Bank, alongside continued settlement expansion and control over resources and land, could leave Palestinians boxed into disconnected population enclaves. Should things escalate to full annexation, the collapse of the Palestinian Authority becomes a real possibility — and with it, the possibility of large-scale displacement. 

Jordan knows exactly what that would mean. Comparing a new wave of Palestinian displacement to the Syrian or Iraqi refugee waves might sound reasonable on paper, but it doesn't capture the Jordanian problem accurately.

 A Palestinian pushed out of the West Bank wouldn't necessarily arrive as a refugee waiting to return to an existing state.

 The disappearance of the very idea of a Palestinian state because of annexation would make the question more complicated: where would these people actually return to? This is where the issue reaches into the core of Jordan's political and social makeup. 

Jordan is a country whose political and social identity was shaped through successive waves of migration and displacement, and the Palestinian cause has been embedded in its structure since the state's founding.

 A large new influx from the West Bank wouldn't be just a humanitarian or relief file — it would raise sensitive questions about citizenship, political representation, the labor market, services, resources, and the balance of power within state institutions, alongside the loss of the very idea of a Palestinian state. 

This isn't simply about adding hundreds of thousands of people to the population; it's a potential change in the rules of the game.

 That's why Jordan treats displacement as a red line. Jordan doesn't need to wait for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to actually reach its borders before it reacts. The moment displacement becomes a permanent Israeli policy, the Palestinian statehood project is effectively being buried in front of it — which explains Jordan's acute sensitivity to what's 

happening in the West Bank. The official Jordanian position rests on an independent Palestinian state along the June 4, 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital, but behind that legal and diplomatic position lies a harsher issue: Jordan's own stability. With the window for a Palestinian state closing and Israel remaining in control from the river to the sea, Jordan will find itself facing a new geographic reality along its longest and most sensitive border. 

Mass displacement accompanying annexation would leave Jordan facing more than a border crisis — it would create a potential internal one, which could push it to reconsider the nature of its relationship with both Israel and the United States, depending on the scale and nature of events. Iran put Jordan in a difficult position because it struck sites linked to the American military presence inside the kingdom, but the Israeli threat Jordan perceives is different in kind: Iran can hit a base; Israel, if it proceeds with annexation and displacement, can change the shape of the entire region running along Jordan's western border. A missile falls and its impact ends there. 

A redrawn map stays. Even so, Amman remained committed to its American partnership throughout the war with Iran, because it needs Washington militarily and economically, and needs its presence as a power capable of influencing Israel and managing regional crises.

 That arrangement becomes far less comfortable once Israel actually starts redrawing the borders of the West Bank or creating a reality where displacement can no longer be stopped.

 For a long time, Jordan's stability was also in Israel's interest — the kingdom served as an important buffer between Israel and potential threats from the east, and played a role in controlling the border and preventing the movement of weapons and fighters.

 The regional environment has changed. Israel is now far more capable of operating militarily beyond its borders, with a direct presence in parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, while the idea of annexing the West Bank has moved from the margins of Israeli politics to a far more influential position within the Israeli right, driven by ideological, religious, political, and economic factors.

 A shift toward seeing direct control over land as more important than preserving the previous regional order could diminish the value of Jordan's stability in Israel's calculations — the worst-case scenario Amman could face. 

There's a mistake in how Jordan's position often gets read, reduced to a single question: does Jordan want war with Israel? Jordan doesn't want war. Not wanting war doesn't mean accepting a radical change to the status quo on its border. 

Jordan signed its peace treaty with Israel in 1994, established diplomatic, security, and economic relations, and turned the border between the two countries into one of the most stable in the region. 

That peace is also tied to stability in the West Bank and to the survival of a political horizon for Palestinians. Peace becoming a cover for annexing land and pushing its population eastward would put the equation it was built on under real strain. 

So what would Jordan actually do if displacement began in earnest? Suspending the peace treaty, downgrading or cutting relations, tightening the border, pressuring Washington, mobilizing diplomatic and international tools — all of these could be on the table.

 Yet stopping a massive human wave from crossing the border is another matter entirely. Jordan knows how hard it would be to seal its border against Palestinians who share deep family and social ties with Jordanian society. That's exactly what makes "soft displacement" so dangerous: there may never be a single moment when Israel says "leave." 

The process is more likely to be cumulative — land seizures, settlement expansion, home demolitions, movement restrictions, the strangling of development, settler violence — until people are pushed to leave in search of somewhere they can actually live. When hundreds of thousands leave that way, the international question becomes "why didn't you stop them?" The Jordanian question is different: how do we keep Jordan from becoming the place where Israel's demographic problem gets solved? The idea of an "alternative homeland" captures exactly this fear. 

Annexation of the West Bank followed by the departure of its residents to Jordan could create a reality in which Palestinians are effectively in Jordan while their land has effectively become part of Israel.

 At that point, Israel would have gained the land, and Jordan would have gained the population — something the Jordanian state cannot accept. The problem isn't with the Palestinians already living in Jordan, who have long been an integral part of its society and state. 

The problem is using Jordan as a substitute for an actual Palestinian state. 

The difference matters enormously. Jordan now finds itself in its most difficult position in years: Iran strikes American sites inside the kingdom because it sees them as part of the military infrastructure it's targeting; Israel is moving in the West Bank in ways Jordan fears could lead to gradual annexation and Palestinian displacement; and the United States, on which Jordan depends for security and economic and political support, is the same power bound to a close strategic and military alliance with Israel. 

Jordan can't simply pick one side and abandon the other. 

It needs Washington, but also needs Washington to use its leverage to prevent the West Bank from becoming a 

permanent annexation project. It wants stable relations with Israel, but can't tolerate the displacement of Palestinians. 

It fears Iran, but doesn't want its own territory turned into an open battlefield for a US-Iran war. This isn't comfortable diplomacy — it's round-the-clock risk management. 

The war with Iran may pause. Negotiations may resume. The American administration may change. 

Escalation in the Gulf may recede. Continued step-by-step annexation of the West Bank could produce a new reality far harder to live with than the return of Iranian missiles. A 

missile falls and its effect ends. A changed map remains — which is exactly why the kingdom doesn't treat the West Bank as some external issue that can be handled with another statement of condemnation.

 Its western border isn't just a line on a map, and any major demographic shift west of the river will reverberate inside Jordan politically, economically, and in security terms. 

So when Jordan speaks about rejecting displacement, its position should be read on two levels at once: a defense of Palestinians and the idea of their state, and, at the same 

time, a defense of Jordan itself. "Soft displacement" may in fact be more dangerous than any dramatic scene of mass expulsion, precisely because it happens slowly, in small steps, under shifting pretexts — until everyone wakes up to find that the people are gone and the land remains. 

That is the exact thing Amman needs to watch more closely than anything else. 

The link between West Bank annexation and the displacement of its population would mean more than a change in who owns the land — it would be an attempt to redefine the borders of the Palestinian state, the makeup of the region, and possibly Jordan's own role.

 At that point, the issue becomes bigger than Israel and Palestine. It becomes a question about Jordan's future.