Then-US President Donald Trump offered Jordan’s King Abdullah II control over Judea and Samaria in January 2018, according to a bombshell report published Wednesday by The Washington Post.
The previously unreported offer was reported in a new book on the Trump residency due to be published next week, written by the husband-and-wife journalist team of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
The Jordanian monarch apparently didn’t react well to the offer.
“I thought I was having a heart attack,” Abdullah told an American friend in 2018, according to the report. “I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled-over.”
Abdullah has had endless problems with his majority-Palestinian Authority Arab population, the newspaper noted.
According to the book, Trump thought he would be doing Abdullah a favor, “not realizing that it would destabilize his country.”
But this is not the first time such a suggestion has been made – and in fact, one such suggestion was made by Abdullah’s great-grandfather, King Abdullah I bin al-Hussein, for whom he was named and who was assassinated in 1951 by a nationalist Arab in Jerusalem while attending Friday prayers at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque.
His grandson, Abdullah II’s father – Jordan’s King Hussein — was with him at the time and narrowly missed being executed as well.
“Abdullah privately agreed to accept the establishment of a Jewish State in exchange for Jewish support of his annexation of the Arab part of Palestine” in talks with Golda Meir prior to the Jewish State’s declaration of independence in 1948, writes journalist Elinor Burkett in her biography of Israel’s first female prime minister (p. 126).
According to Foreign Policy.com, Jordan offered citizenship to the Arabs living in what is today referred to as the “Palestinian Authority,” including refugees from the 1948 war, during the time it occupied the region (1948-1967).
“Rather than seek independence for a Palestinian state, the Arabs from the area allotted for an Arab state in the UN partition resolution agreed to the unification of Palestine with Jordan and swore fealty to the king at the Jericho Conference on December 1, 1948.”
On April 24, 1950, the Jordan House of Deputies and House of Notables, in a joint session, adopted the following resolution annexing the West Bank and Jerusalem:
Approval is granted to complete unity between the two banks of the Jordan, the Eastern and Western, and their amalgamation in one single state: The Hashemite Kingdom of the Jordan, under the crown of his Hashemite Majesty King Abdullah ben el-Husein the exalted.
Great Britain and Pakistan were the only countries that recognized Jordan’s annexation and occupation.
