How Israeli Apartheid Works in the Jordan Valley, 1967-Present

On June 19, 1967, just a week after Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 War, Israel’s cabinet decided to annex the Jordan Valley. Israel’s eastern border would now be the Jordan River, while the adjacent Jordan Valley would remain under Israeli control.

For Israel, the Jordan Valley was a godsend: Its land mass expansive, location strategic and Palestinian population small. It provided “maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs.” A part of historic Palestine without [too many] Palestinians in it! A match made in heaven!

Today, the Jordan Valley is ground zero for Israeli apartheid. Palestinians are 80% of the population but are confined to living in enclaves in just 5% of the land. Israeli Jews constitute 20% of the population but control 95% of the land.

Most Jordan Valley Palestinians live in Jericho and refugee camps near it; the rest are scattered across dozens of villages and small herding and Bedouin communities. 

Most are not connected to the water grid and have to pay 8X more for water than even other Palestinians in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley receive at least 18 times more water than their Palestinian counterparts. 

Palestinians in the Jordan Valley are 100 times more likely to have demolition orders on their homes than be granted permits to build homes. No surprise they constituted 70% of all Palestinians ethnically cleansed from the West Bank in recent years and are 18 times more likely than other West Bank Palestinians to have their homes demolished by Israel. 

So how did we get here?

On August 1, 1967, less than two months after the war’s end, Israel’s annexation of the Jordan Valley was already underway. Nine large tracts of land in the Jordan Valley and a strip of land running its eastern length were declared “closed military zones.”

Then came the question, what to do with the Palestinians living there?

Trigger warning ahead: The Israeli army mounted loudspeakers on cars blasting out calls to leave. Israeli helicopters flew overhead dangling dead Palestinian bodies as a scare tactic. Israeli soldiers dynamited Palestinian homes to incentivize flight. The Israeli army attacked displaced Palestinians attempting to return. The Israeli army then provided buses and trucks to the local population to transport them to the border with Jordan.

By the year’s end, the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley was mostly complete. Israel had forced out some 65,000 of the Jordan Valley’s 93,000 Palestinians in just a few months. By some estimates, as many as 88% of the Jordan Valley’s residents were emptied, most of them refugees, primarily from the Jericho area, al-‘Ajajra, al-Jiftlik, Aqabat Jaber and Ein as-Sultan. 

In 1976, Yigal Allon, architect of Israel’s occupation policies at the time, explained the goal was:

“Absolute Israeli control over the strategic zone to the east of the dense Arab population, concentrated as it is on the crest of the hills and westward. I am referring to the arid zone that lies between the Jordan River to the east, and the eastern chain of the Samarian and Judean mountains to the west--from Mt. Gilboa in the north through the Judean desert, until it joins the Negev desert. The area of this desert zone is only about 700 square miles and it is almost devoid of population.”

In 1976, Israel told the world it was going to keep the Jordan Valley forever. I mean, there were so few Arabs living in it, how could they be expected not to annex it?

Israel’s domination of the Jordan Valley persisted during the Oslo Years. The entire region fell under Area C, where Israel retained complete civilian and security control.

In a leaked recording, Bibi Netanyahu confessed that, as Prime Minister in 1997, he threatened to sabotage the entire Oslo Process for the sake of preserving complete Israeli domination in the Jordan Valley. The video is stunning. Netayahu said:

“Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone.” Netanyahu then refused to sign the 1997 Hebron Agreement unless both his counterparts, Yasser Arafat, and the United States, both agreed “Israel & Israel alone gets to define what a military facility is.” 

The point became even clearer in the 2000 Camp David Accords, when the Israeli negotiating team insisted on maintaining control over large parts of the Jordan Valley and the Jordan River Shoreline. As US Diplomat and Israel apologist Dennis Ross put it, “the Jordan Valley was an area that the Israelis felt they either could not give up or could give up only in part.”

Since the death of the Oslo Process, Israel’s apartheid rule in the Jordan Valley has intensified. In May 2005, Israel began denying Palestinians the right to move there, such as Palestinians from Hebron, Bethlehem or Nablus who find work or marry Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. In fact, anyone living in the Jordan Valley on the eve of May 2005 whose official address was not in the Jordan Valley [recall Israel controls the West Bank population registry] lost their right to continue living there.

The official US recognition of Israel’s apartheid rule in the Jordan Valley came with President Trump’s 2019-20 “Peace to Prosperity” Plan, which stated the point directly: “The Jordan Valley, which is critical for Israel’s national security, will be under Israeli sovereignty.”

In Mar. 2024, Israel declared another 8,000 dunams of the Jordan Valley state land, the largest such land confiscation in three decades.

Israeli soldiers in the Jordan Valley are not even shy about the goal of Israel’s military occupation of the region. “They [the Palestinians] shouldn’t be here. Why don’t they go to Jordan?” one Israeli soldier said. 

The army is aided and abetted by the Jordan Valley settlers, many of whose self-appointed “day job” is to harass, bully and terrorize Palestinians. 

Israel seems unlikely to ever give up rule in the Jordan Valley. It’s large, strategic and sparsely populated with Palestinians. This has made the region home to some of the most grotesque inequality between Jews and Palestinians and some of the worst manifestations of Israel’s violent apartheid regime.