Last year, International Intelligence explained how the names Israel and Palestine (Philistine) have been applied alternately throughout the ages to the same territory, depending on the power in possession. This point is being made by an international organisation called the Jordan Is Palestine Committee which has rightly pointed out that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a Twentieth Century creation occupying territory that was part of Palestine. Unfortunately, the organisation draws the wrong conclusion from this, namely that the Jordan River should form an international frontier between Israel and Palestine, thus missing the point that the two names designate the same territory.
The State of Israel is one of the most ancient in the world, having been founded circa 1200BC (conventional chronology) or circa 1400BC (revised chronology). It lost its sovereignty when it was forced to accept Assyrian suzerainty in 743BC and ceased to exist circa 721BC when Sargon II, King of Assyria, deported its inhabitants. Over two thousand-five hundred years later in 1948, the State of Israel was reborn. It was immediately confronted with the question of the definition of its frontiers, a problem which thirty-five years later remain unsolved.
The River Jordan is not the present frontier of Israel as The Administered Territories have not been annexed. The river has never been the frontier of Israel. Reference to an historical atlas will show that throughout nearly all five centuries of its existence was the first State of Israel occupied territory on both sides of the River Jordan, which thus flowed through the heart of the country.
The frontier was marked by the Syrian Desert, east of the Jordan Valley, until sovereignty was lost to the Assyrian Empire. In 732BC, the River Jordan was made a border (not an international frontier) by the Assyrian Government to demarcate the area of direct Assyrian administration from the vassal states of which Israel was one. Twelve years later, Israel ceased to exist when it was annexed and made part of the Assyrian Province of Samaria.
The Ottoman Empire contained an administration unit known as Palestine and therefore the reference to that territory in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 left the question of its delineation open. Roman Palestine (135-358AD) and Arab Palestine (638-1099AD) each included territory on both sides of the River Jordan. Thereafter, administratively the name fell into disuse. In 1920, the northern part of the Jordan Valley became part of the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. The rest was constituted the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1923 however, the past of Palestine east of the River Jordan was made the separate Mandate of Transjordan with Abdullah bin Hussein, a member of the Hashemite family and thus a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad as Emir. In 1946, it was granted independence with Abdulla as King and changed its name to Jordan.
The River Jordan has thus served only as an international frontier from 1946 to 1948 when it divided the territory of the British Mandate in Palestine from that of the newly independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Jordan Valley is a natural geographical unit with the river as its axis, not its border. That is why Zionists have always claimed it “in toto” including the headwaters which was in the Republic of Lebanon.
Update March 2023: On July 31, 1988, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan renounced sovereignty over the West Bank thereby reinstating the Jordan River as an international frontier.
The above paper by EAC Goodman was written in 1982 as far as he can recall but was never published. He cannot remember either at this distance who published International Intelligence nor what sort of journal it was, nor indeed if it was a journal.
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