The bill was proposed by Aryeh Eldad, a right-wing National Union Party member of Knesset, or the Israeli parliament, and outlines a plan to create two states along the Jordan River, one Israeli and one Palestinian.
Eldad said that with 70 percent of the population Palestinian, Jordan is already a Palestinian state.
“Jordan is the Palestinian state,” he said in the Knesset assembly.
Under his proposal, Palestinian living in the West Bank will have a choice between becoming Israeli residents but citizens of the Palestinian state in Jordan, or to become Israeli residents without citizenship or voting rights in either country.
The remarks struck a chord in Amman, where Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Na’sr Jouda summoned the Israeli ambassador Ya’aqov Rosen and demanded the bill be withdrawn.
The bill passed the preliminary vote in the Knesset, with 53 Knesset members voting in favor. It is now up for debate in the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees.
Jouda stressed the Jordanian position supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state that would be built on “national Palestinian land” and that this was a “high strategic Jordanian interest.”
Israeli President Shimon Peres was quick to pour water on the fire and openly criticized the proposed bill on Wednesday.
The idea that Jordan should take over the welfare of the Palestinians was a “baseless hallucination” Peres told Israel Radio.
Peres said the lawmaker’s intervention into Jordan’s internal affairs was an irresponsible provocation. The Israeli president said the solution to the Palestinian problem should be made with Palestinians on Palestinian land, not on account of a third party.
The incident is not the first time Eldad has made headlines. Last year Eldad said that any Israeli leader who makes territorial concessions should be given the death penalty, referring to an interpretation of treason in the Penal Law.
The bill is also likely to encounter criticism from the United States, as Washington supports a two-state solution which would include Israel and a future Palestinian state, whereas Eldad’s proposal posits an alternative to a Palestinian state in the West Bank.
The current Israeli government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, has been reluctant to embrace the two-state solution.
The Jordanian prime minister Nadir A-Dhahbi said this bill was “absolutely unacceptable” to Jordan, and that Amman would take care of the matter at the highest level, according to the Jordanian daily A-Rai.
Eldad was unperturbed by the commotion that his remarks caused.
“No one can reprimand me just because Jordan is Palestinian,” he told the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, defending his claim as a “proven historical fact that no one can dispute.”
The Hashemite Monarchy is nothing but an artificial entity created by British colonialists and doomed to fade away, Eldad said.
Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994. It was the third member of the Arab League to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel after Egypt and Mauritania.