Jordanian Parliament Speaker Ahmad al-Safadi said maps of ancient Israel “express a criminal mentality and malicious ambitions that cannot be tolerated.”
Moshe Phillips | Jan 14, 2025
A map of ancient Israel and Judea. Credit: Richardprins via Wikimedia Commons.
Enemies of the Jewish state hate cartology—the study of mapmaking—as the world was reminded again last week in the commotion over a map of biblical Israel.
Some Israel-hater noticed that the X (Twitter) account of the Israeli Foreign Ministry included a map showing the biblical borders of the ancient kingdoms of Judea and Israel, including the parts that extended eastward across the Jordan River.
The text asks, “Did you know that the Kingdom of Israel was established 3,000 years ago?” The answer is that, unfortunately, most people do not know that because the facts about the boundaries of the Land of Israel are one of those topics that mainstream media outlets and left-leaning professors never discuss.
The text also mentions King David and King Solomon, and other personalities and events from the biblical period. The Washington Post and the history faculty at Columbia University don’t like talking about this for good reason; they remind us that Israel’s roots in the Holy Land are deep and strong, reaching back literally thousands of years.
The foreign ministry post concludes with another simple statement of fact: “The Jewish people in the Diaspora continued to look forward to the revival of their powers and capabilities and the rebuilding of their state, which was declared in the State of Israel in 1948 to become the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Hysterical comments about the map quickly erupted across the Arab world.
Jordanian leaders were especially overheated in their response. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said it “condemns in the strongest terms the maps of the region” posted by the Israelis because they include territories that they “claim are historical for Israel, including parts of the occupied Palestinian territories, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.”
Those maps are “racist,” the Jordanians added, using what is fast becoming the most overused word in the English language used to attack Israel. Actually, the maps are exactly the opposite of racism since Israel is a multiracial state in which all groups are treated equally, by contrast with the Arab world, where blacks are victims of genocide (Sudan), are enslaved (Mauritania) and are massacred if they even approach the border in the hope of entering (Saudi Arabia).
Moreover, Israel does not have a law mandating the death penalty for selling land to members of a particular ethnic group, but the Palestinian Authority does—and that group is the Jews.
The speaker of the Jordanian parliament, Ahmad al-Safadi, said the maps “express a criminal mentality and malicious ambitions that cannot be ignored or tolerated.”
Not to be outdone, the P.A. declared that it rejects “alleged maps of historical Israel that include Arab lands.” Official P.A. spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh blasted the “alleged map with a comment fabricating an Israeli history dating back thousands of years in line with the Hebrew allegations.”
According to Abu Rudeineh, “this behavior constitutes a flagrant violation of all international legitimacy resolutions and international law.” If that were the case, of course, every copy of the Bible would have to be confiscated or destroyed since it is chock full of references to the ancient borders of the Land of Israel.
The Palestinian Arab writer Yaseen Izeddeen expressed outrage that “the current rulers of Israel declare that Jordan is part of the Land of Israel, and these are old positions that go back more than a hundred years.”
Izeddeen may have been referring to the fact that it was a little more than 100 years ago that the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine sliced the country in two and turned most of it into the artificial country of “Jordan.”
The year was 1922. The British colonialists needed to give Abdullah bin Al-Hussein a “country” to rule over after they had disappointed him by giving the throne of Iraq to his brother. So, they severed the eastern 78% of Palestine and handed it to him on a silver platter as a consolation prize, dubbing it “Transjordan.”
They picked that name not because the people living there were ethnically “Trans-Jordanian.” They were no such thing. They were no different from Arabs living on the western side of the Jordan. They called it “Trans-Jordan” because that means “the other side of the Jordan.”
The very fact that its name is based on a negative—that it’s not on That Side of the river—instead of on something having to do with the actual identity of its residents illustrates how phony the country’s creation was.
Later on, Abdullah and his tribe, the Hashemites, decided to change the name again in order to reinforce their dictatorial rule. So it became “the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” Again, the arbitrary changing of its name shows how inauthentic the country was and is.
No wonder all these Jordanian and Palestinian Arab spokesmen are furious about last week’s posting of a map that reminds the public of Israel’s ancient borders. They don’t want the public to know that Jordan is an artificial entity—that “Palestinian” identity was invented to undermine the Jews and that Jews ruled the Land of Israel for countless centuries.
Politically speaking, the facts of Middle East cartology are very inconvenient.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
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