The Jabotinskyists were set on Transjordan. The Kahanists were set on the "Nile-to-the-Euphrates".
But to me, the most likely scenario seems to be the Halakhist securing of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
At the current rate, it seems that the Religious settlements will gain a greater degree of demographic power in the West Bank within the next 60 years. The West Bank will be consolidated as Judea District and Samaria District, with an expanded Jerusalem Metropolitan District, and the Third Temple, or at least investigatory archaeological excavations within the former edifice (currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque), will be the icing on the cake.
I think that’s the best that I can see happening with Israel consolidating its borders.
But I wonder if those who support the institution of Halakhic law into the Israeli government would conflict with the Revisionists who want to cross the Jordan River or the Kahanists who want to go much, much further.
I wonder this because I think that expanding any further in terms of Israel’s borders would be an unfeasible enterprise for the religious Zionists to support, given that
- Israel’s capital is in Jerusalem, which would make Jordan/East Bank an unwieldy territory to govern so remotely; this would necessitate a move of the capital from Jerusalem to somewhere more easterly and centric to the expanded territory.
- Expanding so far would take the focus and emphasis from off of Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish people; as noted above, the center would move somewhere else.
- Israel doesn’t have the adequate population to support the settlement of the territory
- even the ancient Kingdom of the Davidic line, which had a thin tribal presence in the immediate East Bank, was almost always hemmed in by other rival kingdoms and vulnerable to attack from the semi-desert region that dominates Jordan.
- the agriculture already sucks in Jordan; most of it takes place on the river valley, while the rest of the country is short of rainfall and prone to drought
- Crossing over Jordan would seem less like recovering Zion and saving Jewry and the Jewish people from an antagonistic world and more like a gradual migration into the useless Arabian desert (Israel, so it seems, already has trouble with settling the Negev).
- Agriculture in the East of Jordan would require non-Jewish labor.
This is why I don’t think that Crossing Jordan, as advocated by the Revisionists or the Kahanists (or the Christians here in the U.S.) is an ideal that most Religious Zionists would support.
At best, it is more of a secular ethnonationalist ideal. No, scratch that. Make it a secular irredentist ideal.
It would require a long-term selling of the idea that Israel must ensure its security by retreating and entrenching further inland rather than remain a primarily coastal state prone to Arab, Sunni Muslim onslaught. Those who would support this idea might use ancient Davidic Israel as a class example on how not to define the borders of the Israeli nation-state, and would support expansion through primarily civil settlement, albeit with less (or more, if need be) religious overtones.
At the point of crossing Jordan, it becomes less about the Jewish people’s interests and more about the Israeli people’s interests. It becomes a final negation of the diaspora – and the hopes, dreams and fears which it brought back to Israel through Aliyah – and a first confirmation of the post-Aliyah state.
This state, which has restored Judaism to the land and its former edifices, will no longer be tied to the Jewish diaspora’s aliyah, but will instead see itself as an unevolved state that has not moved or matured out of the settlement mentality that brought so many of their ancestors to the state.
This Israel will envision itself as needing to establish a larger, less minute, less prone geopoltical presence in the region, one that is less concerned with religious or ethnic concerns outside its borders and more concerned with native security and stability. This Israel will seek to center itself beyond ethnic (Tel Aviv) or religious (Jerusalem) concerns, with nationalism being an exclusively government-centric ideology; the government of this Israel will become bigger as well, with a government-derived pseudo-republican nobility.
I see this happening in Israel’s future.