The Palestinian Between Samson, Megiddo, and Jerusalem
From Palestinian Steadfastness to the Arab Geostrategic Depth Model
By Hassan Hussein Al-Wali
Scientific Adviser and Researcher
Researcher and Strategic Adviser in Political Theory and Conflict Governance
Cairo — Arab Republic of Egypt
27 October 2026
Research Reference: HHW-SOV-2803–2026
Despite the pain, Gaza’s steadfastness, amid the rubble, tents, and routes of displacement, has offered some of the highest expressions of remaining steadfast on the land. One phrase has taken root, encapsulating the Palestinian relationship with the land:
“By God’s covenant, we will not leave.”
In Cairo, carrying all its emotional, humanitarian, national, and historical meanings, another phrase resonated through platforms and official positions, moving beyond the limits of a slogan until it became a sovereign position:
“Displacement is a red line.”
Only a short geographical distance separates the two phrases, yet together they encapsulate a much larger equation.
The first expresses the Palestinian will to remain in place.
The second expresses a state’s recognition that uprooting the Palestinian from that place does not affect the Palestinian alone, but extends to its own national security, borders, and the future of its region.
In Gaza, the Palestinian says:
I will not leave.
In Cairo, the sovereign position of the Egyptian state rises:
Displacement will not be a solution.
Here, in my assessment, an equation emerged that deserves to be understood as more than a position associated with the Gaza war.
A geostrategic model has emerged.
The Palestinian maintained his presence in place, while Egypt constituted the direct geographical and political depth rejecting the transfer of that Palestinian outside his land, and the broader Arab position provided this rejection with political and regional support.
In other words, we came to face three interconnected layers:
Palestinian steadfastness on the land → Direct Egyptian depth → Broader Arab support.
This does not mean that Egypt alone “protected Gaza,” nor that other factors of power were absent from the scene. Rather, geography made Egypt the Arab state most directly connected to the equation of displacement from the Strip. The Palestinian’s continued presence in Gaza therefore shifted from being solely an issue of solidarity to an issue that also intersects with Egyptian national security.
But the significance of this model may extend beyond protection from displacement.
If geostrategic depth can constrain the ability of overwhelming power to reshape geography unilaterally, then it may also contribute to something broader: the restoration of strategic balance.
Such balance is not an end in itself. Its value lies in creating conditions in which politics can recover space from destructive ideological imaginaries, and in which regional stability can be built on respect for the rights of peoples and the sovereignty of states.
Here begins the idea I seek to discuss:
If this geostrategic depth contributed to making the uprooting of Palestinians from Gaza more complex and costly, can a similar function be constructed to protect Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem — and, through that protection, contribute to a wider regional balance?
And which state is positioned by geography to occupy, in relation to the West Bank, the corresponding position that Egypt occupies in relation to Gaza?
Geography leads us to:
Jordan.
But reaching Jordan does not mean that the answer has already been settled.
Rather, this is where the real test of this article begins:
Is Jordan prepared to perform this function?
Does it possess, alongside geographical necessity, sufficient state instruments, security interests, and political and diplomatic capacity to become the direct depth of the West Bank and Jerusalem?
And if Jordan’s capacity alone is insufficient, can Egypt, supported by a broader Arab position, support Jordan in performing this function?
This is the hypothesis I seek to argue.
To understand why it is necessary, however, we must first return to the constant throughout this entire geography:
The Palestinian.
The Palestinian Is the Constant
From Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem, the instruments of power and control change, but the Palestinian remains present.
In Gaza, the Palestinian has faced a devastating war, widespread killing, repeated displacement, destruction of the urban environment and infrastructure, and pressure on the space in which he can live and move.
In the West Bank, he faces settlement expansion, land confiscation, settler violence, outposts and roads, demolitions, movement restrictions, and legal and administrative measures that reshape his relationship with the land.
In Jerusalem, demography intersects with settlement, planning, demolition, eviction, identity, the sacred, and sovereignty.
Yet the Palestinian is not merely a number within these processes.
He is a human being, a society, a memory, and an identity, possessing historical and civilizational depth in the place, a long national and struggle-based experience, and a recurring capacity to reproduce society despite wars, refuge, occupation, settlement, and attempts at uprooting.
This is the constant.
The variable, however, is the way this Palestinian presence is perceived within different currents of the Israeli ideological imaginary.
The Palestinian is one, but Gaza is not the West Bank within this imaginary, the West Bank is not Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is not Gaza.
It is therefore not enough to ask:
What does Israel do to the Palestinian?
We must also ask:
What Palestinian does the Israeli imaginary envision when it looks at Gaza? What meaning does Palestinian presence acquire when the West Bank becomes “Judea and Samaria”? And what does Palestinian presence represent when the conflict reaches Jerusalem?
Gaza… and the Samson Complex
I have previously used the concept of the “Samson Complex” as an analytical tool for understanding one dimension of the relationship between power, fear, humiliation, revenge, and destruction in the Israeli approach to Gaza.
By this, I do not mean that there is an official Israeli doctrine bearing this name, nor that military decisions are taken on the basis of a biblical story.
It is an analytical lens for examining the imaginary.
The story of Samson itself is connected to Gaza: power, then captivity, humiliation, and the loss of sight, followed by a return to power in a final moment ending in an act of destruction in which the temple collapses upon Samson and his adversaries together.
When the shock of October 7, 2023 came, carrying for Israel a border breach, security and military failure, and a profound blow to the image of deterrence, it became legitimate to ask:
Did the shock invoke a Samson-like pattern within the political and social imaginary, in which humiliation becomes a driver for restoring power through broad destructive punishment?
This trajectory can be tested:
Breach → Shock → Humiliation → Revenge → Destructive Power.
It is an interpretive hypothesis, not a substitute for analysing actual military and political decisions and interests.
Yet it helps explain how power, at certain moments, can move from targeting a military capability to affecting the environment in which society itself lives.
Here, the human being is no longer the sole object of power.
Place itself becomes part of it.
The West Bank… The Palestinian Inside the “Land”
The West Bank reveals a different relationship.
Within Israeli religious and nationalist discourse, it is not merely the West Bank.
It is “Judea and Samaria.”
The distinction is not merely linguistic. It moves geography from the contemporary political map into an ideological and biblical map.
In Gaza, the Palestinian may appear as the enemy who breached the border, struck the state, and became an object of revenge and restored deterrence.
In the West Bank, however, the Palestinian exists within the very land that religious and nationalist currents consider part of the historical “Land of Israel.”
He is not merely an enemy facing the land.
He is another presence within the land.
Settlement, therefore, becomes more than a housing project.
It can perform the function of transforming narrative into geography, and geography into a political reality that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
And What About Megiddo?
Here, I advance a more cautious hypothesis.
Megiddo and “Armageddon” evoke an imaginary of the great battle and the end, but it would be inaccurate to transform this directly into a doctrine attributed to Zionism as a whole. The apocalyptic imaginary associated with Armageddon is also strongly present within Evangelical Christian and Christian Zionist currents.
I therefore use Megiddo as a question, not as an answer:
Do some religious and nationalist currents contain a reading of Palestinian presence in this geography that goes beyond the contemporary political dispute and places it within a broader historical or epic conception of conflict over land and destiny?
Even before resolving this question, we can use a concept that is more open to testing:
The Anxiety of the Promised Land.
That is, the tension generated by the existence of another people, rooted in the place and committed to their political rights, within a geography whose ideological narrative seeks to transform its historical claim into present sovereignty.
The West Bank therefore differs from Gaza:
Gaza evokes, in our hypothesis, the complex of revenge and destruction.
The West Bank evokes the dilemma of land and the competing human presence upon it.
Jerusalem… The Conflict Over the Center
Then comes Jerusalem.
Palestinian presence there does not compete over land alone, but over sovereignty, identity, narrative, and the sacred.
Here, state instruments intersect with religious symbolism in an exceptional manner.
Planning, settlement, demolition, eviction, law, residency, and roads cease to be separate files when their cumulative impact is examined.
They operate within a larger question:
To whom does the center belong?
If Gaza evokes Samson, and the West Bank evokes biblical land and the competing presence upon it, Jerusalem evokes sovereignty over the center of the narrative itself.
When the Imaginary Becomes a State
Here we reach the core of the problem.
The imaginary alone does not demolish a house, build a settlement, close a crossing, draw a road, or move a tank.
But matters change when the imaginary finds its way into a political project and then into the state.
At that point, the narrative acquires institutions, ideology acquires a government, the project acquires an army, and the map acquires law, planning, settlement, security, and borders.
The process then moves through:
Ideological Imaginary → Political Project → State → Institutions and Power → Legal, Security, and Spatial Measures → Demographic and Geographic Effects.
This is why Palestinian steadfastness alone is insufficient.
The Palestinian is not confronting an idea alone.
He is confronting an idea when it possesses the instruments of the state.
But the Imaginary Was Not Exclusively Israeli
Intellectual integrity requires that we do not search for ideological inevitability on only one side.
Within parts of the Arab and Islamic spheres, and among some Palestinian components, conceptions developed that viewed the relationship with Israel not as a political conflict capable of ending through a historical settlement, but as an extended confrontation with a predetermined conclusion.
This tendency acquired a new regional dimension after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when the Palestinian question became a central component of the discourse and regional project of the Islamic Republic, which later intersected with Arab and Palestinian forces and movements.
Within this environment, religious texts and narratives were invoked to present the modern political conflict as an extension of a final religious battle.
Among the examples worthy of examination is a narrative circulated in wording close to:
“You will be east of the river, and they will be west of it.”
The narrative has a transmitted basis, but its chain of transmission has been judged weak by those who have weakened it. It therefore cannot be transformed into religious certainty upon which the future of peoples and states is constructed.
But the more important issue here is not one of Hadith scholarship.
It is political:
What happens when a weak religious narrative is transformed into a map of the future?
Palestine, Jordan, and Israel then cease to be spaces inhabited by peoples and states whose relations and interests politics may reorganize, and instead become a stage prepared in advance for a battle awaiting its moment.
When Two Imaginaries Intersect Despite Their Contradiction
It is not legitimate to equate an occupying state possessing an army and control over territory with a people living under occupation or with a movement resisting it.
But this does not prevent the existence of a functional intersection between two contradictory imaginaries.
The first may say that the land is a historical right that cannot be relinquished.
The second may say that Israel’s existence is temporary and that recognition of its continued existence is impermissible.
Through two contradictory paths, both arrive at one conclusion:
There can be no final settlement; history has already decided the future.
When that happens, the space available to politics narrows.
Oslo… An Attempt to Restore Politics
The 1993 Oslo Accords can be strongly criticised: the asymmetry of power, the postponement of core issues, the continuation of settlement activity, and the failure of the transitional phase to lead to a Palestinian state.
Yet another meaning of Oslo should not be overlooked.
It was an attempt, however incomplete, to say that history does not condemn Palestinians and Israelis to eternal war.
It was an attempt to move from:
Mutual Negation
to:
Recognition, Negotiation, and Settlement.
This opportunity did not fail because of a single factor.
Settlement expansion, violence, assassinations, power asymmetry, failures of implementation, political transformations, and regional and international interventions all contributed to the outcome.
But ideologies rejecting settlement on both sides also contributed to narrowing the space that politics attempted to open.
This is the lesson from Oslo that matters to us today:
When geography becomes prophecy, the space for politics narrows.
The reverse proposition is equally important:
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When geography is reorganized through balance, rights, sovereignty, and state interests, politics can regain space from prophecy.
Gaza… The Model from Which We Should Learn
Here we return to the starting point.
Gaza does not offer us only an experience of steadfastness.
In my assessment, it offers the nucleus of a geostrategic model.
The Palestinian remained on his land.
Egypt, by virtue of geography and national security, rejected transforming Sinai into a space for his displacement.
And the broader Arab position provided political support for rejecting displacement.
The model therefore becomes:
A Steadfast Palestinian + An Arab Neighboring State That Regards His Continued Presence as a National Security Interest + Arab Support = Greater Capacity to Resist Uprooting.
This does not mean that the threat has ended or that the model is complete.
But the experience demonstrated that steadfastness becomes stronger when behind it stands a state that does not regard protecting the Palestinian merely as solidarity, but as part of protecting its own strategic space.
The question now is:
How can this equation be transferred from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem?
Jordan… Is It Prepared for the Function?
Geography presents Jordan as the natural candidate.
But geography alone is insufficient.
Three conditions must be tested.
Does the interest exist?
Yes. Any large-scale displacement from the West Bank eastward would directly affect Jordan, while Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water, settlement expansion, and the future of a Palestinian state are all connected to vital Jordanian interests.
Do the state and its instruments exist?
Jordan possesses a state, institutions, an army, security services, international relations, a historical role in Jerusalem, and Hashemite custodianship over the holy sites.
Is Jordanian capacity sufficient on its own?
Here the answer becomes more cautious.
Jordan alone does not possess a balance of power that would allow it to confront all the pressures associated with reshaping the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Transferring the Gaza model, therefore, does not simply mean:
Egypt → Gaza
Jordan → West Bank
Another layer is required.
From the Egyptian Model in Gaza to Supporting Jordan in the West Bank
If Egypt constitutes the direct depth of Gaza, Jordan constitutes the natural direct depth of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The difference is that the Jordanian function requires broader Arab strategic support.
Here Egypt becomes part of the solution once again.
Not by replacing Jordan in the West Bank, but by supporting Jordan’s capacity to perform its geostrategic function.
The equation therefore becomes:
In Gaza:
Palestine → Egypt Directly → Arab Support.
For the West Bank and Jerusalem:
Palestine → Jordan Directly → Egyptian Support → Broader Arab Support.
This, in my assessment, is more precise than dividing the Palestinian question into Arab spheres of influence.
We are not dividing Palestine between Egypt and Jordan.
We are constructing circles of geostrategic protection around the Palestinian constant, according to geography, capacity, and national security interests.
Why Egypt in the Second Circle of the West Bank?
Because Egypt is not politically distant from the West Bank.
The Egyptian position itself deals with the unity of Palestinian territory and rejects displacement, annexation, and demographic alteration in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
Cairo also recognises Jordan’s role and the Hashemite custodianship in Jerusalem.
This allows us to imagine a structure in which Egyptian and Jordanian functions do not compete, but complement each other:
Jordan at the forefront by virtue of geography.
Egypt behind it with its Arab political, military, and diplomatic weight.
And the broader Arab sphere behind both.
Protection of the West Bank could then shift from being a Jordanian burden borne alone into a function of shared Arab security led by the state of direct geographical contact and supported by Arab strategic depth.
Saudi Arabia and the Arab Sphere… Support, Not Substitution
Within this structure, the role of Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab sphere also becomes clearer.
Saudi Arabia is not a “third party” in a geographical division of the Palestinian file.
Its function is strategic support for the entire sphere, through the political, economic, Arab, and Islamic weight it possesses.
We therefore do not have three separate roles, but a layered structure:
The Palestinian at the center.
Then the neighboring state most directly connected to the threatened geography.
Then the central Arab state capable of supporting it.
Then the broader Arab sphere, providing legitimacy and political, economic, and diplomatic weight.
This layered structure should not be understood as the construction of a new regional axis. Its purpose is precisely the opposite: to create sufficient balance so that no ideological project can convert overwhelming power into an unrestricted capacity to determine the geography, rights, and future of other peoples.
The Proposed Model
The model I am arguing for can therefore be summarized as follows:
Gaza:
Palestinian Steadfastness + Direct Egyptian Depth + Arab Support.
The West Bank and Jerusalem:
Palestinian Steadfastness + Direct Jordanian Depth + Egyptian Support + Arab Support.
The objective is not to create an alliance for war.
Nor is it to reproduce the logic of regional axes.
Nor is it to place Palestinian decision-making under anyone’s guardianship.
On the contrary:
The Palestinian is at the center of the model because he is the holder of the land, the right, and the national decision.
The function of geostrategic depth is to make his uprooting, displacement, or the dismantling of the possibility of his state more costly and more difficult politically, in security terms, diplomatically, and economically.
But protection is only the first function.
The second is balance.
For when the Palestinian is protected from forced removal, when neighboring states possess sufficient capacity to defend their legitimate security interests, and when the broader Arab sphere provides political, economic, and diplomatic support, the resulting architecture can help reduce the asymmetry that allows ideological projects to impose irreversible facts on the ground.
This is the difference between solidarity and geostrategic depth.
Solidarity tells the Palestinian:
We stand with you.
Geostrategic depth says:
Your uprooting affects our security as well; therefore, protecting you becomes a function of the state.
Strategic balance adds a further proposition:
Protecting rights and sovereignty is not merely a defensive act; it is a condition for restoring politics and producing sustainable regional stability.
From Geostrategic Depth to Strategic Balance
The purpose of this architecture therefore extends beyond protecting the Palestinian from displacement, annexation, or the erosion of the territorial possibility of his state.
Its broader function is to restore strategic balance.
Balance here does not mean constructing an Arab ideological axis against an Israeli ideological axis. Nor does it mean preparing the region for another cycle of confrontation.
It means building sufficient state capacity around the Palestinian space to prevent overwhelming asymmetry of power from allowing any ideological vision to reshape geography unilaterally or deny the legitimate rights of other peoples.
The sequence therefore becomes:
Palestinian Protection → Geostrategic Depth → Strategic Balance → Political Space → Regional Stability.
The importance of balance is that it can reopen the political space that destructive ideological imaginaries progressively close.
When no actor possesses unchecked capacity to translate its ideological conception of history into territorial facts imposed upon others, politics regains relevance. Negotiation becomes possible again. Sovereignty acquires practical meaning. And coexistence ceases to depend solely on the intentions of the stronger party.
This is where the Egyptian vision acquires broader significance.
In this reading, the logic expressed through Egypt’s regional posture is not merely one of border protection or rejection of displacement. It points toward a wider conception of stability: that durable regional stability requires balance, and that balance must rest on respect for the legitimate rights of all the peoples of the region and the sovereignty of their states.
This principle matters because it changes the purpose of power itself.
Power is no longer required to eliminate the other, redraw his geography, or impose an ideological conclusion upon history.
Its function becomes to establish enough balance to prevent domination, protect sovereignty, preserve rights, and return unresolved conflicts to the political sphere.
Under such conditions, destructive ideological imaginaries do not necessarily disappear. But their capacity to become state policy, territorial transformation, or permanent conflict can begin to recede before a regional order governed increasingly by interests, rights, sovereignty, and political settlement.
The proposed architecture is therefore not an architecture for war.
It is an architecture of balance.
And its strategic purpose can be expressed as:
Geostrategic Depth → Strategic Balance → Protection of Rights and Sovereignty → Political Space → Regional Stability.
From the Imaginary to the Logic of the State
Here the argument becomes complete.
If the ideological imaginary was able to transform itself into a state, law, army, settlement, planning, and a capacity to alter geography, it is not enough to confront it with a counter-imaginary.
Nor is it enough to confront it with Palestinian steadfastness alone.
Arab depth itself must be transformed into the logic of the state and the capacity of the state.
But state capacity should not reproduce the destructive logic it seeks to constrain.
Its purpose must be balance.
This creates two opposing trajectories.
The first is:
Ideological Imaginary → Political Project → State Power → Spatial and Demographic Transformation → Continuing Conflict.
The alternative proposed here is:
Geostrategic Depth → State Capacity → Strategic Balance → Protection of Rights and Sovereignty → Political Space → Regional Stability.
The alternative to destructive ideology is therefore not another destructive ideology.
It is the logic of the state, strategic balance, political settlement, and mutual recognition of rights and sovereignty.
Gaza offered the first model:
A Palestinian who does not leave, Egypt that regards displacement as a red line, and an Arab position supporting both.
The West Bank and Jerusalem require the model to be developed further:
A steadfast Palestinian, Jordan viewing his protection as part of protecting its national security, Egypt supporting Jordan, and a broader Arab sphere raising the cost of annexation, displacement, and the alteration of geography.
Then the Palestinian will no longer be the only constant.
Behind him will stand a depth that is also constant.
Perhaps this is the equation we need for the future:
Steadfastness keeps the human being in place.
The neighboring state protects the immediate strategic space.
Arab depth protects the neighboring state from standing alone before an asymmetry of power.
Strategic balance protects the region from allowing ideological supremacy to determine the future of its peoples.
In this way, we move from Arab solidarity with Palestine toward a geostrategic architecture for the protection of Palestine and the restoration of regional strategic balance.
Its purpose is not to produce another war, but to prevent another uprooting, protect the possibility of a Palestinian state, preserve the sovereignty and security of the states of the region, and keep politics and a just settlement possible.
The ultimate objective is therefore larger than the prevention of displacement.
It is to create a regional environment in which the rights of peoples, the sovereignty of states, strategic balance, and political settlement reinforce one another as foundations of stability.
When the Palestinian in Gaza says:
“By God’s covenant, we will not leave,”
and Egypt says:
“Displacement is a red line,”
the question we should carry from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem is:
Who can transform “we will not leave” there as well, from a steadfast popular will into a geostrategic equation that protects both the human being and the place — and from that protection into a balance capable of reopening the path to politics and stability?
The answer I put forward for discussion is:
Jordan on the line of direct contact, Egypt in its strategic depth, and the Arabs behind them — with the Palestinian at the center, steadfast on his land and the holder of his right and his state.
Not as an architecture for another confrontation, but as an architecture of balance capable of protecting rights, preserving sovereignty, restoring political possibility, and opening a path toward a stable region for all its peoples and states.
Keywords
Palestine; Palestinian Steadfastness; Geostrategic Depth; Arab Geostrategic Depth; Strategic Balance; Regional Strategic Balance; Regional Stability; Gaza Strip; West Bank; Jerusalem; Egypt; Jordan; Saudi Arabia; Palestinian Displacement; Forced Displacement; Settlement Expansion; Demographic Transformation; Spatial Transformation; National Security; Arab National Security; Geostrategic Protection; Strategic Depth; Samson Complex; Megiddo; Armageddon; Promised Land Anxiety; Ideological Imaginary; Political Imaginary; Destructive Ideologies; Oslo Accords; Two-State Solution; Palestinian Statehood; Hashemite Custodianship; Egyptian National Security; Jordanian National Security; Arab Strategic Support; State Capacity; State Sovereignty; Rights of Peoples; Logic of the State; Political Settlement; Conflict Governance.
