The malicious Aqaba Canal Project: A historical perspective
A malicious geopolitical conspiracy in the history of the Middle East
A Visionary Proposal
In the early 1940s, an audacious plan emerged—an alternative to the Suez Canal that would reshape the region. Enter William L. Gordon, an American Jewish Zionist businessman, who proposed the "Aqaba Canal" to Britain.
The Grand Design
Gordon's vision was colossal: a 177-kilometer canal stretching from Aqaba on the Red Sea to Gaza on the Mediterranean. It promised to be longer, wider, and deeper than existing canals, avoiding the Suez's limitations.
A Land of Promise again!
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| Photo of Winston Churchill |
The project wasn't just about waterways. Alongside the canal, Gordon envisioned a development zone—8.5 kilometers wide and 177 kilometers long—teeming with "productive" villages, towns, and industry. New Gaza, New Beersheba, and more would rise.
Controversy and Legacy
The Aqaba Canal stirred debate. Was it a strategic move or a land grab? As the Balfour Declaration loomed, tensions escalated. Ultimately, the project faded into history, but its echoes remain.
Confiscation and compensation
The plan proposed that Britain "confiscate the lands and pay the Arabs a small compensation for their desert and useless, unproductive lands."
However, it proposed an alternative, which is “for the British government to strongly argue that it needs this land to build necessary military facilities, such as a railway line, etc., considering this an urgent emergency.”
He reviewed the condition of the lands proposed to be confiscated. He said that it is "a wild, neglected, desolate, and unproductive desert area, which is why they call it a desert. It is inhabited by a few wandering nomads, and it has very few permanently settled Arab villages, and they rarely produce enough to survive."
Historically, this land “has been like this for centuries and will continue to be like this for many more centuries to come as long as nomads use it as sites for Bedouin tents.”
Based on this, the British government, Gordon believed, “will not find it difficult to obtain it through confiscation and compensation.”
No resettlement of JewsGordon accompanied his project with a lengthy CV, and it seemed that he wanted to deny any political nature of his project and to remove any suspicion of a relationship between him and the Zionist movement, which was active in transporting Jews from all over the world to settle in Palestine.
He said that his project is "developmental, will not have any connection to the Zionist Organization, and is not a project to settle Jews in Palestine." He added that the matter "should be interpreted this way, even though I am a Jew and a Zionist."
He went on to say, “I crossed Palestine and spent 20 months in Jaffa, Palestine, as a resident representative of a major export and import company in the Russian city of Odessa, my hometown, and it was a company affiliated with the Russian merchant fleet before 1912.”
He reiterated that the goal of the entire project is money. He told Churchill, "There is no ideology attached to this plan except dollars and cents. Please understand me that way." He reiterated that he was "a loyal American citizen, a good Briton, and above all, a contractor and builder."
In this context, the plan spoke about the desired relationship between Arabs and Jews in the project area. According to Gordon’s vision, they must be used to implement the project because “there are no white men”!
He said that since the land was “currently desolate and not inhabited by white men who would provide urgent support for the new railway project,” he planned to “rely on bringing together Arabs and Jews in common residential areas.” This means "developing this region and settling it entirely with Jewish and Arab agricultural villages, in which Jews and Arabs live together as close neighbors (the Arab is fine if he does not incite another Arab), and not in separate villages or isolated Jewish neighborhoods (the ghetto)."
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| The Aqaba Canal Proposed by W. L. Jordan Rejected by Winston Churchill in 1940th |
categorically, project rejection
Months passed and Gordon did not receive a response, so he wrote to Churchill again, requesting that he be informed of the appropriate department to address.
The documents reveal that consultations within the British services ended with a response sent by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Bernard Reilly, from the Navy, to Churchill’s personal secretary, saying:
"We feel that his (Gordon's) project can hardly be considered a serious contribution to solving wartime transportation problems in the Middle East."
In April 1943, after a year of study, Gordon received a letter from Churchill's office manager saying, "I inform you that he (Churchill) regrets that, under the present circumstances, he cannot give this project the encouragement you require."
The British, according to what was stated in the documents, did not give Gordon specific reasons for refusing to support his project.
However, four years later, the file was reopened again. Barely six months had passed since the announcement of the end of the British Mandate over Palestine and the establishment of Israel, when the Office of Colonial Affairs and the Department of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began examining the possibility of leaving a permanent British garrison in any of the regions of Palestine and making arrangements to defend the Suez Canal. In this context, the idea of the Aqaba-Gaza Canal was reintroduced, as was the possibility of establishing a British corridor in the Negev Desert.
According to an internal cable to the Foreign Office, Sir John Robert Chancellor, Director of the Colonial Department, said, “The Gaza-Aqaba Canal project has been studied. However, the thinking was that the engineering difficulties were very great and the project would require many millions (of pounds sterling) to implement the idea.”.
He added, "I doubt whether, in light of the changing circumstances of modern wars, we will have to resort to digging a separate canal through southern Palestine, especially since we will not maintain control there."
Regarding the defense of the Suez Canal, the idea was put forward of establishing camps for British forces near Gaza and maintaining a 16-kilometer-wide corridor along the border between Palestine and Egypt, within the Palestinian territories, to connect Gaza to Aqaba, which Britain intended to keep.
Justification
Is development, connecting continents, and enhancing industry and trade justification for stealing and seizing lands, and oppressing the capabilities and rights of peoples?!
The project was gone, shelved and forgotten, until Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, tried to revive it again in 2015 as Ben Gurion Canal, befor Gaza war start, but its legacy remains a testimony to malicious, arrogant ideas and geopolitical conspiracies.
