The Jordanian Option, Again.

Does the apparent collapse of the peace process with the Palestinians presage a comeback of the 'Jordanian option'.

By DANNY RUBENSTEIN
Passport 521 (photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Passport 521
(photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
IN EARLYOCTOBER, THE HIGHER Finance Committee for coordinating activities between the Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority met in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
This committee carries out the instructions of King Abdullah II of Jordan and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Finance Minister Hasan Abu Libdeh, head of the Palestinian delegation, and his Jordanian counterpart, Minister of Trade and Industry Umer al-Hadidi, discussed the establishment of free-trade zones between the PA and Jordan. Also discussed were the construction of a Palestinian international airport near Jericho and a series of issues under the heading “Reinforcing the Economic Ties between Jordan and Palestine.” Meetings of this kind have become a fairly routine occurrence of late, with Jordanian and Palestinian representatives meeting to discuss cooperation on just about any issue – economic, social and, especially, political.
Can we learn something about the future of relations between Jordanians and Palestinians from this? These relations have known both ups and downs ever since the Israel Defense Forces captured the West Bank from Jordanian occupation in the 1967 Six Day War. The history is well known: Following Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, King Abdullah I (the current king’s great-grandfather) annexed the West Bank to Jordan and the city of Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and the Jewish State. West Jerusalem became the capital of Israel while East Jerusalem became a small Jordanian frontier town.
Abdullah was assassinated by Palestinian nationalists in 1951 while visiting the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. His grandson, King Hussein, focused on developing the East Bank and the capital, Amman – to a great extent, at the expense of the West Bank. Between 1948 and 1967, when the Jordanians ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Amman and the East Bank were developed while the West Bank remained deprived and neglected.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them refugees displaced from Israel in the 1948 war, together with a minority who were native residents of various West Bank districts, moved over to live east of the Jordan.
In essence, the Palestinians have built the Kingdom of Jordan, becoming its economic and social backbone. Demographic estimates put the percentage of residents of Palestinian descent currently living in Jordan at anywhere between 50 to 80 percent of the total population.
(The Palestinians tend to prefer the higher estimate, while the Jordanians cite the lower one.) Palestinians have equal rights in the kingdom, and there’s no question they comprise the majority of residents of Amman, for example.
The national Palestinian movement, which since the Six Day War has manifested itself most prominently as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), battled the Jordanian regime for many years. The climax came in September 1970, dubbed “Black September” by Palestinians, when Palestinian organizations rebelled against Hussein and even attempted to assassinate him. In response, the king expelled the Palestinian resistance groups, led by Yasser Arafat, from the kingdom; several thousand were exiled to Lebanon. The PLO headquarters remained in Lebanon until 1982 when, as a result of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Arafat and his men were forced to move to Tunis. They remained in Tunis until the Oslo Accords of 1993, as a result of which they returned to the West Bank and established the Palestinian Authority.
Hussein refused to accept the loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. For years he secretly negotiated with the Israeli government on reinstating Jordanian rule in the West Bank or at least over parts of it. The Labor Party was in power during these years and its political platform included agreement to return parts of the West Bank to Jordan. This became known as the “Jordanian option,” since the alternative was full annexation of the occupied territories, as demanded by the rightwing parties, or negotiations with representatives of the Palestinians (i.e. the PLO) regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state, alongside Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, as demanded by the Israeli left.
THE REVOLUTION IN LABOR Party thinking came in 1993, as party leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres realized that the Jordanian option no longer existed and had been replaced by the Palestinian option. This was the backdrop to the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO.
The eruption of the first intifada in late 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza removed the Jordanian option from the political agenda.
Hussein realized that not only were the Palestinians opposed to Israeli rule – they were opposed to Jordanian rule, too, and preferred the PLO. Hussein feared that the riots in the West Bank would spread to the East Bank as well, as they had years earlier during Black September. As a result, in the summer of 1988, Hussein declared that there would be “complete separation” between his kingdom and the West Bank.
This history is essential to understanding the way in which events are playing out now between Jordan and the Palestinians. Back then, Hussein lost Palestinians’ trust and the West Bank because his rival, the PLO, was a much stronger political body. Today, the PLO is a much weaker, even pathetic, force that has failed to make good on its promise to create an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. All of which provides fertile ground for the Jordanians to get back into the picture with regard to the future of the West Bank.
I write this now as the peace process between Israel and the PA, which is supposed to lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, seems deeply mired. The PLO, and its leader, Abbas, have lost the Gaza Strip and their position is so tenuous that the only leverage that they can bring to bear is a threat to dismantle the Palestinian government.
What will happen if the PA is dismantled? Israel would not agree to reinstate full military rule in the West Bank, so the almost inevitable result would be complete chaos. That’s what happened 10 years ago after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David talks under US president Bill Clinton, when Palestinian president Yasser Arafat failed to sign a deal with prime minister Ehud Barak.
The generation of Jordanian and PLO leaders who fought and killed each other in Jordan in 1971 are no longer on the scene – both Arafat and Hussein, whose personal animosity towards each other was hardly a secret, are gone. Ayoung king, who fears the Palestinians far less than his father did, rules Jordan today.
Abdullah has established his rule, bringing (relative) economic and political prosperity to his country. Over the past few years, Jordan has absorbed nearly a million refugees from the ongoing Iraq war and, prior to that, it absorbed several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees who were expelled from Kuwait.
Over the last few years, some 50,000 Palestinians have left the checkpoints and clashes with the settlers and the IDF on the West Bank and taken up residence in Jordan.
Many of them are disappointed Fatah activists and leaders who had dreamed of creating a dynamic new state in the West Bank.
Nearly all have settled in Amman, making their home in the luxurious new suburbs. Many of them have integrated into Jordan’s highereducation system, which attracts thousands of students from the the Near and Far East. Indeed, some 6,000 Arab citizens of Israel currently study in Jordan.
In the Kingdom of Jordan, there is still a differentiation between Jordanians of Palestinian descent and “native” Jordanians. But the distinction has become increasingly blurred. For example, most opposition groups, which generally are based on the Islamic movements and especially on the Muslim Brotherhood, are made up of Jordanians and Palestinians in equal numbers.
Throughout my years as a journalist, I’ve regularly asked Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem how they feel when visiting Amman. I have never heard any Palestinian say he feels like a foreigner.
Palestinians might feel like foreigners in every other Arab country, whether in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and certainly across North Africa.
But not in Jordan. The dialect of Arabic used, which varies from country to country, and from region to region in the Arab world, is absolutely identical in Jordan and Palestine.
Sometimes I ask acquaintances from Jerusalem and Ramallah where they stayed while visiting Jordan. Not once did I hear that any of them had stayed in a hotel. Every single one of them, without exception, has family in Jordan; sons or daughters, brothers or sisters – and that’s where they stay. Many West Bank residents hold partial or full Jordanian citizenship.
And not only does the wider Palestinian public feel at home in Jordan, but so do the political activists and the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. Many of them feel at home in the corridors of the Jordanian government.
In the days of Arafat, there was intense rivalry and tension between the PAand Jordan over who would control the Muslim waqf religious authority over the Al-Aqsa mosque and East Jerusalem because Israel had given that control over to Jordan in the 1995 Jordanian- Israeli peace agreement. But that bitter tension is no more. The Jordanians now exercise complete control over the Mount and have invested heavily in the renovation of Al-Aqsa. They appoint the supervisors of the waqf in Jerusalem and pay their salaries. The Palestinians, who once objected so vociferously that they appointed their own supervisors to the waqf in parallel to the Jordanian appointees, barely utter a murmur today.
This is only an example of the strength of the Jordanians in contrast to the weak Palestinian Authority. The situation has progressed to the extent that it is even possible to overhear, from time to time, discussion of a renewal of the idea of the Palestinian- Jordanian confederation – and even the possibility of Israel’s participation in that confederation.
Israel would feel far more at ease and comfortable discussing the West Bank’s future with a broad and stable Jordanian monarchy that boasts a bustling and wide-open capital than it would with the Palestinians. After all, the blocs of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Jewish neighborhoods in metropolitan Jerusalem, which Israel will claim in any negotiation, comprise nearly one-third of the future Palestinian state.
And so, the question is: Does the collapse of the peace process with the Palestinians presage a comeback of the “Jordanian option?”