Jordanian option
Apr 23rd, 2008 by MESH
In an April 16 op-ed entitled “Back to the Jordanian Option,” Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, argued that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement is “unfeasible in the foreseeable future.” He asked: “So what should we do?”
We should reshuffle the cards and try to think about other solutions as well. One of them is a return to the Jordanian option. The Jordanians won’t admit this publicly, yet a Palestinian state in the West Bank is the worst solution for them. They too know that within a short period of time such state would be ruled by Hamas. The moment Jordan—which features a Palestinian majority as well as powerful Muslim Brotherhood opposition— will share a border with a Hamas state, the Hashemite regime will face immediate danger.
We asked Efraim Karsh for his response.
From Efraim Karsh
Giora Eiland rightly assumes that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement is unfeasible in the foreseeable future. This is not because of the weakness of the present Palestinian leadership and its inability to deliver the goods, or the lack of viability of a Palestinian state, as he suggests. It is for the simple reason that there is no fundamental difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the PLO vis-à-vis Israel. Neither accepts the Jewish state’s right to exist and both are committed to its eventual destruction. The only difference between the two groups lies in their preferred strategies for the attainment of this goal. Whereas Hamas concentrates exclusively on “armed struggle,” a convenient euphemism for its murderous terror campaign, the PLO has adopted since the early 1990s a more subtle strategy, combining intricate political and diplomatic maneuvering with sustained terror attacks (mainly under the auspices of Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah, the PLO’s largest constituent group and Arafat’s alma mater).
Eiland is also correct about Jordan’s abhorrence of an independent Palestinian state, though this is by no means their worst possible nightmare, as he tends to believe. That would be the incorporation of a huge “fifth column” of some two to three million Palestinians into their kingdom: an assured prescription for Hashemite demise.
From the early 1920s to this very day, the Palestinian leadership has been antagonistic to Hashemite rule in Transjordan (later Jordan) and committed to the vision of “Greater Palestine” comprising both banks of the Jordan River. In 1951, King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian militant, and while successive attempts on the life of his erstwhile successor, King Hussein, came to naught, as did the September 1970 putsch, the Hashemites have never lost sight of the mortal danger to their throne attending the reincorporation of the West Bank into their kingdom. This was especially so after the Oslo accords transformed the area into a full-fledged terror state. Their best hope, therefore, would seem to lie with Israel’s continued security control of this territory, which would leave them to pay the customary lip service to Palestinians’ rights and to bemoan their “oppression,” without incurring the detrimental consequences of renewed annexation.
As for Israel, one need look no further than David Ben-Gurion’s justification (in December 1948) of his preference for an independent Palestinian state over the annexation of Judea and Samaria (the term West Bank was not born yet) to Transjordan: “An Arab state in western Palestine [i.e., west of the Jordan] is less dangerous than a state that is tied to Transjordan, and tomorrow—probably to Iraq [then ruled by the Hashemites].”
Of course, the international circumstances have changed dramatically since then, but the gist of Ben-Gurion’s rationale remains very much intact, albeit in the opposite direction. That is: a Palestinian-dominated militant entity on both banks of the river would pose a far greater threat to Israel’s national security than a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, or perhaps two smaller states in each of these areas.
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3 Responses to “Jordanian option”
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Efraim Karsh and Giora Eiland are both right on the unfeasibility of a Palestinian–Israeli final status agreement. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any Palestinian leadership to agree on “end of conflict” with Israel. If “end of conflict” is intended to resolve not only the 1967 questions (borders, settlements, Jerusalem, etc.) but also the 1948 issues (refugees, etc.), its impossibility was already shown in Arafat’s time. The increasing strength of Hamas is only pushing such a deal even further out of reach.
The PLO’s greatest achievement was the recognition of the organization by the Arab League in 1974 as the “sole” legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO’s recognized status pushed Jordan out of the picture and eventually coerced the United States and Israel into dealing directly with Arafat. But nothing now remains of that great achievement. Since the Hamas victory in the 2006 elections, the Palestinians have no “sole” legitimate representative. It is not just Mahmoud Abbas who is weak. Secular Palestinian nationalism, as embodied by the PLO, is in decline. Muslim Palestine (Filastin al-Muslima) is inheriting Palestine of the Revolution (Filastin al-Thawra), and Hamas is steadily eroding whatever was left of the viability of the two-state solution.
As Eiland suggests, it would therefore be a great step forward if Jordan could be enticed to resume its historical role in the Palestinian question and put some order into the pandemonium called the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, however, in the Jordanian mind, the Jordanian option is not a book on the shelf for the Israelis to take down whenever they find it useful. When the Jordanians were genuinely interested, even desperate, the Israelis were consumed by their post-1967 hubris and sent the Jordanians packing. Some water has flowed down the Jordan river since then, and the Jordanian position has evolved.
Jordan’s loss of the West Bank in the 1967 war arrested the process of “Jordanization” of the Palestinians and denied Jordan its manipulative control of the bulk of what remained of Arab Palestine. The meteoric rise of the Palestinian national movement thereafter forced the Jordanians into the realization that they could not contain Palestinian nationalism as they had intended, and eventually forced them to disengage from Palestine lest it consume them. Over the years, especially since the civil war of 1970-71, a cohesive Jordanian national movement has emerged as a counterweight to Palestinianness. The Jordanian political elite has actually developed an interest in a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, as a guarantee against the transformation of Jordan itself into the “alternative homeland” (al-watan al-badil) for Palestine, as some on the Israeli right and elsewhere have suggested.
“Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine,” King Hussein used to say in his later post-disengagement years. The Jordanians have developed an obsession about the “alternative homeland” theory, and any Israeli idea of a Jordanian role in Palestinian affairs is immediately interpreted as an effort to suck the Jordanians into a quagmire of which they want no part. Hitherto that has been the position whenever ideas like the one suggested by Eiland have come to the fore. In the eyes of the Jordanian political elite, deep Jordanian involvement in the affairs of Palestine could be but the first step in a process which will culminate in the Palestinization of Jordan—and they, needless to say, are not interested. Hamas’s power in Palestinian politics these days doesn’t make the Jordanians any more receptive to the idea. Quite the opposite is true.
For the Jordanians to change their minds on this matter would require of them to conclude that the kingdom would face even graver threats to its well-being if it refrained from such involvement. Presently that does not seem to be the case. It would be a remarkably positive development if Jordan would agree to pull the chestnuts out of the Palestinian fire. It seems very unlikely, however, that they would agree to do so.
Asher Susser is senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University.
I agree with the fundamental assessment that my friends Giora Eiland, Efraim Karsh and Asher Susser all make—i.e., that an Israeli-Palestinian “permanent status agreement” is not feasible in the foreseeable future. However, I think we err by thinking of these as binary options, i.e., either the Palestinian or the Jordanian option. That observation, I quickly note, does not necessarily lead to the resurrection of another idea whose viability I do not vouch for, namely a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation antecedent to an Israeli-Palestinian permanent status agreement. For reasons that Asher accurately laid out, that is probably not in the cards (at least at the moment).
My own view is that there may (and I emphasize may) be an option of having Israeli-Palestinian negotiations proceed in parallel with Jordanian-Palestinian talks on certain issues. Indeed, on certain critical topics—from trade to security—Israel is only likely to reach agreement with the Palestinians if the Israelis have a clear sense of how Palestinians and Jordanians will themselves approach the issues and if the Jordanians are bound up in both the process of negotiations and the resolution of the outcome. Some will view this as building confederation brick-by-brick; I prefer not to label this so as not to scare away participants.
Of course, the Jordanians may want none of this. Despite their stated preference for progress in Abbas-Olmert talks, they may decide to use resources at their disposal to ensure no real progress, because a fully Palestinian independent state, governing its borders, is not in Jordan’s interest. However, if the Jordanians were convinced that the alternative to the one I suggested is not perpetual Israeli control of the West Bank (which, for all its problems, would be better for the Hashemites than independent Palestinian rule) but the likelihood of growing Hamas/Islamist influence there, they may decide that participating in the parallel diplomacy I propose is the least bad of the available options.
Robert Satloff is a member of MESH.
Giora Eiland’s points are valid. No serious observer of Palestinian politics would dispute the assertion that for the foreseeable future, an independent Palestinian state—even if it were granted on a silver platter—would most likely be a failed state. The energy necessary to reverse the “political entropy” that has characterized the Palestinian society for years cannot come from inside that society.
At the same time, no external actor is willing to invest what is needed to create a stable Palestine—first and foremost, military force—to disarm the plethora of armed gangs who now rule the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. The only military force in the region that could conceivably tame the West Bank—at a very high price—is Israel, and Israel will not do so. The proposals for an international force are even less practical, as no international force will be able to embark on the kind of “surge” needed to pacify Palestinian society. Therefore, in the absence of a “Palestinian option” and in light of the fact that the current situation seems untenable in the long haul, the “Jordanian option” has been mooted again.
But as Asher Susser rightly argues, the absence of a Palestinian option alone is not enough to convince the Jordanians that it is time to take on responsibility for the West Bank. A major part of the Jordanian political body eschews any idea of a return to the West Bank for fear of losing both banks to a Palestinian majority. I do not subscribe to argument that “Jordan is the Palestinian state” (despite the large percentage of Jordanians of Palestinian descent in the East Bank); the Jordanian regime has succeeded admirably in creating a common denominator and relative stability. However, any attempt to swallow the Palestinians of the West Bank would most probably undermine these achievements. Moreover, even if an agreement were reached to bring Jordan into the West Bank, the ability of the Jordanian army to impose law and order in a theatre from which it has been absent for forty years is highly in question.
All this said, Jordan and Israel—and Egypt as well—have a common interest in cordoning off the West Bank and Gaza from “spilling over” into their own “Palestinian” communities. Israel is capable of doing so by erecting the security fence and restricting contact between the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Jordan, however, would find it difficult to cut off all social and economic ties with a West Bank which is cut off from Israel, and by so doing be accused of participating in an Israeli “siege” of the Palestinians. Thus, the more successful Israel is in cutting itself off from the Palestinians, the greater the danger for Jordan of spill-over into the East Bank. Only in this scenario might the Jordanian leadership conclude that the kingdom would face even graver threats to its well-being if it refrained from involvement in the West Bank.
Shmuel Bar is director of studies at the Institute for Policy and Strategy, IDC, Herzliya, Israel.
MESH Updater: Visit this additional post, ‘Radical pragmatism’ and the Jordanian option, for more commentary.