Lion of Jordan
Page 61
In his speech Hussein tried to dispel the suspicions that Jordan still hoped to recover the West Bank for itself and that it was still competing with the PLO, but his words were greeted with scepticism. His other aim was to defend Jordan’s role as a channel for Arab aid for the occupied territories in cooperation with the PLO. He reminded his audience that Jordanian law still applied to the West Bank, that Jordanian currency and passports were still in use there, and that Jordan still paid the salaries of 18,000 civil servants on the West Bank and another 6,000 in the Gaza Strip. He also pointed out that some of the Gulf states had failed to honour the commitment of financial aid that they had made at the Baghdad summit in 1978, causing Jordan to incur large debts. If support was not forthcoming, he warned, Jordan might be forced to terminate its role in the occupied territories.
Hussein’s impassioned speech fell on deaf ears. The summit resolutions ignored Jordan and affirmed Arab support for the right of the Palestinians to independent statehood under the leadership of the PLO. The commitments made at the Baghdad summit were not renewed, and Jordan was excluded from the new Arab aid package. Moreover, all Arab aid in support of the intifada was to be channelled exclusively through the PLO and not, as previously, through a joint committee. This disappointing and indeed humiliating outcome reflected the sharp decline in Jordan’s stature as a regional power and the corresponding improvement in the position of its rival. For Hussein it was also a personal defeat. Only seven months previously, at the Amman summit, he was a dominant figure on the Arab stage. At Algiers he was isolated, frustrated and impotent. For him the Algiers summit resolutions were the last straw and a major encouragement to disengage from the West Bank.
Practical steps towards disengagement were undertaken in the bitter aftermath of the Algiers summit. On 1 July the Ministry of Occupied Territories Affairs was abolished and its responsibilities transferred to the Palestinian Affairs Department linked to the Foreign Ministry. From his vantage point across the river, Labour Party leader Shimon Peres was troubled by this trend because he realized that it spelled the end of the so-called ‘Jordanian option’. For if Jordan relinquished its claim to the West Bank, and the PLO became the sole representative of the Palestinians in fact as well as in name, Israel would have to deal with an organization that did not recognize its right to exist. Peres knew that Hussein still held him responsible for the failure of their joint plan for an international conference. But, on 26 July, he sent a letter that was designed to make the king stop and think. Peres acknowledged that in the past there had been moments when they misjudged each other’s intentions. The purpose of his letter was to reiterate his commitment to ‘the London document approach’. Peres still thought that the London Agreement held the most promising prospect for progress, and he gave his reasons for this view. Towards the end of the letter Peres extended to the king his best wishes for the end of the holiday of Eid al-Adha, which commemorated the sacrifice of Abraham, their common father. But he could hear again the bells of belligerency ringing in their region, and he entreated the king to introduce his voice, ‘both sober and moving’, in favour of peace.15
Hussein replied the following day to assure his ‘dear friend’ that his commitment to the peaceful resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict remained firm. The purpose of any action Jordan might take would be to break the long-standing stalemate in the peace process. ‘We may disengage from the West Bank,’ wrote the king, ‘but we would never disengage from the peace process. We may disengage from managing a people that is under occupation, but we would never be able to disengage from the Palestinian people and the Palestinian problem.’ Hussein said he shared his friend’s vision of peace and agreed that the means to that end was an international conference along the lines they had discussed in London. Moreover, he hoped that Jordan’s move would make the Palestinians see the light and do what was required of them for the sake of peace in the region. Hussein thanked Peres for his good wishes for Eid al-Adha, which reminded Hussein of the sacrifices that both of them had made for the sake of peace, and he promised to continue to work, from an improved position, for this noble cause.16
The move towards disengagement was by now irreversible. On 28 July the Jordanian government announced the termination of the five-year West Bank Development Plan. The reason given for this move was to allow the PLO to assume more responsibility for this area. Two days later a royal decree dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, thereby terminating West Bank representation in the Jordanian legislature. Finally, on 31 July, in a televised address to the nation, the king formally announced the severing of Jordan’s legal and administrative ties with the West Bank. The speech was a major landmark in Jordan’s history. Adnan Abu-Odeh, who prepared the draft of the speech for the king, placed it in the context of the Hashemite heritage:
Since its creation, Jordan has been faced with the challenge of survival. This challenge became ingrained in the political psychology of its elite. There was a real fear that without an outside strategic partner, Jordan might evaporate. In order for it to secure such a partner, Jordan needed to develop a regional role. Historically and up until 1956, Jordan had this role imposed upon it by the British. After 1956, the US became Jordan’s strategic ally and its main role at the time was to combat Communism and Nasserism in the region. After 1967, Jordan developed two new regional roles. On the one hand it became the advocate of peace in the region. From 1973 onwards it also came to defend Western interests in the Gulf.
From early on, the king realized that his grandfather’s project regarding the West Bank was wrong. But he could not disengage himself because that would mean giving up Jordan’s regional role, Jordan’s credentials for survival. When Gulf oil gained importance and Jordan was granted a second regional role, it became easier for the king to abandon the first role. In the 1980s, after the failure of the Jordanian–PLO partnership, it became apparent that the king felt that his grandfather’s enterprise was a source of trouble. It also became apparent that the solution that he was hoping to reach was to separate from the Palestinians on the West Bank. In the 1980s therefore one could detect that the king was on the verge of disengaging himself from Palestine. From a historical perspective, the king’s disengagement decision was a move to undo what his grandfather had built.17
The decision to disengage was warmly received by the East Bankers but not by the Palestinians who lived on the East Bank. Some East Bank politicians felt they got nothing but ingratitude for their efforts to help the Palestinians and that the time had come to cut their losses. They welcomed the opportunity to make the East Bank their priority and to relinquish all responsibility for the West Bank and its population. The king himself felt that Jordan was fighting a losing battle in defending positions that had already fallen to the PLO. After two decades of trying to blur the distinction between the East Bank and the West Bank, he felt that the time had come to assert that the East Bank was not Palestine and that it was up to the Palestinians to decide what they wanted to do with the West Bank and to deal with the Israelis directly over its future. The old Hashemite slogan had been ‘Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.’ This was replaced by a new slogan that said ‘Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine.’ Disappointment with his Palestinian subjects was a factor in the king’s decision. Using the royal ‘we’, he explained:
It was the intifada that really caused our decision on disengagement from the West Bank. It was again our lack of ability to get any agreement with our Palestinian brethren. I wish to God they had been frank enough about what they wanted and they would have got it a long time before. But we were torn apart trying to get all the pieces of the jigsaw together to help them. However, suspicions and doubts got in the way. But beyond that, we recognized there was a definite trend that had started before the Rabat resolution of 1974 and continued all the way through. They could give, they could take, and they could do whatever they liked. They could probably give more than we could but they decided that they wanted to have their say
regarding their future and I simply tried to help them by that decision.18
This account exaggerates the element of altruism in the decision. The controlling consideration behind the decision was Hussein’s own dynastic interest. Hussein’s speech to the nation ignored the second and played up the first. Disengagement was described as ‘a series of measures to enhance the Palestinian national orientation and highlight the Palestinian identity; our goal is to benefit the Palestinian cause and the Arab Palestinian people.’ Jordan respected, said Hussein, the wish of the PLO to secede and establish an independent state. The institutional links with Jordan were said to be an obstacle along the Palestinian road to independence, so these links were going to be severed. The new measures, however, would apply only to the occupied territories and not to Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin. Palestinians outside Jordan’s borders were promised that Jordan would continue to support their struggle: ‘No one outside Palestine has had or will ever have a connection with Palestine or with its cause that is stronger than the connection of Jordan or of my family with it.’ The Great Arab Revolt was mentioned only in passing, but the message was clear: the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would remain the proud bearer of the standard of Arab unity and would continue to play a major regional role.19
Hussein’s speech spoke only of severing Jordan’s legal and administrative links with the West Bank; it did not renounce irrevocably the Hashemite claim to this territory. The 1950 Act of Union between the two banks was not repealed. The constitution was not amended. Parliament passed no legislation affecting Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. The move was meaningless under international law. These omissions fed Palestinian suspicions that disengagement was just a tactical move and that the Hashemite claim was only held in abeyance rather than abandoned. About the Hashemite trusteeship of the holy places in Jerusalem there was no ambiguity: it was to continue. As a Hashemite and as a descendant of the Prophet, Hussein was anxious to protect the Islamic religious and cultural legacy in the Old City. Disengagement did not apply to the 3,000 employees of the Ministry of Religious Endowments and Religious Affairs who worked in Jerusalem. Hussein viewed Jerusalem as a personal responsibility and as a political necessity, since there was no guarantee that the Israelis would allow the Palestinians sovereignty over the disputed sites.20
Hussein did not consult the PLO before making his dramatic announcement, and he did nothing to smooth the transition to PLO rule. In the words of Taher Kanaan, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin and a former head of the Ministry of Occupied Territories Affairs, ‘The decision to disengage was not a favour to the PLO; it was a provocation to show that the PLO could not do it. The decision did not mean giving up Jordan’s role in the West Bank. It was intended to demonstrate that the PLO was inadequate and Jordan was indispensable.’21 Taher al-Masri, the foreign minister, did not know the content of the king’s speech until he heard it on television that evening. He was particularly worried that there might be a backlash against the Palestinian population of the East Bank. That evening he went to dinner at Prince Hassan’s house, and he was seething with anger. He said to Prince Hassan, ‘This is a black day in your record as Hashemites!’22
Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank came as a disappointment to George Shultz because his initiative depended crucially on cooperation with Hussein. In a press conference on 7 August the king said that never again would Jordan assume the role of negotiating on behalf of the Palestinians. This statement was probably not meant to be as final as it sounded. But it was taken by the American secretary of state to mark the end of his initiative. A few weeks after the king had announced his decision, he asked the State Department to pass a message to Shimon Peres: the decision to remove Jordan from the peace process was taken in the hope that it would cause the PLO to ‘see the light and come to terms with reality’.23
This private message, however, could do no more than soften the blow that the king’s latest move was bound to inflict on his partner in the abortive London Agreement. The effect of the public message was to strengthen the position of the PLO and to undermine the Labour Party’s so-called Jordanian option. The king himself had never liked the term ‘the Jordanian option’, for it implied an agreement between Israel and Jordan over the heads of the Palestinians. In his speech and his press conference he therefore cleared the air. He said, in effect, that if a Jordanian option for settling the Palestinian problem had ever existed, it was now definitely dead.
From Israel’s standpoint, the king’s speech marked the collapse of a very popular idea. It meant that Jordan was no longer prepared to negotiate on the Palestinian problem with Israel; the only issue it would discuss was the question of its own borders. The Israelis were stunned by the speech and initially interpreted it as no more than a tactical move by the king to get the Palestinians to say that they still wanted him to represent them. But when the king asked his supporters on the West Bank not to sponsor petitions urging him to relent, the Israelis were forced to recognize that disengagement was a strategic move, not a tactical one. Even Likud leaders had reason to regret this move because they realized that the forecasts of all the prophets of doom had come true: Israel now found herself all alone in the arena with the PLO.24 What Israeli leaders of both major parties failed to grasp was the contribution that their intransigence had made to Hussein’s frustration, from which sprang the decision to leave the field to the PLO.
Another consequence of the intifada was the birth of Hamas. The name is an Arabic word meaning ‘zeal’, and also an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas was founded in Gaza in 1988 by Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, a paralysed religious teacher, as a wing of the long-established Muslim Brothers in Palestine. To obtain a permit from the Israeli authorities, the movement was obliged to pledge that its fight for Palestinian rights would be conducted within the limits of the law and without the use of arms. Ironically, the Israeli authorities at first encouraged Hamas in the hope of weakening the secular nationalism of the PLO. But the Palestinian uprising had a radicalizing effect on Hamas, and its members began to step outside the bounds of the law. The Israelis repeatedly cracked down on the organization, but the roots it put down sprouted again, giving rise to more violence each time. In 1989 the Israelis arrested Shaikh Ahmed Yassin and kept him in prison until 1997. Hamas, however, continued to shift from the use of stones to the use of firearms. In 1994 it began, through its military wing, to launch suicide bombers inside Israel. The suicide attacks were mounted by individual members of Hamas who carried explosives on their body and detonated them in crowded places such as buses and markets. Israel’s tactic of ‘divide and rule’ had backfired disastrously.
While radicalizing Hamas, the intifada had a moderating effect on the secular Palestinians. On the one hand, the intifada raised the morale and boosted the pride and self-confidence of the Palestinian community. On the other, it did not bring an end to Israeli occupation, and living conditions deteriorated in the course of the struggle. Local leaders realized that a Palestinian peace initiative was essential. They were worried that the intifada would come to an end without yielding any concrete political gains. Consequently, they started to put pressure on the PLO chiefs in Tunis to meet the conditions that would enable them to enter into negotiations with Israel. Over the years the PLO mainstream had moved towards more moderate positions, but it avoided saying this in any clear-cut fashion, for fear of alienating the militant factions of the organization. The local leaders now threw all their weight behind the moderate mainstream. They urged the PLO chiefs in Tunis to recognize Israel, to accept a two-state solution, to declare a Palestinian state and to establish a government-in-exile.
Hussein could claim a share of the credit for compelling the PLO to shoulder its responsibilities and to adopt a more moderate position. Under pressure from above and below, the PLO rose to the challenge. Disengagement helped to force it, in the words of Hussein’s message to Peres, to ‘see the light and come to terms with reality’. A revolut
ion in Palestinian political thinking took place, and the man who presided over it was none other than Hussein’s old sparring partner, Arafat. The success of the intifada challenged Arafat and his followers to moderate their political programme. It gave prominence and credibility to the internal leadership. The external leadership in Tunis risked being left behind. They were forced to move. At the meeting of the Palestine National Congress (PNC) in Algiers in mid November 1988, Arafat won a majority for the historic decision to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, to accept all the relevant UN resolutions going back to 29 November 1947 and to adopt the principle of a two-state solution. The claim to the whole of Palestine, enshrined in the Palestinian National Charter, was finally laid to rest and a declaration of independence was issued for a mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. The resolutions of the PNC were well received in Jordan. The PLO, Hussein noted, was ‘shouldering its responsibilities’ and had demonstrated its willingness to join in an ‘historic reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis’. Jordan immediately recognized the independent Palestinian State, and, in early January 1989, the PLO office in Amman became the embassy of Palestine.25 A month after the PNC meeting, at a press conference in Geneva, Arafat renounced all forms of terrorism. These changes made possible the initiation of a dialogue between the US government and the PLO, but Israel’s rejection of the PLO remained absolute and unconditional.
Following Hussein’s voluntary abdication as the key Arab player in the diplomacy surrounding the Arab–Israeli conflict, he pursued more vigorously Jordan’s second role as a promoter of Arab unity and a defender of Western interests in the Arab Gulf. Hussein always sought an Arab order that could guarantee the survival of his dynasty. Between 1988 and 1990 the main thrust of his foreign policy shifted towards the Arab world. This was manifested in efforts to improve bilateral relations with all the Arab states, in the promotion of inter-Arab dialogue and in the establishment of the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) – a regional alliance that brought together Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and North Yemen.26