Lion of Jordan (79 page)

I asked the king: ‘Would you make peace with Israel without the recovery of the whole of the West Bank?' He answered saying no. I then asked him: ‘Would you make peace with Israel without recovering East Jerusalem?' He said no. I then said to him: ‘Do you think that the Israelis would make peace with you on the basis of the return of the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem?' He thought a little and said no. I said to him: ‘Then let us be frank, by doing this we cannot make peace with Israel.' He did not comment. I continued by saying: ‘Israel, America and the West believe that you are the one who will make peace with Israel. We have agreed that you cannot make peace with Israel. This situation will only cause more suffering for the Palestinians because those among them who want to make peace cannot do so. This situation will only bring about the continuation of the occupation and more torture for the Palestinians.' He kept silent. I then said: ‘Don't you think it is time to consider a disengagement from the West Bank?' He said: ‘But to leave it to whom?' I said: ‘You leave it to nobody; you leave it to the PLO. The whole Arab world at Rabat acknowledged the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO has been fighting against us for years to establish that role. By disengaging we would be responding to the Arab world and to the Palestinians. The Palestinians in the West Bank do not challenge the PLO. The only two parties that do not consider the PLO as the Palestinian representative are Israel and the West. By disengaging we would not only be helping the Palestinians, we would also be helping ourselves.' The king left the office.
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Abu-Odeh understood that the king wanted to reflect their conversation. He did not claim it was the beginning of the king's decision to disengage from the West Bank, but he did feel that it accelerated the king's thinking and made disengagement a more practical option for him to pursue. Two weeks later there was a meeting of the king's men over lunch at his residence. The lunch was attended by Zaid Rifa'i, the prime minister, Zaid bin Shaker, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Marwan Kasim, the chief of the royal court, Tariq Alaiddin, the director of
intelligence, and Adnan Abu-Odeh, the political adviser. The king unexpectedly turned to Abu-Odeh and said, ‘Abu Said, tell our brothers what you told me the other day.' The political adviser presented to the others the argument he had shared with the king. When he finished, the king asked the rest of the company for their thoughts. The first to respond was Rifa'i. He thought that disengagement from the West Bank was a brilliant idea. Everyone else concurred. All of them were Trans-jordanians except for Abu-Odeh, who was a Palestinian. Most other Palestinians in high office, including Foreign Minister Taher al-Masri, who was not present at this meeting, were opposed to disengagement. Three months later disengagement took place.
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In as much as any one meeting can be said to have made the strategic decision to disengage, this was it. The group of five continued to meet informally and to prepare for the king ideas, proposals and plans for disengagement. At every stage they waited for the green light from the king before proceeding to the next stage.
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The first stage was to clarify Jordan's position in relation to the Shultz Initiative. The Jordanians had gone along with Shultz's plan but stated publicly that they were wary of any move designed to ‘defuse' or ‘contain' the intifada. ‘The Jordanians clearly did not want to appear to be pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for the sake of Israel and the United States by cooperating in what could be seen by the Palestinians as an exercise to frustrate their national aspirations.'
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In early April, Shultz embarked on another tour of Middle East capitals in an effort to push forward his plan. In Jerusalem he saw no inclination on the part of Shamir to give him anything at all to work with. Shultz offered to take a message from Shamir to Hussein, and the prime minister gave him a paragraph that urged direct Israeli–Jordanian negotiations. This was precisely what the king could not possibly agree to at this juncture. Shultz made the same offer to Peres, who drafted a message urging the king to accept the American initiative. Shultz was frustrated by Shamir's inflexibility and by the fact that the divided government meant that no one could be held responsible and accountable. ‘When I arrived in Jordan,' writes Shultz, ‘I found King Hussein candid and gloomy: he again gave me nothing but wanted me to “persevere”.'
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If Hussein looked gloomy it was because he had a lot to be gloomy about, not least Shultz's subservience towards Shamir. Nevertheless, on 6 April, Hussein handed Shultz a paper outlining ‘Jordan's constants',
or its principles for the settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute. These principles were broadcast on Radio Amman the same day. Some of them were familiar: the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war; Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories as the basis for a settlement, one that had to be comprehensive; Security Council Resolution 242 applied to all of the occupied Arab territories; the international conference had to be more than a ceremonial gathering and to ‘reflect the moral and constant weight of the five permanent members of the Security Council in assisting all the parties to the conflict to arrive at a comprehensive, just and lasting peace'. Two additional points, however, were indicative of the shift in Jordanian foreign policy since the outbreak of the intifada. One was the emphasis on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The other point made it clear that Jordan could not represent the Palestinian people at the conference or negotiate the settlement of the Palestinian problem on behalf of the PLO. Jordan was, however, prepared to attend the conference in a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation if this arrangement was acceptable to the parties concerned.
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At the summit conference of the Arab League in Algiers on 7–9 June, Hussein urged the other members not to reject the Shultz Initiative, but by this time his own influence was rapidly declining. The time and place of the summit were not of his own choosing. It was an emergency summit to consider the intifada and financial support for the uprising was the main item on the agenda. Jordan was thrown on the defensive, as it had been at the Rabat summit fourteen years earlier. The intifada refocused the attention of the Arab world on the Palestinian problem. The courage of the Palestinians in resisting Israeli occupation put the rest of the Arab world to shame. Sympathy translated into material and political support for the Palestinians.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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: