Lion of Jordan (88 page)

Another obstacle that had to be cleared on the road to the peace conference was Syria. Hussein decided to speak to Asad directly. Relations between the two men were superficially correct. But the president had the power to intimidate and to undermine the king. He had resorted to subversion in the past against what he saw as the archetypal ‘imperial lackey' and he could do so again if he chose. Baker was dubious about Asad, and he thought there was a chance that Hussein could be persuaded to participate unilaterally. He wanted a commitment from Jordan to attend regardless of whether Syria came. ‘I'll be the master of my own destiny,' Hussein told Baker. ‘I'm going to Damascus only for reasons of form.' Although Baker was still cautious, he saw this as a plausible reason to end Hussein's political and economic isolation.
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On 19 August, Hussein made the trip to Latakia, accompanied by his liberal prime minister. They informed Asad that Baker insisted on a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation and that they agreed to form one. Although Jordan preferred to have separate delegations, they said, this was unacceptable to America and Israel. They asked for Asad's understanding of their position, and he reluctantly gave his consent.
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Once Asad had been squared, the arduous task of forming the joint delegation began. For Hussein it was like squaring a circle. He had to preserve the fiction that the PLO was not represented, while assuring the PLO that within the joint delegation the Palestinians would be able to speak with an independent voice. Arafat feared that once the conference began, the fiction would become a reality and that this was the king's intention. But this was not the case. He respected the right of the Palestinians to represent themselves, and he entreated the members
of the Jordanian delegation to treat their Palestinian colleagues honestly and fairly, and to give them all the help and assistance they needed. Hussein understood the sensitivities of the Palestinians and the constraints under which they were operating. His general approach to international relations was one of empathy, and this worked well with the Palestinians.
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An agreement between the Jordanian government and the PLO was signed on the modalities of coordination and cooperation. Dr Kamel Abu Jaber, the foreign minister and former academic, was appointed as head of the joint delegation, which consisted of twenty-eight members, fourteen Jordanians and fourteen Palestinians. Dr Abdul Salam Majali, who hailed from one of the largest and most influential East Bank families, was appointed as head of the Jordanian delegation. He was a former chief medical officer in the army and a former president of Jordan University; he had extensive ministerial experience; and he was proud of the fact that his name meant ‘the servant of peace' in Arabic. Half the members of the Palestinian delegation were doctors and university professors. The head of their delegation was Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, an elderly physician from Gaza and a much respected public figure. Faisal Husseini headed the Palestinian Guidance Committee and Dr Hanan Ashrawi was its spokesperson. Husseini and Ashrawi knew only too well the complex legacy of resentments and conflicting claims between the Hashemites and the Palestinian nationalists. But they felt that the king was quite sincere in seeking new relationships with the Palestinians based on candour and trust.
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The formal letter of invitation to the Madrid peace conference assured Jordan that negotiations would be based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and that the aim was to achieve a comprehensive peace. In an address to the Jordanian National Congress on 12 October, the king declared: ‘Peace demands no less courage than war. It is the courage to meet the adversary, his attitudes and arguments, the courage to face hardships, the courage to bury senseless illusions, the courage to surmount impeding obstacles, the courage to engage in a dialogue to tear down the walls of fear and suspicion. It is the courage to face reality.' He rejected the arguments of the Islamic opposition to peace negotiations. Negotiations, he claimed, represented the only means to induce Israel to accept the principle of land for peace. Apart from seeking a solution to the Palestinian problem, Jordan had a number of specific
interests to safeguard through negotiations, namely, security, the environment, water and economic development.

A great deal of preparatory work on all of these issues was carried out in the weeks and months before the conference under the supervision of Prince Hassan. He was very active in chairing meetings, in brain-storming sessions, in devising negotiating tactics, in preparing position papers and in presenting Jordan's views to the media. Hussein himself did not get involved in the details or issue any general policy guidelines. But he had a talent for inspiring loyalty to the cause and fostering a team spirit. Some of the officials were reluctant to meet with the Israelis, but his humble and diffident manner moved them to want to serve king and country. Hussein went to the airport to bid farewell to the team. He spoke very briefly but movingly to say it was a national call, to ask them to do their best and to express his full confidence in them.
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In an interview with an American newspaper just before the conference opened, the king remarked that he had ‘almost forty years on active duty'. He conceded that he was tired, had contemplated stepping down and was increasingly conscious of his own mortality. He hoped that the lasting achievement of his nearly forty years on the throne would be ‘to contribute towards peace and to see it coming'. He warned that if the Israelis proved inflexible at the peace conference and continued to build Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, a very dark phase in the life of the entire region would result. He worried that the status quo would only solidify Israel's hold on the occupied territories and said that if the Madrid meeting failed, the flickering hopes of peaceful coexistence would be snuffed out.
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The Middle East peace conference opened in the Palacio Real in Madrid on 30 October 1991 with the United States and the Soviet Union as co-sponsors, the UN as an observer and delegations from all the parties to the conflict in attendance. The Soviet Union, bankrupt and in the final phase of disintegration, had virtually no influence over the proceedings. The conference was carefully staged by the Americans, with Baker acting as the master of ceremonies. Jordan's two main objectives at the conference were to begin negotiations for the resolution of its dispute with Israel and to enable the Palestinians to engage in separate negotiations with Israel about the future of the occupied territories. In other words, Jordan wanted the Palestinians and Israel to settle the dispute between them but not at its expense.
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In his opening speech Kamel Abu
Jaber delivered a clear message that Jordan was there to negotiate an enduring peace based on international legality. He focused sharply on UN resolutions embodying the principle that land must not be acquired by force. He was preceded by Shamir and followed by Haidar Abdel Shafi.

Shamir's opening speech confirmed the Jordanians' worst fears. The whole tone of the speech was anachronistic, saturated with the stale rhetoric of the past and wholly inappropriate for the occasion. His version of the Arab-Israeli conflict was singularly narrow and blinkered, portraying Israel simply as the victim of Arab aggression and refusing to acknowledge that any evolution had taken place in the Arab or Palestinian attitude to Israel. All Arabs, according to Shamir, wanted to see Israel destroyed; the only difference between them was over the ways to bring about its destruction. His speech, while long on anti-Arab clichés, was exceedingly short on substance. By insisting that the root cause of the conflict was not territory but the Arab refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, he came dangerously close to rejecting the whole basis of the conference: UN resolutions and the principle of land for peace.

The contrast between Shamir's speech and the speech of Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, the head of the Palestinian delegation, could hardly have been more striking in tone, spirit or substance. The principal aim of the speech, an aim endorsed by the PLO leaders in Tunis, was to convince the Israeli public that the Palestinians were genuinely committed to peaceful coexistence. Abdel Shafi reminded the audience that it was time for the Palestinians to narrate their own story. While touching on the past, his speech was forward-looking. His basic message was that Israeli occupation had to end, that the Palestinians had a right to self-determination, and that they would pursue this right relentlessly until they had achieved statehood. But, while staking a claim to Palestinian statehood, Abdel Shafi qualified it in two significant ways. First, he accepted the need for a transitional stage. Second, he envisaged a confederation between an ultimately independent Palestine and Jordan. No PLO official had ever been able to declare so unambiguously that a Palestinian state would be ready for a confederation with Jordan. Abdel Shafi's speech was both the most eloquent and the most moderate presentation of the Palestinian case made by an official Palestinian spokesman since the beginning of the conflict at the end of the nineteenth century. As the head of the Palestinian delegation was delivering his speech,
Israel's stone-faced prime minister passed a note to a colleague. One of the 5,000 journalists covering the conference speculated that the note could well have said: ‘We made a big mistake. We should have insisted that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.'

What distinguished Madrid from previous Arab–Israeli conferences was that there the Palestinians were represented for the first time on a footing of equality with Israel. Madrid registered the arrival of the Palestinians, long the missing party, at the Middle East conference table. The mere presence of official Palestinian representatives in Madrid marked a change, if not a reversal, of Israel's long-standing refusal to consider the Palestinians as a partner to negotiations, as an
interlocuteur valable
. The principal outcome of Madrid was, as Baker had intended, to establish a twin-track framework for bilateral negotiations between the parties: an Israeli–Arab track and an Israeli–Palestinian track. Although no progress was made on substantive issues, a framework for ongoing negotiations was established.

Both parts of the joint delegation considered the Madrid conference a success. The Palestinians took charge of their own diplomatic struggle for independence and kept open the option of an eventual confederation with Jordan. The Jordanians, after more than two decades of futile diplomacy, were finally engaged in a serious international effort to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East on the basis of UN resolutions. In addition, Jordan's participation at the conference went some way towards repairing the damage caused by its conduct during the Gulf crisis. Most importantly, at Madrid, Jordan succeeded in making a clear distinction between the Jordanian national identity and the Palestinian national identity and in discrediting the notion of
al-watan al-badeel
, of Jordan as an ‘alternative homeland' for the Palestinians. From this point, Jordan was free to pursue its own peace diplomacy in conformity with the general Arab consensus rather than in defiance of it, as Sadat had done a decade earlier.
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In the Jordanian parliament, Islamic opposition to the peace talks with Israel was stepped up in the aftermath of Madrid. The Muslim Brotherhood merged with independent Islamists to form the Islamic Action Front (IAF). The new party conducted a campaign against the government of Taher Masri because he was a secular liberal, because some of his ministers were considered leftists and above all because
of the government's peace policy. Fifty out of the eighty members of parliament voted for a motion of no confidence in the government. The king urged Masri to soldier on regardless of the opposition. But if he had done so, the opposition would have brought down the whole government, forcing the king to dissolve parliament and hold new elections. Masri considered that an internal upheaval would hurt the democratization process and damage Jordan's relations with the West, so, on 19 November, he tendered his resignation but not that of his government.
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He was replaced by Zaid bin Shaker, the king's trusted adviser and friend, and a conservative who also had the advantage of being a sharif, a descendant of the Prophet. Shaker's appointment restored the tacit alliance between the palace and the Islamists against radicals and leftists that had its origins in the 1950s.

The clandestine contact between the palace and Israel was resumed several weeks after the end of the public gathering in the Spanish capital. Elyakim Rubinstein and Efraim Halevy were conveyed by boat from Eilat to a meeting point in the Gulf of Aqaba one stormy night in December 1991. They moved to a tiny boat driven by Colonel Ali Shukri and Nasser Judeh, Prince Hassan's son-in-law and a future minister of information. The meeting the next day was positive. It established what Prince Hassan called a ‘safety net' for the forthcoming bilateral negotiations in Washington. These were to proceed simultaneously on two parallel tracks – one public in Washington and one secret in the region. The safty net was a formula arrived at by the Jordanian and Israeli leadership. Essentially it meant that when deadlock was reached in the official negotiations, another meeting would be held privately to more things along. The Jordanian side of the safety net would consist of Hussein, Prince Hassan and, later, a number of senior advisers. The Israeli side would consist of Itzhak Rabin, sometimes Peres, Rubinstein and Halevy.
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The public track of the peace process was held under American auspices and American management. As a follow-up to the Madrid conference, the Bush administration invited all the parties to hold substantive bilateral peace talks in Washington starting on 10 December. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians accepted the invitation without any conditions. The Israelis were less enthusiastic. The last thing they wanted was the kind of brisk and concrete down-to-business approach urged by the Americans. The issue used by the Israelis to delay the start of the
talks was the status of the Palestinians. On the last day of the Madrid talks an understanding was reached that in the bilateral phase the Israelis would negotiate separately with the Palestinians and the Jordanians. Accordingly, the Americans prepared two rooms in the State Department, one for the Israeli and Palestinian teams, and one for the Israeli and Jordanian teams. But on arrival at the State Department, the Israelis insisted on negotiating with a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation to underline their opposition to a separate Palestinian entity. For six days the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian delegations haggled in the corridor of the State Department, even unable to agree to enter the conference room. The American hosts thoughtfully placed a sofa in the corridor. Rubinstein, the head of the Israeli delegation, felt personally safe sitting between two medical doctors. But the scene was bizarre, and it added a new term to the rich lexicon of the Arab–Israeli conflict – corridor diplomacy. After another round of talks a compromise was reached on the status of the Palestinians that enabled both sides to claim victory. Israel was to negotiate with two separate subcommittees consisting of nine Palestinians and two Jordanians on Palestinian-related issues, and nine Jordanians and two Palestinians on Jordan-related issues. With a sigh of relief Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman, announced that ‘corridor diplomacy' had ended.