by Abe Haak
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands to lose more than any other party from the establishment of a State of Palestine.
Egyptian President Gamal Nasser brokering
ceasefire ending Black September with PLO Chairman Arafat and King
Hussein of Jordan, 1970, photo via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 852, June 1, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands to lose more than any other party
from the establishment of a State of Palestine. While the potential
dangers and complications for Israel of such a state could be
significant, Jordan would face threats to both its social stability and
its foundational idea: that it governs the Arab population on both banks
of its eponymous river. In addition to the substantial political and
security difficulties such a state would create for Jordan, it could
also jeopardize its continued viability by shifting the locus of
political leadership for a majority of Jordanians away from Amman and
towards Ramallah.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Palestinian
statehood is a moribund idea. Despite official pronouncements, none of
the principal parties seem very keen on achieving it, least of all the
PA.
However, if, through some unilateral action, a
State of Palestine were to be declared in the territory comprising Areas
A & B, the repercussions (mostly negative) would affect the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan more than any other party, including Israel.
The dangers to the Kingdom would manifest
themselves on three levels: the political threat, the security threat,
and the existential threat.
The Political Threat
With the establishment (or announcement) of a
state of Palestine, the tensions that have characterized the
relationship between the Palestinian organizations and the Hashemite
Kingdom since the 1960s would take on an institutional concreteness, and
would become a fixed feature of the new post-statehood scene. The
recent tension over access and security management of the Temple Mount
area provides a foretaste of the public embarrassments and diplomatic
paralysis that would afflict the crucial Israel-Jordan relationship as a
result.
Israel and Jordan are developing very close
institutional relationships – perhaps the strongest in the region.
Economic integration is moving apace, with significant portions of
Jordan’s energy and water consumption to be provided by Israel. This
provision is on track to reach such a level in the foreseeable future as
to increase the likelihood that a sudden interruption would have
catastrophic results for the Kingdom.
Cooperation and integration in the security sphere
are arguably just as important. For decades, Jordan’s enemies, both
internal and external, have had to reckon with a powerful pair of
disincentives when contemplating violent action against the government: a
first line of defense consisting of a tenaciously loyal Jordanian army,
and a second in the form of an overwhelmingly powerful IDF.
Even with this background of increasing
integration, the Jordan-Israel relationship is chronically strained by
the adventurism and rejectionism of the PA leadership. That strain would
worsen dramatically if the Palestinian leadership had full statehood
rights at Arab and international fora.
The Security Threat
For a preview of the relationship Jordan would
have with a State of Palestine across the river, one can look to Egypt’s
current relationship with Hamas. The main difference is that Jordan’s
troubles would be many times greater than those from which Egypt suffers
today. The reasons are many:
- Jordan’s border with the West Bank is longer and more porous than the one between Gaza and the Sinai.
- The presence of Palestinian political forces, especially those supporting Hamas, are greater and more entrenched in Jordan’s political life than they are in Egypt’s.
- Jordan’s south is both more populous and in some towns (notably Maan) more radicalized than the Sinai tribes who, under the banner of ISIS, have at times wrested control of parts of the peninsula from Egypt.
- Perhaps most importantly, on cultural, linguistic, and ethnic grounds, the distinction between Egyptians and Gazans is much clearer than that between the Arabs living on either side of the Jordan River. As a result, cracking down on organized subversion or even a low-intensity insurgency in Jordan would feel more like a civil war. It would test the loyalty of the Jordanian armed forces, especially if Israel is seen as the Jordanian government’s partner in such an effort.
- Last but not least, Jordan would have to contend with a security nightmare-scenario that would likely develop soon after a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. Such a declaration would probably precipitate an Israeli decision to pull the plug on a corrupt and ineffectual PA, a move that would almost certainly bring about its collapse. This would then be followed by a bloody struggle for supremacy between nationalists and Islamists, as occurred in Gaza. Because of the lack of contiguity between many towns in Areas A and B, the outcome will not be a speedy Hamas victory as occurred in Gaza in 2006, but a prolonged, low-intensity civil war with assassinations and sporadic outbreaks of mass violence. Israel would probably limit itself to containing and preventing the violence from spilling into Area C and beyond.
Regardless who gains the upper hand, West Bank
Arabs able to escape this bloody mess will do so in a hurry, and will
head in the only direction open to them: eastwards, to Jordan. The
Kingdom will then be faced with two unhappy choices: either to absorb
yet another large wave of restive refugees into a system already
bursting at the seams, or to reassert, with likely Israeli acquiescence,
limited administrative and security prerogatives over the afflicted
areas in the West Bank in order to forestall a greater humanitarian
catastrophe and the mass exodus such a catastrophe would precipitate.
The Existential Threat
It is arguable that these threat scenarios could
be handled by a Jordanian leadership and army that have repeatedly
demonstrated resilience in crises of greater duration and severity.
However, setting aside all the situational challenges that a declaration
of Palestinian statehood would engender for Jordan, a qualitatively
greater long-term strategic threat will inevitably develop for the
Kingdom from the realization of Palestinian statehood.
It is a fact that most Palestinians are Jordanian
and most Jordanians are Palestinian. More precisely stated: a majority
of those who self-identify as Palestinians inside and outside Jordan
carry a Jordanian passport (including Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Mash’al);
and a majority of Jordan’s resident population self-identify as
Palestinians. This has been Jordan’s chronic conundrum since the late
1950s, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser began actively
incubating a separatist Palestinian nationalism in direct challenge to
Jordan’s formal custody of West Bank Arabs. Simply put, the putative
Palestinian national identity was the result of an Egyptian
anti-Hashemite campaign begun in the late 1950s and institutionalized
with the creation of the PLO at the Cairo Arab Summit of 1964.
This anti-Hashemite campaign was at the core of
Jordan’s most dangerous cascade of crises in 1959, 1967, 1970-71, 1986,
and 1988. A formal declaration of Palestinian statehood would take it to
a much more dangerous level for the simple reason that a state cannot
long survive when a majority of its citizens claim the national identity
of a neighboring (and likely adversarial) state.
This concept is easily grasped. If, for example, a
majority of Guatemala’s citizens self-identified as Mexican, Guatemala
would simply turn into a cultural and political vassal of Mexico.
Similarly, the national identity of Jordan and its
political viability will be difficult to sustain if a majority of its
citizens owe political allegiance to a foreign, neighboring, albeit Arab
state. Such a state would be able to indirectly steer the affairs of
Jordan by mobilizing a sizable part of the citizenry to do its bidding
if its interests conflict with those of the Jordanian government.
Setting aside the official Jordanian posture
towards the conflict, the political class in the Kingdom must be aware
of these threats from a future Palestinian state, especially the first
two. But it also needs to be aware that the entire edifice of the
Palestinian national movement is a political construct of Jordan’s Arab
enemies that was meant to make the country ungovernable by the late King
Hussein. In their origins and practice, Palestinian nationalist
organizations, regardless of their rhetoric, have been more
anti-Hashemite than anti-Zionist. These organizations have always
claimed to represent a majority of Jordan’s citizens, a dangerous claim
for any country. For Jordan, such a claim becomes intolerable when
concretized in an adjacent state whose leadership has a history of
serially attempting to sabotage Hashemite rule.
In the view of many Jordanians, the disengagement
announcement of 1988, which formally recognized the PLO as sole
representative of the “Palestinians” (a majority of Jordan’s citizens),
was a mistake that sundered the national demographic unity of the
country in response to Arab political pressures. The conditions that
generated those pressures are now gone – indeed, they are reversed.
Consequently, Jordan should consider reversing the announcement (which,
constitutionally speaking, remains invalid to this day because it was
never ratified by Jordan’s parliament). This would be in the best
interest of Jordan’s citizens on both banks, and in the best interests
of peace and stability in the region.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/danger-jordan-palestinian-state/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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