Jordan's King Hussein: Leading The Arab Pack or Odd Man Out?

By Richard Curtiss

The 25-mile drive in an aged taxi from the airport to downtown Amman gives the driver a long time to ingratiate himself with his passengers, and thus ensure the kind of tips that probably are the difference between a decent living and hardscrabble existence in a country literally on the resourceless margin between the fertile coastal plains of Israel/Palestine and the sun-baked and wind-swept but oil-rich deserts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. At its last census in 1979, Jordan had 2,132,000 people. The December 1994 census is expected to show double that number, of whom perhaps two-thirds are Palestinian refugees and their progeny.

Jordan, Syria and Iraq are the only eastern Arab countries that have offered full citizenship to all Palestinian refugees who apply for it. Of the three, there is relative political freedom only in Jordan, which now has had two successful parliamentary elections in the 1980s and 1990s after an earlier parliament was abolished by King Hussein. Therefore Jordan is the Arab country with by far the largest number of citizens of Palestinian origin, and their absorption has been both a political problem and an economic and social benefit for the country. That is why King Hussein's signature a week before my arrival on a formal peace treaty with Israel involved both the economic security accompanying forgiveness of Jordan's $900 million debt to the U.S. government and the personal insecurity of joining Egypt in breaking Arab League vows of no separate peace with Israel until all outstanding Arab territorial claims have been settled.

Over the rattle of the taxi and the rush of wind from the open windows in a mountain city where, as yet, few cars seem to have air conditioning, the driver extolled the virtues of King Hussein. I wondered if he was being defensive because of the king's controversial decision, but concluded instead that it is the standard patter of a white-haired native Jordanian who has seen many changes in his lifetime. Pointing to the two- and three-story limestone villas newly completed or in various stages of construction along much of the road between the airport and the city, he recalled that all this land once was barren high desert, barely able to sustain passing bedouin and their herds. Where miles of pines, junipers, cypress, occasional olive groves or small fruit orchards, and one magnificent stand of forest now grow, "there was not a single tree," the driver continued.

I could see the word picture he was painting. The remaining one-third of native Jordanians, like him, are unswervingly loyal to their king, to whom they credit Jordan's modernization, and they will support whatever he decides is in their best interest. Still in the balance, however, are the feelings of the Palestinian majority. Each signature by an Arab leader on a treaty with Israel before final status negotiations with the Palestinians are completed weakens their chances of reclaiming family lands inside Israel's permanent Green Line borders, and homes to which the keys have been passed down from grandparents who locked the doors, leaving all their possessions inside, 46 years ago in 1948.

Upon arrival at the Marriott hotel, I received my first "peace dividend." Even before getting a room key, I darted across the lobby to a travel agency to try to start the formalities with the Jordanian Ministry of Interior to cross the Allenby Bridge into the new "Palestinian entity" and Israel as soon as possible.

"That's no longer necessary," the travel agent said. "Since the beginning of this week it's just a normal border. You don't need advance exit permission from Jordan. I'll have a bus here at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow to take you to the bridge."

The simplification of procedures gave me a little unanticipated time to solicit reactions to the peace treaty from Palestine-born Jordanians. "No, I wouldn't go back there to live," confessed a Jordanian who fled what is now Israel as a child in 1948. "But I would like my children, who have grown up in Jordan and consider themselves Jordanians, to see what was stolen from us and to discover who we were before we were turned into refugees. And they should be compensated for the heritage I was unable to pass on to them. Then we all can rest."

"Yes, I will go back if I am permitted to do so," says another middle-aged man. But his are exceptional circumstances. He fled a town in Israel just inside the Green Line in the 1970s after he had been twice arrested on suspicion of anti-Israeli activities, and feared torture and imprisonment the next time. Now he wishes he had taken his chances and remained among his brothers, sisters and cousins, even though he has acquired a Jordanian-born wife and has Jordanian-born children.

Together the nearly 3 million Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the lands it occupied in 1967 and the 4 to 5 million other Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East, Europe and North and South America outnumber the 4 million Jews living in Israel.

Whether they hope to return, or only seek recognition and compensation, the diaspora Palestinians feel forgotten in the rush to settlement. While Yasser Arafat bargains for Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Palestinian sovereignty throughout the former Israeli-occupied territories, no one is negotiating on behalf of dispossessed Palestinians who have no homes to return to in the nascent Palestinian state. Thus their opposition to Yasser Arafat for signing what they see as a blank piece of paper when it comes to their rights. Now that bitterness could be transferred to King Hussein for signing a peace agreement with Israel before the completion of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

At the moment, however, the Jordanian government is scrambling, perhaps at U.S. prompting, to undo some of the potential damage to itself. Arafat and his followers were infuriated at the clause in the treaty recognizing Jordan's "special rights" in the Haram Al Sharif, Islam's third holiest site, in the heart of Jerusalem. They charged Israel's insertion of the wording was an attempt to by-pass the Palestinians in the final disposition of the city they expect to be their capital, as well as Israel's.

As a result, Arafat was not invited to the treaty signing in Jordan. Noting, however, that Arafat was seated beside Secretary of State Warren Christopher at the Casablanca conference that followed the signing ceremony by only a few days, Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan tried to put a better face on the matter by saying to the press after the conference that Jordan accepted the custodianship of the holy places only pending the final disposition of Jerusalem, at which time Jordan will agree to whatever decision is reached between Israel and the Palestinians.

If Palestinians in Jordan, seeking to remain loyal both to King Hussein and whoever speaks for the Palestinians, breathed a sigh of relief, that feeling was short-lived.

The Israeli press solemnly declared the following day that that wasn't exactly what the crown prince really had said at Casablanca, nor was it what the treaty specifies. Instead, Israeli press reports said, the crown prince suggested that Jordan will retain custodianship over the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques for the foreseeable future, or until a pan-Islamic body can be formed to administer the areas. That seemed to bring the dispute right back to where it started, giving all the appearances of an attempt to undercut Palestinian claims to authority in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians are determined will be the capital city of their independent state, and which Israelis say will be part of the "undivided capital" of only the Jewish state.

Jordanian spinmasters insisted that in becoming the second Arab state, after Egypt, to sign a final treaty of peace with Israel, they were not betraying the Arab cause, but forcing an expansionist Israel once and for all to define its borders.

"Since the very beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the border issue has been at the heart of the whole Middle East problem," wrote Jordanian academic Dr. Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh in the Nov. 3-4 Jordan Times. "Until recently, Israel, unlike almost all other countries in the world, has been borderless...The Jordanian-Israeli treaty comes at exactly the right moment to put an end to the fear, doubt, suspicion, skepticism, discomfort and anxiety."

The Nov. 2 Jordan Times published an article by Arab political scientist Cecil Hourani, declaring: "The Jordanian-Israel Peace Treaty puts an end once and for all to the possibility that a future Israeli government might revive [the 'Jordan is Palestine'] claim, or perhaps encourage or promote the transfer of further Palestinian populations from the occupied territories into Jordan."

Perhaps both are right. It appears, however, that the most effective way to allay the suspicions of both Palestinian supporters and detractors of Yasser Arafat, and thus avoid further splitting the entire Arab world, would be for King Hussein to reaffirm his solemn pledge of 1988 renouncing, once and for all, Jordanian claims to the Palestinian territories Jordan occupied between 1948 and 1967, when they were seized by Israel in the Six-Day War.

Upon my return to Jordan after a few days in Gaza and Jerusalem, a rainstorm that had begun on my earlier visit to Amman still was raging from Egypt to Iraq. So, interestingly, was the debate in Jordan's lower house of parliament over ratification of the treaty. Opponents charged that the treaty "ceded four-fifths of the land of Palestine," would not lead to recovery of all of Jordan's water rights, allowed Israelis to remain on Jordanian land under "the jurisdiction of Israeli law," and broke previous government vows by agreeing to the settlement of displaced Palestinians in countries other than their homeland.

Although the final vote was 55 to 23 in favor of the treaty, what was most interesting was the fact that details of the debate, both in support of the treaty and against it, were carried, accurately and fully, in the Jordan Times and other newspapers. Jordan is not a limited constitutional monarchy on the British pattern, with a figure-head monarch, nor is it likely to be—given Arab preferences for strong leadership. But the elections that have brought critics of the government from both the Islamist right and the populist left to the parliament, where they speak freely and have their words accurately reported in the press, demonstrate that Jordan is far removed from the patterns of authoritarian dictatorship practiced in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

Jordan's problems spring not from its lack of resources, or its uneasy balance between nascent popular democracy and traditional patriarchal government. They spring directly from the unsolved Palestine problem. My Palestinian-born taxi driver for the long trip from the capital back to the airport clearly was unhappy at my question of whether he would return to Palestine.

He left his birthplace as a child, he explained, and since it will remain in Israel under any settlement being contemplated, "there is nothing there for me." Asked what he thought of the Israel-Jordan treaty, he was glumly noncommital. His silence was eloquent testimony to the feeling of betrayal shared by "1948 Palestinian refugees," wherever they may have settled.

While Yasser Arafat bargains for the nascent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and other Arab "confrontation states" sign peace treaties with Israel, where is the will or leverage to reach a final settlement on behalf of the Palestinians displaced from Israel proper? And if these refugees, who constitute more than half of the population of Jordan, are to receive neither the right to return nor a generous cash compensation to enable them and their children to start a new life where they find themselves, when will there be stability in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the other Middle East countries that received them in such vast numbers more than 46 years ago?

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.