Where Courage is Needed

When King Hussein visited the U.S. just over a year ago to discuss the "Reagan plan" for the West Bank, he told the Administration that he could not negotiate with Israel on it unless two essential conditions were met. Firstly, he would need to get authorization from the PLO. Secondly, Israel would have to stop trying to impose its own solution on the West Bank by continuing to build settlements there. The King did not, of course, expect the Administration to "deliver" the PLO. He did, however, believe the U.S. was in a position to prevail upon Israel to go along with one thing the plan called for: "the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze." The King thought he had made it clear that negotiations could never start unless the freeze took place, and went back home believing that the Administration was committed to seeing that this would be done.

Within four months, the Administration's plans for Jordan-Israel negotiations had fallen apart. King Hussein had had long talks with Yasser Arafat, but failed to get his backing. He announced on April 10, 1983, that he would not enter into negotiations. Official Washington was stunned, and even a little angry. Why didn't the King have the courage to talk to Israel anyway, many complained, with or without Arafat? The fact that Israel was still establishing settlements on the West Bank seemed to cross the minds of officials only fleetingly, almost as though the settlements were irrelevant, or at the most a minor nuisance.

The media, too, noted for only a brief period the fact that a freeze on settlements had been an objective. It then seemed to drop the subject. For nearly a year now, whenever the King's decision not to negotiate is brought up in passing, the standard capsule explanation is that the King backed out of negotiations because he could not get the backing of the PLO. Seldom is it mentioned, even by thoughtful writers in serious journals, that the failure of the Administration to get the Israelis to stop building settlements was in itself enough to make him decide not to go ahead.

Why wasn't anybody listening? The King had not been speaking pro-forma about settlements, but was deadly serious. It was clear to him, and in our view should have been clear to anyone who brought some common sense to bear on the subject, that the credibility of the entire Reagan plan rested on the U.S.'s ability to get Israel to make the freeze. If it couldn't even get Israel to do that, how could it possibly ever persuade Israel to give up sovereignty—not just settlements, but sovereignty, for heaven's sake—over the West Bank? Because that's what the Reagan plan calls on Israel to do.

Why are we bringing up all this? Because recently King Hussein was in Washington again, amid a lot of talk about renewed determination by Jordan and the PLO to work for a settlement on the West Bank. But what has really changed since a year ago? Israel keeps making it clear that it rejects the Reagan plan—and as the military occupier of the West Bank, it can, and does, use bullets to make its rejection stick. Now, as before, the King needs concrete evidence that Mr. Reagan is really serious about wanting his plan to come to fruition, and will use the leverage he has over Israel to make it happen. But with an election year in full swing, he has even less chance of seeing this than he did last year, when the chances were nearly nil.

There are still those who say that King Hussein should "step forward," as Sadat did, and negotiate with Israel—whether or not the U.S. is ready to use its leverage on Israel to support him. This is nonsense. The West Bank is not Sinai. The way Begin looked at it, it nets a good deal for him to give the Sinai desert back to Egypt in return for an opportunity to nail down—without the former risk of Egyptian interference—the lands he really wanted, which included the West Bank. Mr. Shamir, who like Mr. Begin calls the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, feels the same way, and would not hand the territory back even if the King came to the Knesset every day to make a speech. For the King to do this even once, under present circumstances, would carry with it an unacceptable risk of humiliation.

It is sad but, in our opinion, very true that there is no chance whatsoever that Israel will relinquish the West Bank unless a U.S. Administration has the courage to tell it that it will have to do so if it wishes to continue to receive financial and military aid. What is even sadder is our conviction that this will never happen until the Arab nations possess the military strength and political unity that will oblige U.S. Administrations to sit up and listen. If present trends continue, this will take a very long time.