Bravo

President Reagan's new peace initiative for the Middle East was announced just before this publication went to press. While we have a number of reservations regarding its content and its prospects for success, we welcome it as a positive step forward, and rejoice that the Administration is trying to work out a plan of its own that it regards as fair and workable, rather than accepting the faits accomplis of others. Bravo, Mr. President.

Why Jordan Is Not Palestine

There may be some readers who have just returned from vacation in Siberia or the Gobi Desert and have not yet heard the refrain, growing louder and more insistent by the day, that is now coming out of Israel. It goes something like this:

There already is an independent Palestine state. It's called Jordan. So why do Palestinians need to have such a state anywhere else?

It is easy to see how convenient it would be for the Israelis if they could get people to believe this fantasy. For one thing, they could claim that in absorbing the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, they are not in any way blocking the Palestinians' right to self -determination—which could, after all, be exercised by the Palestinians in their "real" homeland across the Jordan River.

But the Israelis have an even stronger motivation to spread this idea. Once the West Bank and Gaza are fully absorbed into Israel, there will remain one troublesome problem: the existence of an additional one million non-Jews in what is supposed to be a Jewish state. Wouldn't it be nice, they think, if large numbers of these people could be—er, encouraged—to do what is best for them and go to live in their independent homeland? This would not be expulsion, of course. It would simply be helping them to do what is in their own interest, as patriotic Palestinians.

The case being made about Jordan rests on two major arguments: one demographic, and the other historical.

The demographic argument is particularly mind-boggling in its audacity. The Israelis argue that Jordan is Palestine because a majority of the people who live there are now Palestinians. In other words, if you force enough people out of country X into country Y, you can tell them that country Y is really country X!

The second Israeli argument is more complex. In fact, an Israeli professor, J. Nedava, has just written a 3,500 word article expounding it. What it boils down to is that the British, after World War I, regarded the territory then known as Transjordan as part of Palestine, and included it as part of their Palestine Mandate. Aside from the fact that the point is misleading when it fails to take into account that Transjordan was given the status of an independent state under King Hussein's grandfather three months before the Mandate became official, and was treated separately from the other territories thereafterwards, the principal weakness of the argument lies in the assumption that Britain in any case had the right to decree what was Palestine and what was not. For hundreds of years, under the Ottomans, the territories east and west of the Jordan River had been administered separately—and had thereby achieved separate identities. Just because the British came along in the 20th century and called the Jordanian apple an orange, is no reason to assume we should be able to get orange juice from it.

Perhaps the best way to establish whether Jordan is Palestine is to ask the people who live there. A visitor would be hard put to find a Palestinian in that country—whether holding Jordanian citizenship or not—who regards Jordan as the state of Palestine. As for the Jordanians whose family roots have always been in the soil east of the Jordan River, they do not and have never considered themselves to be Palestinians. It is safe to say that most of the people in Israel who are floating their theory about Jordan have never been to Jordan. But even if they had, it is doubtful that it would make any difference. Mr. Begin and Co. seldom allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.