Tag Archive for: Jordan

The Islamic scramble for Jerusalem

Three recent articles in The Strategist about President Donald Trump’s Jerusalem declaration—by Peter Rodgers, Mike Scrafton and Richard Haass—demonstrate that we’re dealing with narratives, concepts and emotions that no logical arguments or facts can change or influence. Being a retired Israeli diplomat and a resident of Jerusalem, I believe that any attempt from my side to add more will be to no avail. However, I was stationed in three interesting cities which may offer some perspective and ideas.

My first posting abroad was at the Israeli embassy in The Hague, the Netherlands. The Hague isn’t the capital of the Netherlands; Amsterdam, just a 45-minute drive northeast of there, is. I don’t know why or who decided that it should be as it is. Nor can I recall that anyone was bothered by that situation.

It also happens that I lived in New Delhi and discovered that the city of Chandigarh is the joint capital of two important Indian states, Punjab and Haryana. And it works. And finally, I was stationed for more than nine years in Amman and have some insights into the crucial importance of Jerusalem to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The Hashemite dynasty descends from the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. This lineage provides respectability and authority to Jordan’s king in the eyes of both Jordanians and Muslim believers living abroad. The crown’s stability is frequently attributed to this heritage. Accordingly, Jordan’s special role in the Muslim holy places in the city is recognised in the peace agreement with Israel: ‘Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem.’ The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan contributes to maintaining these shrines and pays the salaries of officials and staff.

Jordan is very sensitive to current developments and is seriously looking for ways to tackle them. But it faces many other contenders in the Arab and Islamic world who also claim a role in Jerusalem, each for their own ends and motives. The Palestinian Authority, for example, has designated Jerusalem the capital of the future Palestinian state and is working hard to take the lead. That puts the Palestinian Authority, consciously or unconsciously, in competition, and eventually on a collision course, with Jordan about which country will have the special role in Jerusalem’s holy shrines.

But there’s another Arab Muslim state whose king also hails from the Prophet Muhammad’s family: the Kingdom of Morocco, headed by King Muhammad VI. The king, like his father before him, chairs the Al-Quds Committee (Jerusalem Committee) of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is an umbrella for 57 Islamic states. The committee promotes Muslim claims to Jerusalem.

Turkey is another strong player in the arena. In recent years it has sought openly and systematically to restore the heyday of the Ottoman Empire. It remembers very well its 400 years of custodianship of Jerusalem (1517–1917). Last month, it hosted an emergency meeting of the OIC to discuss President Trump’s declaration. But Jerusalem is only one facet of the broader Turkish effort. The recent visit of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Sudan yielded an interesting result: a long-term contract to restore an old Sudanese port on the shores of the Red Sea. The port was used during the Ottoman period to transfer Muslim pilgrims from Africa to the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The contract facilitates, among other things, the presence of Turkish navy vessels in the port, which has caused discomfort to Arab countries in the neighbourhood.

Next in line is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It’s the guardian of the Muslim holy shrines of Mecca and Medina and has an uneasy history with the contemporary Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. It should be remembered that the Hashemites were the guardians of Mecca and Medina before being replaced by the Saudi dynasty in 1925.

And in the flanks, casting a long shadow, looms the Islamic Republic of Iran with its Quds Force, a special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps dedicated to the liberation of Jerusalem, which adds a Shia dimension to the already complex competition. Needless to say, the force was established long before the current American president was sworn in.

As one can see, the picture is much more complex than meets the eye. Ignoring all these factors won’t contribute to a realistic assessment or solution.

The multiple actors competing between themselves may resort at some stage to more populist steps, such as allowing ‘volunteers’ to march in the direction of Jerusalem or calling for jihad. That shouldn’t surprise anyone; only 100 years ago, during World War I, British propaganda depicted the Palestine campaign as ‘the last crusade’. The stage is wide open to miscalculations and eventually to unintended consequences.

The return of the Jordanian option

France’s initiative to hold an international conference to re-launch direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians, aimed at the ever elusive “two-state solution,” is the child of a resilient fantasy. But after decades of failed negotiations, it’s time to start thinking like adults.

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian society is primed for compromise. On the contrary, in Israel, surging nationalism has become a major obstacle to any negotiation. With Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu catering to ultra-nationalist elements, there is no possibility that he will produce the kinds of peace proposals pursued by his predecessors, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. As for Palestine, its fragmented polity undermines any possibility of effective negotiation.

But even beyond the current circumstances, there are more fundamental reasons why the Israel-Palestine peace process has never worked. The role of history and religion in the conflict, together with the small size of territory over which the parties are fighting, leaves too little room for accommodation.

There is another vital reason: The Palestinian interlocutor is not a state, but an unpredictable movement. It is a movement that is institutionally invertebrate and split between Islamists, who dream of a borderless Arab nation, and ineffective secular nationalists who four times (1937, 1947, 2000, and 2008) rejected offers for the creation of a Palestinian state.

When negotiating with Arab states, Israel was far more forthcoming than it ever was in the case of the Palestinian national movement. In the early 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin promised Syria’s then-president, Hafez al-Assad, a return to the 1967 borders without so much as a meeting. In 1979, Egypt got back 100% of the land that Israel captured from it in the 1967 Six Day War.

Of course, Israel also began as a movement. But almost from its inception, the Zionist project was driven by a unifying sense of purpose in building an independent nation-state. At every crossroads throughout the years leading to Israel’s creation, the movement’s leaders made the pragmatic, rather than the fanciful, choice.

Palestinian nationalism, by contrast, was never focused on state-building. Fuelled by the tragedy of expulsion and disinheritance, it focused on the dream of restitution. The failure and eventual sacking in 2013 of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad—whose professed intention was to emulate Zionism through a laborious policy of state-building—is revealing.

But there is an alternative to the two-state solution that accounts for these factors: The West Bank could revert to Jordan, which would then become a kind of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. In essence, this option represents a return to the parameters of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, at which a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation represented the Palestinian cause.

Israel, in this scenario, would benefit from gaining an interlocutor that is an orderly state with a tradition of—and interest in—negotiation and compliance with agreements. This should be enough to impel Israeli leaders at least to consider the option, and behave less deceitfully than they have in direct negotiations with the Palestinians.

With Israel no longer able to use Palestinian institutional weakness as a justification for its continued occupation of the West Bank, Palestine would stand to benefit. Moreover, Israel could not, as it attempted to do in the past, annex strategic areas of the West Bank and return the rest to Jordan; instead, it would have to withdraw to the 1967 borders, with agreed modifications and land swaps.

Palestinians seem to recognize these benefits. In 2013, according to polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 55% of Palestinians supported the Jordanian option—a 10% increase from five years earlier.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle is Jordan, which currently is not interested in getting involved. That will change only if it faces a threat to its own security, stemming, say, from the spill over of Palestinian instability from the West Bank.

Paradoxically, one potential trigger of such a security risk could be apparent progress toward a two-state solution. The late King Hussein feared that an independent Palestinian state could become a radical irredentist entity, and his own 1988 decision to waive Jordan’s claim on the West Bank, taken under pressure from the Arab League, was never ratified in parliament, and is still regarded by many as unconstitutional.

Fear of Palestinian instability also drove two former Jordanian prime ministers, Abdel Salam Majali and Taher al-Masri, to advocate a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. Majali remains a staunch champion of the idea, as he made clear in a recent meeting in Amman with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. His elaborate 2007 plan, undoubtedly shared with King Abdullah’s consent, was spurred by the prospect of chaos should an Israeli government decide to secure Israel’s survival as a Jewish state through unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank. That chaos, Jordan’s government feared, could spread to the East Bank, potentially dealing a fatal blow to the Kingdom.

The international community is about to embark, yet again, on a peace process aimed at creating an orderly and viable independent Palestinian state in the West Bank. That would be the most just outcome. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely, leaving a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation as the last remaining hope for Palestinian statehood.