The Jordanian dilemma

It’s hard to rebut the Palestinian narrative without bringing up Jordan, yet doing so has real costs.

Writing in this paper on Friday, Martin Sherman correctly pointed out that “the origins of the assault on Israel’s legitimacy are rooted in the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative.” Once someone is convinced that a) the Palestinians have a right to a state, and b) the West Bank and Gaza are “occupied Palestinian territories” that rightly belong to a Palestinian state, he will necessarily see any Israeli effort to impose conditions on this state’s establishment, or to curtail its territory, as illegitimate. In a clash between “rights” and “security needs,” rights will always win.

There’s no conceivable excuse for Israel’s failure to combat the second half of this Palestinian claim. But there’s a substantive reason for its historical reluctance to challenge the first half, and it can be summed up in a single word: Jordan. For the simplest rebuttal to the claim that the Palestinians have a “right” to establish a state is to point out the obvious but perpetually overlooked fact that a Palestinian state already exists: It occupies fully 80 percent of the original British Mandate for Palestine, and its population is roughly two-thirds Palestinian. It just happens to be called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan rather than Palestine.

If a Palestinian state already exists, then the argument for creating a second one is obviously much weaker. Even the most expansive interpretations of the right to national self-determination don’t hold that given ethnic groups have a right to statehood on any patch of land where they happen to comprise a majority (as the Palestinians do in the West Bank and Gaza); if so, multiethnic states would fragment unendingly into ever smaller statelets. Hence no Western country, for instance, supports allowing Kosovo’s northern provinces to break away and either form their own state or join neighboring Serbia, even though these provinces are majority Serb. The generally accepted principle is that once a given national group has a state where it can exercise self-determination, group members living outside this state don’t need another one; they can move to the original if they wish to exercise their right of national self-determination – just as Jews wishing to take part in the Jewish national project move to Israel, or ethnic Germans wishing to take part in the German national project move to Germany.

Nevertheless, there’s a serious obstacle to making this argument: For Jordan to function effectively as a Palestinian state, a revolution would have to occur there. And not only would the ouster of Jordan’s Hashemite rulers create real security headaches for Israel, but even advocating such a scenario would do so.

Currently, Jordan is an undemocratic state ruled by Saudi Arabian exiles (the Hashemites), which actively discriminates against its Palestinian citizens. Palestinians are largely excluded from government, and thousands have even been stripped of their citizenship over the last decade. Moreover, Jordan stringently restricts Palestinian immigration from the West Bank and Gaza, even though many West Bank Palestinians held Jordanian citizenship until Jordan rescinded it overnight in 1988.

None of this changes the reality that Jordan is a Palestinian state. But Palestinians won’t be able to exercise full national self-determination there until the system of government changes enough to bring the Palestinian majority to power.

As the Arab Spring has shown, a revolution is hardly unthinkable. But neither would it be cost-free for Israel.

The Jordanian border is not only Israel’s longest border, but also its quietest one. That has been true for roughly four decades, even though a formal peace treaty was signed only in 1994. And today, it’s Israel’s only quiet border. Thus if this border heated up as well, it would clearly be a major security headache for Israel. And there’s no reason to think a Palestinian-ruled Jordan would keep the peace the way the Hashemite kings have done.

Indeed, even openly discussing the “Jordan is Palestine” option could exact a security price: The Hashemites have long considered a quiet border in their own interest, but their calculations might understandably change if they thought Israel were actively seeking their overthrow.

Any such discussion would also exact a significant diplomatic price. It would certainly shred the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and might also endanger Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan’s ally, Egypt. Moreover, it could create substantial friction with Washington, since Jordan is an American ally.

For all these reasons, successive Israeli governments have consistently eschewed a Jordan-is-Palestine policy. In retrospect, I think this proved to be the wrong decision. A Palestinian state in the West Bank would be even more dangerous than one in Jordan, and the delegitimization campaign that resulted from Israel’s failure to counter the Palestinian narrative seems likely to exact higher costs than a Jordan-is-Palestine policy would. But even today, the arguments against such a policy are nontrivial; hence reasonable people can and do disagree about it.

No such justification can be advanced for Israel’s failure to rebut the claim that the West Bank and Gaza are “occupied Palestinian territory.” Combating that canard has no downside whatsoever, since even Israelis who favor creating a Palestinian state in these territories agree that any such deal must meet certain minimal Israeli requirements, and a state generously ceding its own territory for the sake of peace is much better placed to make demands of the other side than a state stubbornly refusing to return stolen land. Moreover, not only are all the facts are on Israel’s side, but they were universally accepted throughout the West until a few decades ago. That they have since been universally forgotten amounts to criminal diplomatic malfeasance by successive Israeli governments, which have spent the last 20 years pushing the Palestinian narrative instead of Israel’s own – a mind-boggling lapse that can’t be corrected too soon.

As for Jordan, Israel should at the very least be preparing to leverage a Jordanian revolution if and when it comes, since if the Arab Spring has proven anything, it’s that sooner or later, it probably will. But Jerusalem should also give serious thought to starting a Jordan-is-Palestine campaign now – because given the pace at which delegitimization is progressing, waiting for the revolution may be too late.