HOW JORDAN CAN HELP PALESTINE by Joseph Braude - THE NEW REPUBLIC
HOW JORDAN CAN HELP PALESTINE.
Good Neighbor
by Joseph Braude
Only at TNR Online
Post date 08.30.05
My Comments are in red....
Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza this month marked more than just a blow to the settler movement. By departing Gaza without a peace deal, Israel affirmed with finality that the dream of economic integration and political partnership between Israelis and Palestinians is dead. And that means a viable Palestinian state will have to be built in consort with another power. Ten years of conflict among Israel, Palestinian Islamists, and the Palestinian Authority have left Gaza and the West Bank deeply wounded--its physical and human infrastructure hobbled, its institutions of civil society gutted--and badly in need of a partner in security and economic reconstruction. The natural candidate is Jordan, Palestine's neighbor to the east.
The concept of "Jordanian-Palestinian confederation" has never been clearly defined and at times has raised objections from nationalists in both countries. For some, it implies less than full sovereignty for either people. For others, it raises the specter of the "alternative-homeland" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once envisioned by some revisionist Zionists--the notion of a mass transfer of Palestinians across the Jordan River. This idea is, of course, immoral and unacceptable. Yet if confederation in the sense of mass transfer is to be firmly repudiated, confederation in the sense of heightened political and military coordination as well as economic interdependence between Jordan and Palestine is to be welcomed; in fact, it may represent the most viable path to rebuilding the shattered economy and fractured society of the West Bank and Gaza. Seen this way, confederation is not an alternative to a Palestinian state but rather the best available framework in which to build one.
So it's a good sign that prominent voices on both sides of the Jordan River are calling for closer links between the Palestinian and Jordanian leaderships - it is a good sign for who? The question now is whether Jordan's King Abdullah and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will move towards a formal alliance. Palestinians, Jordanians, Israelis, and Americans should all be hoping that they do.
Cultural ties between the east and west banks of the Jordan River are one of the great historical continuities of the topographical designation known as Palestine. Israel's foremost Jordan scholar, Tel Aviv University professor Asher Susser, has observed, "Historically it has been much easier to travel from east to west across the Jordan River than from the southern part of the east bank to its northern part." The resulting confluence of personal and family ties between east bank cities like Kerak and Salt and west bank cities like Nablus and Hebron has created a longstanding sense of solidarity across the river--quite literally, blood that runs thicker than water. This observation is nothing new. But here's what has changed in recent years: The so-called "West Bank" Palestinians, once refugees, who populate the "East Bank" capital Amman have won greater power and influence in the country today than at any time in its history--making Amman, in effect, a Palestinian-majority city-state, culturally and economically distinct from Jordan's northern and southern provinces.
It has been 35 years since "Black September," a bloody civil war in Jordan that left ethnic Jordanians fully in control of the country's military, security services, and government--and most Palestinian refugees languishing in camps and urban poverty. Since that time, the children and grandchildren of many '48 and '67 refugees have been integrated into mainstream Jordanian society and now dominate the economic life of Amman. Their clout in the city's businesses and banks has been fortified by the inflow of several hundred thousand Palestinians from Kuwait, banished by that country's emir in 1990 as punishment for the PLO's support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. These affluent, educated people were allowed to bring most of the money they had earned along with them to Amman as part of an arrangement that made their migration a gift to the Jordanian economy. In the country today, ethnic Jordanians still dominate the public sector, security services, and armed forces; but they are economically weaker than ethnic Palestinians who dominate an increasingly robust and globalized urban private sector.
King Abdullah's current reform agenda seeks to parlay this reality into a new decentralized form of governance. As part of a set of initiatives termed "Jordan First," Abdullah has called for redistricting his country into three "governorates"--northern, southern, and central--each with heightened authority over its own law-making. The expressed purpose of the shift is to strengthen Jordanian nationals' allegiance to the state by vesting the historically disenfranchised--largely ethnic Palestinians--with more ownership over their local governments. But there's a tacit understanding that "Jordan First" could be more than that: It could signal the beginning of a new federal structure, a segment of which would be open to innovative arrangements and alignments across the Jordan River. As the Ramallah-based Palestine Media Center noted in a recent paper, "Abdullah's new decentralization plan for Jordan is a far reaching move to enfranchise Jordan's Palestinian majority and may also represent the foundation of a political infrastructure for future cooperation with the West Bank."
No less significant than the king's proposed political reforms has been a decision he made earlier this year with immense symbolic meaning to Palestinians. The king formally relieved his half-brother Hamza of his role as crown prince and replaced him with his own ten-year-old son Hussein, whose mother, Queen Rania, is a Palestinian with roots in the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The promise of a half-Palestinian king reigning in Jordan gives the present monarch unprecedented popularity with Palestinians on both sides of the Jordan River--and the sort of credibility that would be needed for the king to sell his subjects on a closer relationship with the West Bank.
Meanwhile, across the Jordan River, a different set of political factors also mitigates in favor of heightened collaboration with Amman. The death of Yasir Arafat marked the end of his long campaign to marginalize Jordan's political role in Palestine. Arafat had evicted Muslim clerics loyal to the king from the religious administration of Arab East Jerusalem and replaced them with PLO firebrands. His very position, for that matter, as Palestinian Authority chief following the Oslo accords amounted to a displacement of longstanding Jordanian influence over the West Bank. Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is by contrast one of the most pro-Jordanian members of the PLO's old guard. As the Palestine Media Center's paper noted, Jordan's special role in securing East Jerusalem has been gradually reestablished over the past two years; and recent initiatives by Abbas call for a greater Jordanian role in Palestinian reconstruction than at any time since the Oslo accords were first signed. Perhaps the most dramatic change in Jordan policy under Abbas has been his effort to gain King Abdullah's help in reestablishing security in the West Bank. Though only some of these proposals have been accepted by all parties concerned, the extent of Jordanian military involvement that Abbas apparently envisions is extraordinary. Abbas proposed importing King Abdullah's Badr Forces--Palestinians trained to fight under Jordanian supervision--to put down the mounting chaos in the West Bank. This idea was reportedly rejected by some of Abbas's Palestinian colleagues--who feared a loss of turf--and by Israel, which feared a return of Palestinian refugees under a military guise. But earlier this summer, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon approved a new Jordanian-Palestinian security cooperation project in the northern West Bank. If this pilot program proves successful, it could lead to further Jordanian involvement elsewhere in Palestinian areas.
Palestinians understand that the sooner they establish security in West Bank cities and towns, the sooner those towns will be released by Israel to join an emerging Palestinian state. Abbas's manifest enthusiasm for a Jordanian role in this process would seem to reflect his belief that the king's army could help rescue the deteriorating security situation in Palestine. And Abdullah is just as keen as Abbas to stem the chaos in Palestine: In a speech earlier this month, the monarch reiterated his concern about a new wave of refugees from across the Jordan River--and his emphatic refusal to accept them. What both these leaders have been expressing, in essence, is a sense of mutual interdependency on matters of security.
The United States--which earlier this year dispatched a senior military official to oversee the streamlining of the Palestinian police forces--should acknowledge the wisdom of this old fashioned "trans-Jordanian" sentiment and seek to build on it. Indeed, the United States, more than any other outside power, is the linchpin of integration between Jordan and an emerging Palestine. Washington's substantial commitment of foreign aid to both governments gives it unique clout to encourage and cajole Jordanians and Palestinians toward a policy of heightened political and economic intimacy.
In doing so, the United States has to be careful, as the story of Adnan Badran illustrates. Badran, a Palestinian who became Jordan's prime minister this year, was given a mandate by the king to implement fast-track American-style economic reforms--and soon faced a rebellion in Jordan's parliament. Though Badran's adversaries--led by the powerful south Jordanian speaker of the parliament, Abd al-Hadi al-Majali--voiced their opposition in terms of economic policy differences, the underlying ethnic tension was unmistakable. Free market reforms that trim the public sector and transfer growth to the private sector were understood by many ethnic Jordanians to further threaten their standing in the country--because the public sector is their bread and butter--vis-à-vis Palestinians, whose wealth comes mainly from business. Conservatives in parliament managed to force a reshuffling of Badran's cabinet, which had included an unprecedented number of Palestinian ministers, and force a delay in the new government's plans.
The lesson here for the United States is that free-market reforms should be introduced with due consideration to their impact on longstanding ethnic tensions in Jordan; after all, ethnic accord within the country is vital to the engineering of greater integration across the Jordan River. As Yasir Abu Hilala, a columnist for the Jordanian daily Al-Ghad, observed, "In Jordan, it is possible to design a project of political reform that takes into account the fears that are associated with identity."
But there's a flip side to the importance of treading lightly on ethnic tensions within Jordan. The United States should also use its formidable influence to help resolve the festering disputes that underlie those tensions to begin with--in particular, the ambiguous status of Palestinian refugees, as well as former Palestinian refugees who now hold Jordanian citizenship (the latter grouping, in fact, being considerably larger than the former). Recognizing the permanent status of this community's members as Jordanian--rather than paying lip service to the decades-long counterfactual assertion that their repatriation in Palestine is imminent--will allow all Jordanian nationals to publicly debate the merits of confederation with an equal sense of entitlement.
"[Confederation] is one of the options that I would say is the best for the Arab-Israeli crisis," Samir Abu Libdeh, a visiting scholar from Jordan at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. "But I don't think the issue of confederation is clearly open without discussing internal matters of defining the Palestinians and Jordanians." With all Jordanians equally vested in their country's well-being, Amman would be well positioned to form a close alliance with the new Palestinian state. And for anyone who wants to see the Palestinian national project succeed - on someone else's expense and not Israel's, that would be welcome news indeed.
Confederation is politically defined as A group of nations or states, or a government encompassing several states or political divisions, in which the component states retain considerable independence. The members of a confederation often delegate only a few powers to the central authority. This scenario could be entertained when an Independent Palestinian is declared and only then. Other than that, such a scenario will certail mean the resolution of the Arab - Israeli conflict on Jordan's expense.....
Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.
Good Neighbor
by Joseph Braude
Only at TNR Online
Post date 08.30.05
My Comments are in red....
Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza this month marked more than just a blow to the settler movement. By departing Gaza without a peace deal, Israel affirmed with finality that the dream of economic integration and political partnership between Israelis and Palestinians is dead. And that means a viable Palestinian state will have to be built in consort with another power. Ten years of conflict among Israel, Palestinian Islamists, and the Palestinian Authority have left Gaza and the West Bank deeply wounded--its physical and human infrastructure hobbled, its institutions of civil society gutted--and badly in need of a partner in security and economic reconstruction. The natural candidate is Jordan, Palestine's neighbor to the east.
The concept of "Jordanian-Palestinian confederation" has never been clearly defined and at times has raised objections from nationalists in both countries. For some, it implies less than full sovereignty for either people. For others, it raises the specter of the "alternative-homeland" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once envisioned by some revisionist Zionists--the notion of a mass transfer of Palestinians across the Jordan River. This idea is, of course, immoral and unacceptable. Yet if confederation in the sense of mass transfer is to be firmly repudiated, confederation in the sense of heightened political and military coordination as well as economic interdependence between Jordan and Palestine is to be welcomed; in fact, it may represent the most viable path to rebuilding the shattered economy and fractured society of the West Bank and Gaza. Seen this way, confederation is not an alternative to a Palestinian state but rather the best available framework in which to build one.
So it's a good sign that prominent voices on both sides of the Jordan River are calling for closer links between the Palestinian and Jordanian leaderships - it is a good sign for who? The question now is whether Jordan's King Abdullah and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will move towards a formal alliance. Palestinians, Jordanians, Israelis, and Americans should all be hoping that they do.
Cultural ties between the east and west banks of the Jordan River are one of the great historical continuities of the topographical designation known as Palestine. Israel's foremost Jordan scholar, Tel Aviv University professor Asher Susser, has observed, "Historically it has been much easier to travel from east to west across the Jordan River than from the southern part of the east bank to its northern part." The resulting confluence of personal and family ties between east bank cities like Kerak and Salt and west bank cities like Nablus and Hebron has created a longstanding sense of solidarity across the river--quite literally, blood that runs thicker than water. This observation is nothing new. But here's what has changed in recent years: The so-called "West Bank" Palestinians, once refugees, who populate the "East Bank" capital Amman have won greater power and influence in the country today than at any time in its history--making Amman, in effect, a Palestinian-majority city-state, culturally and economically distinct from Jordan's northern and southern provinces.
It has been 35 years since "Black September," a bloody civil war in Jordan that left ethnic Jordanians fully in control of the country's military, security services, and government--and most Palestinian refugees languishing in camps and urban poverty. Since that time, the children and grandchildren of many '48 and '67 refugees have been integrated into mainstream Jordanian society and now dominate the economic life of Amman. Their clout in the city's businesses and banks has been fortified by the inflow of several hundred thousand Palestinians from Kuwait, banished by that country's emir in 1990 as punishment for the PLO's support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. These affluent, educated people were allowed to bring most of the money they had earned along with them to Amman as part of an arrangement that made their migration a gift to the Jordanian economy. In the country today, ethnic Jordanians still dominate the public sector, security services, and armed forces; but they are economically weaker than ethnic Palestinians who dominate an increasingly robust and globalized urban private sector.
King Abdullah's current reform agenda seeks to parlay this reality into a new decentralized form of governance. As part of a set of initiatives termed "Jordan First," Abdullah has called for redistricting his country into three "governorates"--northern, southern, and central--each with heightened authority over its own law-making. The expressed purpose of the shift is to strengthen Jordanian nationals' allegiance to the state by vesting the historically disenfranchised--largely ethnic Palestinians--with more ownership over their local governments. But there's a tacit understanding that "Jordan First" could be more than that: It could signal the beginning of a new federal structure, a segment of which would be open to innovative arrangements and alignments across the Jordan River. As the Ramallah-based Palestine Media Center noted in a recent paper, "Abdullah's new decentralization plan for Jordan is a far reaching move to enfranchise Jordan's Palestinian majority and may also represent the foundation of a political infrastructure for future cooperation with the West Bank."
No less significant than the king's proposed political reforms has been a decision he made earlier this year with immense symbolic meaning to Palestinians. The king formally relieved his half-brother Hamza of his role as crown prince and replaced him with his own ten-year-old son Hussein, whose mother, Queen Rania, is a Palestinian with roots in the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The promise of a half-Palestinian king reigning in Jordan gives the present monarch unprecedented popularity with Palestinians on both sides of the Jordan River--and the sort of credibility that would be needed for the king to sell his subjects on a closer relationship with the West Bank.
Meanwhile, across the Jordan River, a different set of political factors also mitigates in favor of heightened collaboration with Amman. The death of Yasir Arafat marked the end of his long campaign to marginalize Jordan's political role in Palestine. Arafat had evicted Muslim clerics loyal to the king from the religious administration of Arab East Jerusalem and replaced them with PLO firebrands. His very position, for that matter, as Palestinian Authority chief following the Oslo accords amounted to a displacement of longstanding Jordanian influence over the West Bank. Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is by contrast one of the most pro-Jordanian members of the PLO's old guard. As the Palestine Media Center's paper noted, Jordan's special role in securing East Jerusalem has been gradually reestablished over the past two years; and recent initiatives by Abbas call for a greater Jordanian role in Palestinian reconstruction than at any time since the Oslo accords were first signed. Perhaps the most dramatic change in Jordan policy under Abbas has been his effort to gain King Abdullah's help in reestablishing security in the West Bank. Though only some of these proposals have been accepted by all parties concerned, the extent of Jordanian military involvement that Abbas apparently envisions is extraordinary. Abbas proposed importing King Abdullah's Badr Forces--Palestinians trained to fight under Jordanian supervision--to put down the mounting chaos in the West Bank. This idea was reportedly rejected by some of Abbas's Palestinian colleagues--who feared a loss of turf--and by Israel, which feared a return of Palestinian refugees under a military guise. But earlier this summer, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon approved a new Jordanian-Palestinian security cooperation project in the northern West Bank. If this pilot program proves successful, it could lead to further Jordanian involvement elsewhere in Palestinian areas.
Palestinians understand that the sooner they establish security in West Bank cities and towns, the sooner those towns will be released by Israel to join an emerging Palestinian state. Abbas's manifest enthusiasm for a Jordanian role in this process would seem to reflect his belief that the king's army could help rescue the deteriorating security situation in Palestine. And Abdullah is just as keen as Abbas to stem the chaos in Palestine: In a speech earlier this month, the monarch reiterated his concern about a new wave of refugees from across the Jordan River--and his emphatic refusal to accept them. What both these leaders have been expressing, in essence, is a sense of mutual interdependency on matters of security.
The United States--which earlier this year dispatched a senior military official to oversee the streamlining of the Palestinian police forces--should acknowledge the wisdom of this old fashioned "trans-Jordanian" sentiment and seek to build on it. Indeed, the United States, more than any other outside power, is the linchpin of integration between Jordan and an emerging Palestine. Washington's substantial commitment of foreign aid to both governments gives it unique clout to encourage and cajole Jordanians and Palestinians toward a policy of heightened political and economic intimacy.
In doing so, the United States has to be careful, as the story of Adnan Badran illustrates. Badran, a Palestinian who became Jordan's prime minister this year, was given a mandate by the king to implement fast-track American-style economic reforms--and soon faced a rebellion in Jordan's parliament. Though Badran's adversaries--led by the powerful south Jordanian speaker of the parliament, Abd al-Hadi al-Majali--voiced their opposition in terms of economic policy differences, the underlying ethnic tension was unmistakable. Free market reforms that trim the public sector and transfer growth to the private sector were understood by many ethnic Jordanians to further threaten their standing in the country--because the public sector is their bread and butter--vis-à-vis Palestinians, whose wealth comes mainly from business. Conservatives in parliament managed to force a reshuffling of Badran's cabinet, which had included an unprecedented number of Palestinian ministers, and force a delay in the new government's plans.
The lesson here for the United States is that free-market reforms should be introduced with due consideration to their impact on longstanding ethnic tensions in Jordan; after all, ethnic accord within the country is vital to the engineering of greater integration across the Jordan River. As Yasir Abu Hilala, a columnist for the Jordanian daily Al-Ghad, observed, "In Jordan, it is possible to design a project of political reform that takes into account the fears that are associated with identity."
But there's a flip side to the importance of treading lightly on ethnic tensions within Jordan. The United States should also use its formidable influence to help resolve the festering disputes that underlie those tensions to begin with--in particular, the ambiguous status of Palestinian refugees, as well as former Palestinian refugees who now hold Jordanian citizenship (the latter grouping, in fact, being considerably larger than the former). Recognizing the permanent status of this community's members as Jordanian--rather than paying lip service to the decades-long counterfactual assertion that their repatriation in Palestine is imminent--will allow all Jordanian nationals to publicly debate the merits of confederation with an equal sense of entitlement.
"[Confederation] is one of the options that I would say is the best for the Arab-Israeli crisis," Samir Abu Libdeh, a visiting scholar from Jordan at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. "But I don't think the issue of confederation is clearly open without discussing internal matters of defining the Palestinians and Jordanians." With all Jordanians equally vested in their country's well-being, Amman would be well positioned to form a close alliance with the new Palestinian state. And for anyone who wants to see the Palestinian national project succeed - on someone else's expense and not Israel's, that would be welcome news indeed.
Confederation is politically defined as A group of nations or states, or a government encompassing several states or political divisions, in which the component states retain considerable independence. The members of a confederation often delegate only a few powers to the central authority. This scenario could be entertained when an Independent Palestinian is declared and only then. Other than that, such a scenario will certail mean the resolution of the Arab - Israeli conflict on Jordan's expense.....
Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.
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