Yossi Klein Halevi has it right, I think, if only it can be done:
Israel should enlist JORDAN in the cause.
Sunday, April 28, 2002; Page B03
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI is the New Republic's correspondent in Israel and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report.
Israel needs a strategy that combines the insights of its left and right: that we can neither occupy the Palestinians nor make peace with them. We should revive what Israelis once called the Jordanian option -- ceding most of the territories to the Hashemites, who governed the West Bank and East Jerusalem before 1967.
That's because the disastrous experiment of partitioning the Holy Land with the unholiest national movement of our time is over. By embracing the suicide bombers, Palestine has committed suicide. Yasser Arafat has convinced an Israeli public once ready for far-reaching compromise that the Palestinians cannot be trusted as peace partners, let alone as partners in governing Jerusalem. The result is that a comprehensive settlement has become unattainable.
Once, before Oslo, the Labor Party supported the Jordanian option, while Likud opposed it. Disastrously, Likud vetoed negotiations in 1987 between Shimon Peres and the late Jordanian King Hussein. The first intifada broke out shortly afterward, leading to Jordanian withdrawal of its claims to the territories and Labor's fatal embrace of the PLO.
Now, Palestine is in ruins, with no prospects of recovery, controlled by a leadership that places grandiose national dreams ahead of its people's most basic welfare. Relatively stable Jordan is the natural custodian to help rebuild Palestinian society. Jordan's population is around 70 percent Palestinian, and the Hashemite Kingdom has been the only Arab country to grant Palestinian refugees citizenship. That is tacit recognition of the fact that Jordan is part of historic Palestine -- indeed, the only independent Arab state that has ever existed in this land.
As a first step, the Palestinian Authority must go the way of the Taliban. Arafat should be placed on a plane to Baghdad and his terrorist "police" apparatus dismantled. Israel would then cede most of the territories to Jordan, concentrating the settlements in areas close to the 1967 borders. Until the situation stabilizes, Israel would remain in control of a united Jerusalem, though it would cede the Temple Mount to the Hashemites who, as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad's family, have a compelling claim as custodians of the site. Finally, Israel would retain a military presence along the Jordan River.
Jordan is the only Arab country that has entered into a strategic relationship with the Jewish state. The Hashemites fear a PLO state no less than the Israelis do. Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who once advocated transforming Jordan into Palestine, has become one of the stalwarts of the Israeli-Jordanian relationship. Perhaps Sharon is the man to help transform Palestine back into Jordan.
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