Published in the Jerusalem Post, 2 March 2023
On January 24, for the
first time in over four years, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Jordan to meet King Abdullah II, in an
effort, no doubt, to start his new period in office with a clean slate. He doubtless recalled the episode in 2019,
toward the end of his previous term in office, when Abdullah declared to the
world that relations between his country and Israel were “at an all-time low”. Abdullah, too, may have wished to ensure no
repeat of the previous public clash.
In one sense nothing
much had changed. As ever Abdullah focused,
as the official Jordanian account of the meeting puts it, “on the need to
respect the historical and legal status quo at the blessed Al-Aqsa
Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif and not to harm it.”
This was a covert
reference to the visit by Israel’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben
Gvir, to the Temple Mount on January 3 - a visit which did not breach the
status quo in any way, but which led to furious condemnation from the Arab
world.
Equally familiar during
their meeting was Abdullah’s reiteration, for the umpteenth time, of his support
for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian dispute. He favors establishing a sovereign Palestinian
state within territory captured by Israel in the Six Day War, including east
Jerusalem.
On the face of it, this
demand puts Jordan arm-in-arm with the Palestinian Authority (PA), both
apparently seeking precisely the same from Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jordan believes that the
active involvement of the US would be vital to any attempt to resolve the
Arab-Israel conflict, and that Jordan would have a key role to play. Abdullah met US President Joe Biden in
Washington on February 3 when, according to media reports, Biden “reaffirmed
his strong support for a two-state solution”, and recognized Jordan’s “critical
role” in maintaining regional stability.
The PA leadership has a
quite different view. They broke off
diplomatic relations with the US after then-President Donald Trump recognized
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and moved the US embassy to
Jerusalem in May 2018. That chasm
remains as wide as ever. The US now has no official diplomatic offices in the Palestinian territories, and provides
no consular services to Palestinians.
Equally, the Palestinians have had no diplomatic representation in the
US since the closure of the PLO mission in Washington in October 2018.
Palestinian leaders maintain that they would refuse to engage in any peace
effort in which the US was dominant.
Explaining the position
of the PA leadership, Dr Abdullah Swalha, founder and director of the Center
for Israel Studies in Amman, said: “They can count on the Europeans, Japan and
other countries, as well as the halls of the UN and some international human
rights platforms.”
That difference between
Jordan and the PA over the role of the US is exacerbated by their different positions
on the two-state solution. For the
Fatah-controlled PA public advocacy of partition remains the tactical ploy
originally conceived by Yasser Arafat at Oslo in 1993 – a ploy which has proved
remarkably successful in winning world support for the Palestinians.
Not long after the conclusion of Oslo 2 in 1995, Arafat held what was intended to be a secret meeting with Arab leaders in a Stockholm hotel.
The Hamas organization regarded
the Oslo Accord of 1993 as a total betrayal of the Palestinian cause, and broke
with Arafat completely. On 5 September 1993, shortly after the terms were
announced, Hamas issued its Leaflet 102 condemning both the agreement and the
PLO leadership: “We will therefore insist on wrecking this agreement, and
continue the resistance struggle and our jihad against the occupation power…
Arafat’s leadership is responsible for destroying Palestinian society and
sowing the seeds of discord and division among Palestinians.”
Hamas controls the Gaza
Strip, which contains some 40% of the Palestinian population. It regards Israel as an illegal occupier of
Palestinian land, and its purpose is to remove Israel through armed struggle
and terror, and occupy all the land “from the river to the sea”. It rejects the tactics of the PA leadership,
and has consistently opposed Abbas’s apparent advocacy, in the UN and more
widely, for a two-state solution, since one of the two states would be Israel.
Jordan, together with
the majority of world opinion, fails to take account of the realities of
championing a two-state solution. Nobody
acknowledges that the real long-term objective of the Palestinian leadership is
to gain control of all of what was Mandate Palestine, and that any PA leader
signing up to a two-state deal would be regarded as a traitor to the
Palestinian cause. Which is why no Palestinian leader has done so.
However, even if the PA
could be induced to do so, Hamas and the 40% of the Palestinian population
occupying Gaza would never come on board.
They would never recognize Israel’s right to exist in the region. So what sort of sovereign Palestinian state could
it be, shorn of half the Palestinian population?
There is an uncomfortable
truth that Jordan, the US and all genuine supporters of the two-state solution
must eventually face up to. An essential
prerequisite to any two-state solution would have to be the disempowerment of
the Hamas organization.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733116
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