Jordan Plans to Pump Funds Into West Bank

After years of neglect, Jordan is stepping up its involvement on the West Bank of the Jordan River and has in the works a five-year development plan that would pump about $1.3 billion into the Israeli-occupied territory.

The plan, still in the draft stage, is part of what a number of Western diplomats characterize as a “carrot-and-stick” approach to win over the West Bank’s residents. The campaign includes generous aid proposals, increased political coordination with avowedly pro-Jordanian Palestinians and stepped-up security constraints on Jordan’s opponents on the West Bank.

The Quality of Life

Jordanian officials say the effort is designed, as one official put it, to “visibly improve the quality of life” for the 750,000 West Bank Palestinians who, despite the Israeli occupation, carry Jordanian passports and are still theoretically represented in the Jordanian Parliament.

The campaign also appears to be aimed at increasing Jordan’s political influence on the West Bank following the breakdown of joint peace efforts by King Hussein and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

After Hussein announced the end of their cooperation on Feb. 19, government officials here were shocked by the level of animosity the West Bank Palestinians displayed toward Jordan, which annexed the territory in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel.

Although officials publicly deny it, there are hopes that the Jordanian effort on the West Bank will gradually lead to a reduction in PLO influence and the emergence of an alternate, more moderate Palestinian leadership.

“The Jordanians came to realize that through a major change in the relationship with the West Bank, they can change the scenario for the future and they can change the major actors in the drama,” said a West Bank resident who serves in the Jordanian government.

The centerpiece of Jordan’s campaign is the internationally financed plan designed to inject 461.4 million Jordanian dinars, roughly $1.3 billion, into the West Bank from 1986 to 1990.

According to Planning Minister Taher Kanaan, who helped draft the plan, the program will provide loans and incentives to build new facilities and to repair existing ones that have long been neglected.

Breakdown of Funds

According to a draft of the plan, which is expected to be made public in November, the Jordanians are earmarking annual allotments of $36.2 million for agriculture, $13.2 million for industry, $114 million for housing in the form of loans, $38 million for construction, $46 million for education, $20 million for health and $6 million for social development plans.

“We feel this is the minimum amount that could start to have an impact on the area because there is a tremendous backlog of work that needs to be done,” Kanaan said in an interview.

The government is also considering proposals to include on Jordanian government payrolls schoolteachers and local officials who have been hired since Israel occupied the West Bank in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Currently, salaries are paid only to civil servants who worked for Jordan before 1967, and the expansion would greatly increase Amman’s patronage among influential West Bank residents. The Israeli occupation authorities currently pay salaries to all civil servants on the West Bank, but at a level one Jordanian official described as “barely subsistence.”

Plan for More Exports

Officials are also weighing a plan designed to greatly expand West Bank industrial exports to Jordan and the rest of the Arab world.

Jordan’s involvement in the West Bank began declining in 1974 when an Arab summit meeting in Rabat, Morocco, designated the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

In 1979, an Arab summit meeting in Baghdad, Iraq, established a Jordanian-Palestinian committee to channel Arab aid to the West Bank, but the committee long ago ran out of funds. In addition, the PLO directly gives millions of dollars to West Bank residents, in the form of aid to institutions such as schools and hospitals or support for widows and orphans.

On the political front, the Jordanians reportedly pressed three West Bank Palestinians to accept appointment by Israel as the mayors of the towns of Ramallah, Hebron and Al Birah. The Jordanians are reported to have offered financial support to the municipalities if the men agreed to serve.

An ‘Arab Identity’

The Jordanians support the idea on the grounds that, by replacing Israeli military rulers with local Palestinians, the municipalities would maintain an “Arab identity.” In the first appointment under a “local autonomy” plan announced by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a prominent Palestinian, Zafer Masri, was appointed mayor of the West Bank town of Nablus last December with the active support of Jordan and the tacit approval of the PLO. Masri was assassinated by gunmen on March 2, and two Palestinian groups based in Damascus, Syria, asserted that he had been killed for collaborating with the Israelis.

The PLO has condemned suggestions that three new mayors be named by the Israelis, a position that made all three candidates reluctant to accept the proffered posts. One recently has gone on Israel radio to withdraw his name.

PLO Offices Closed

In part because of PLO criticism of Jordan’s West Bank policy, the Jordanians this week closed 25 offices in Amman and other Jordanian cities belonging to Fatah, the mainstream PLO faction led by Yasser Arafat. But even before this move, Jordanian authorities had cracked down on pro-PLO West Bank residents and curtailed the publication of news about the PLO in the Jordanian press. A Palestinian newspaper in East Jerusalem even suggested that Jordan had blacklisted a number of West Bank journalists, but Jordan vehemently denied the accusations.

So far, the Jordanian crackdown has mostly taken the form of officials withholding or confiscating Jordanian passports from critics of Jordanian policy in the West Bank or open supporters of the PLO. People who live on the West Bank are normally entitled to Jordanian passports by virtue of Jordan’s annexation of the territory in 1948.

“By virtue of the carrot-and-stick approach,” a Western diplomat said, “the Jordanians hope to bring home to the Palestinians that they cannot expect continuing political and financial support if their objectives are not reasonable and the people bite the hands that feed them.”

More Stick Than Carrot

So far, the Jordanians have wielded the stick far more often than they have offered the carrot, but diplomats here believe that this policy will give way shortly to what an envoy described as a “more subtle and thoughtful approach.”

Until now, the Jordanians have not obtained Western or Arab agreement to provide the bulk of the $1.3 billion outlined in the ambitious West Bank development plan.

Arab states, the PLO and even Israel may oppose channeling aid to the West Bank through the Jordanian government.

Even though the Israelis have reportedly expressed willingness, in indirect negotiations through the United States, for the Jordanians to step up their involvement as a means of reducing support for the PLO, each project will be subject to veto by the Israeli military authorities, who retain ultimate control of the West Bank even if the autonomy plan goes ahead.

“The reality of Israeli occupation is the hardest thing for us to deal with,” a Jordanian official said.