Analysis : Hussein’s West Bank Move a Major Challenge to PLO

At the recent Arab summit meeting in Algiers, King Hussein of Jordan promised to adhere to whatever consensus his fellow leaders reached concerning the Palestinian issue. Now, barely two months later, he seems to be keeping his promise with a vengeance.

Much to the consternation of the Palestinians themselves, Hussein has embarked on a course that could, if taken to the extreme, amount to Jordan’s virtual disengagement from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Jordanian officials have spent much of this week insisting to skeptical diplomats and journalists that this is exactly what the king is determined to do. And indeed, what Hussein really seems to be saying is that if the occupation is going to continue, then the cost--for both the occupier and the occupied--is about to go up.

Jordan’s links to the West Bank, which it ruled for 20 years until Israel captured the land in the 1967 Six-Day War, have been extensive: Most Palestinians in the territory hold Jordanian passports, for example. Amman spends $30 million a year on salaries, stipends and pensions for civil servants and teachers and that much again on municipal services. And until this week, West Bank residents enjoyed equal if symbolic representation in the Jordanian Parliament.

More importantly, Jordan’s policy of “open bridges,” or free travel, along with its purchase of several hundred million dollars a year in West Bank produce, has been a mainstay of the local economy.

All this, senior officials say, is about to change. And, they add with grim satisfaction, Jordan is only doing what the PLO and other Arabs have been publicly asking it to do for years.

“The PLO thought we were competing with them in the West Bank,” one senior official said. He added icily: “We want them to be a million percent sure of their authority. So we are ceasing all activities they might see as competition from Jordan.”

But it is Hussein’s fate that the more he asserts that he is not trying to compete with the PLO, the more observers say they are convinced he is doing just that.

“Clearly, the king is not doing this for the reasons he says he is,” said a Western diplomat, echoing the consensus of his colleagues in Amman. “Obviously, it is a major challenge to the PLO.”

Jordan announced Thursday that it will dismiss within two weeks 21,000 Palestinian civil servants and teachers working at Jordanian institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And Hussein has canceled a $1.3-billion development plan for the occupied territories and cut the legal link between the East and West banks of the Jordan river by dissolving the lower house of Parliament, half of whose members represented the West Bank.

Other, unspecified measures also will be taken, although they will be implemented gradually to cushion their impact, officials say.

The Arab League, by previously recognizing the PLO as the Palestinians’ “sole legitimate representative” and by supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state, effectively had vetoed Jordan’s claims to sovereignty over the West Bank.

Both decisions, made in 1974 and 1982, were major setbacks for Hussein, who nevertheless continued to support the West Bank in the hope of achieving the kind of compromise that he feels Israel and the Palestinians must make to achieve peace.

Time and time again, however, the king’s peace efforts have met with failure:

-- He has negotiated secretly with the Israelis, only to find them paralyzed with political indecision as a result of a split in their government coalition.

-- He has tried to persuade the Reagan Administration to pressure the Israelis to be more flexible, only to conclude that the United States “has no Middle East policy other than support for Israel.”

-- And he has endeavored to pry concessions from the PLO by pressuring it to formally recognize Israel’s right to exist and to settle, as an initial goal, for confederation with Jordan rather than an independent Palestinian state.

All of this, in the king’s own view, has gotten nowhere--and indeed, all it has earned him is the enmity of the Palestinians and empty accolades from Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

More recently, Hussein has witnessed the almost total eclipse of his own influence in the West Bank by the eight-month-old Palestinian uprising, which has fired a radical nationalism that sees no point in substituting Jordanian for Israeli rule.

Jordan may remain, in the U.S. view, the key to the Arab side of the peace process. But without tangible support from any quarter, Amman has found itself being pushed inexorably toward the periphery of that process.

The last straw, as Jordanian officials are characterizing it, came in June in Algiers, where Arab leaders again snubbed the king by voting to make the PLO the only authorized channel for economic aid to the intifada, as the uprising is known in Arabic.

Several diplomats said in interviews that they believe the king’s aim is twofold--and one goal is to remind the angry young men of the intifada of the value of the Jordanian support that they have spent the past eight months denouncing. In this sense, the king is not only still competing with the PLO, but “competing with it more ferociously than ever,” one diplomat noted.

The other aim, they say, is to place even more pressure on the PLO to come to terms with Jordan and to “shoulder its responsibilities” by adopting more realistic positions toward the peace process.

Indeed, Jordanian officials have been at pains to stress that Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank does not mean it is also disengaging from the peace process, to which Hussein himself only last week pledged that he remains committed.

But Jordan also sees that process as going nowhere at the moment. Senior officials in Amman say they have given up the hopes they once had of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his centrist Labor Alignment winning the next Israeli elections in November with a mandate to negotiate land for peace. Based on their reading of Israeli politics, these officials think Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s right-wing Likud Bloc will be the victor.

If that happens, it is extremely unlikely that Israel will make even minimum concessions without the kind of pressure that the United States has been unwilling to exert so far.

Thus, in a sense, there may be a third aim behind the king’s West Bank gambit--namely, to pressure both the United States and Israel, as well as the PLO, to show more realism toward the peace process.

The message to Israel has a particular twist: For 21 years, ever since the Six-Day War, Jordan has in effect been helping to underwrite the Israeli occupation through the salaries it pays to Arab civil servants in the West Bank.

Now, it says simply that this responsibility belongs to the PLO--but Israel, it goes without saying, will not allow the PLO to step into Jordan’s shoes in the West Bank. Thus, the financial burden for the salaries of the workers who perform essential services in the territories falls upon the Israelis themselves.

Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy, who is still looking to hold discussions with credible Palestinians who are not PLO members, is back in the region this week. In an obvious message to Murphy, Hussein seems to be saying that further attempts to draw Jordan into peace talks without PLO representation are a waste of time.

“The king’s message to us is that there is a real force now called Palestinian nationalism and, like it or not, we have to recognize and deal with it,” one U.S. diplomat said.