West Bank Stew

Jordan’s King Hussein has stopped short of irrevocably renouncing his claims to the West Bank, but for the time being he is doing all he can to prove that he means what he says about dropping the thankless burden of trying to represent the Palestinians there. Jordanian officials say that this decision was forced on the monarch by the inertia, indecision and duplicity of Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the United States and other Arab states, none of which adequately appreciated the efforts Hussein made or the risks he ran. Like a chef who has heard his cooking criticized once too often, Hussein has now put down his pot and spoon and invited the complainers to see what they can do in the kitchen.

The PLO, into whose hands Hussein says that he is placing the exclusive right to represent the West Bankers, professes to be delighted with this turn of events. For the last 14 years the Arab states have agreed that the PLO alone has the authority to speak for the Palestinian people. Hussein’s action lends practical force to this investiture. But if the PLO is pleased, it also seems remarkably diffident in seizing the opportunity now before it. The only concrete action that it has taken since Hussein’s announcement has been to summon the PLO’s national council, a sort of legislature in exile. But that meeting won’t occur for a month or so--a curiously long delay, given the seeming urgency of the issue.

The reasons for this delay are readily guessed at. First, the PLO leadership is no doubt typically divided over what to do, with hard-liners pulling in one direction and more pragmatic elements in another. Second, the realists among those leaders surely understand the magnitude of what they now face. For two decades Jordan, with Israel’s approval, has channeled funds to the West Bank for civil-service pay and other causes. Those payments are about to end, and the PLO knows that it will be hard put to replace them. Israel plainly has no intention of allowing any money to move to the West Bank that would boost the PLO’s credentials. The PLO on its part is still waiting to get its hands on the first dinar of the more than $140 million that the Arab states promised it two months ago to subsidize the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule.

No easy territorial access, no money, no consenus about where it should go next--this for now is the PLO’s plight as it peers into the West Bank political vacuum. All of which suits Hussein just fine. He will not weep if the PLO fails to meet its new political challenge and West Bankers are forced to invite him back to act in their behalf. At the same time, Hussein seems genuinely ready to abandon the West Bank, more and more seeing its problems and its restive population as a threat to Jordan’s own survival. Thus his emphatic insistence that there is a Palestine and there is a Jordan, and no one should confuse the two entities.

Israel, meanwhile, also remains typically at odds with itself over what it should next be doing and with whom. Hard-liners demand the annexation of the occupied territory, with the hardest of the hard-liners calling for the expulsion of the Arabs who are living there. Accommodationists continue to point to demographic and political realities as requiring that Israel seek an early territorial compromise. A government that will stay divided and incapable of major initiatives at least until the November elections can only dither. In some ways the last two weeks have seen nothing change. But in other ways it seems likely that forces have been let loose that could shape and shake events for a long time to come.