Hussein’s Main Targets? Try U.S. and Israel

In his bold actions of last week, King Hussein of Jordan has posed dilemmas for virtually everyone in the Middle East--but none more so than Israel and the United States.

The king relinquished all claims over the West Bank, challenged the Palestine Liberation Organization to take his place, and cut off funding for Palestinian administrators. He acted after years of frustration over failed efforts to make peace between Israel and its neighbors, capped by a 1988 U.S. peace plan that never had much chance and now--by Hussein’s actions--has none. The Hashemite ruler was criticized by all and sundry: by Palestinians who see him as usurper, by brother Arabs who welcome a lightning rod for their own troubles, by Israelis who want him to risk talking directly and openly to them, and by Americans who have never quite understood his moods or motives.

As this drama was unfolding, the conventional wisdom was that Hussein wanted to demonstrate to both the PLO and his fellow Arabs that they cannot live without him. In particular, he is ending Jordan’s responsibility for administering the West Bank and for channeling the funds required to do the job, although Jordan will still provide the Palestinians with their sole source of legal personality when traveling abroad. The theory has been that the PLO would fail miserably in trying to take Hussein’s place, and he then would be urged to rejoin the fold, both to help on the West Bank and to act for Palestinians in any peace process--but on his terms.

This analysis is plausible, but it puts too little emphasis on the imponderables that always dominate a region of high tension, conflicted politics and rogue elephants. It is equally likely that Israel and the United States are Hussein’s principal targets.

To begin with, if he does totally relinquish Jordan’s role on the West Bank--and he has now cut off funding for civil administration--Israel will face unpalatable choices. If it lets the PLO assume Jordan’s place, Yasser Arafat & Co. will claim credit and assert even greater political dominance on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. If Israel blocks PLO money and management and itself does nothing to fill the vacuum, it will be condemned abroad for abetting human suffering. But if it broadens its own administrative duties, it will further dramatize its role as occupier and make its citizens even more vulnerable to the intifada --the Palestinian uprising.

Why would Hussein want to put Israel in such an impossible position? He has, after all, contrived for years to enter a peace process with Israel. He has experimented with different means of involving the Palestinians in peace talks, with PLO blessing but not being. He has worked hand-in-glove with the domestic policies and politics of Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres. And he has sought an “umbrella” of legitimacy--and life insurance--for his actions by proposing an international conference that would include the Soviet Union as well as the United States.

Hussein is sensitive to events around him. The Iran-Iraq War will likely soon come to a hiatus if not a halt. In time, an Iraq at peace could refocus its attention, backed by its considerable military power, toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. This will certainly be done by other Arab states.

The king may also calculate that he is better off with an Israeli government that is reasonably unified, rather than the fractious coalition--with two widely different peace policies--that has ruled Israel for the past five years. By dropping out of the peace process and thus undercutting Peres, Hussein has helped the Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Israel’s elections Nov. 1.

But, in the process, Israel’s dilemmas have sharpened. Unless the so-called “Jordanian option” can be revived, Israel must either give up hope for peace and try to integrate the West Bank--as proposed by Ariel Sharon, who has long wanted Palestinians in the territories to make Jordan their homeland--or face what it sees as the repugnant prospect of an independent Palestinian state, whether run by the PLO or by indigenous Palestinians. What, from Israel’s point of view, is a barren choice is certainly more likely than the dream that some Israelis expressed recently--that the PLO will finally have to moderate its demands and demeanor.

By renouncing a role on the West Bank, Hussein is also rebuking the United States for seven years of lassitude in peacemaking, followed this year by a last-minute peace plan that was irremediably flawed. The Jordanian monarch is piqued that he cannot freely gain access to American weapons but is expected to run capital risks for half-hearted U.S. peace efforts. Now he is telling Washington to put up or shut up.

This is the picture that will likely confront new governments in both Israel and the United States--with the latter under pressure to do something effective in a region whose political temperature is persistently rising. Yet unless Jordan’s king changes his mind, or gives up his stance as bluff, the new U.S. Administration will have no easy alternatives for peacemaking diplomacy. By Hussein’s lights, at least this time he will not just be a pawn who is expected to move at others’ command, nor the scapegoat for others’ failures.