Ask Jordan to Take Over the Territories

These days, everyone is writing Yasser Arafat’s political obituary. But the conversation generally stops short when the topic turns to who--or what--could replace him.

It’s time to go back to the fundamental strategic problem facing Israel and the Palestinians and to determine what, in the wake of Arafat’s failure as a peacemaker, could solve it. The answer may well lie with Jordan.

The great majority of Israelis want to withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. The steady stream of suicide bombings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere present Israel with the emotional equivalent of a World Trade Center attack, one floor at a time, with no end in sight.

But even if the Israelis were to pull out of most of their settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and build a high wall between themselves and the Palestinians, it would solve nothing.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s own military forces--heavily fortified by ever more offensive and terrorist arms supplied by Iran, such as those on the ship Israel recently captured--would pursue the Israelis while they retreated. The Palestinians would fire Katyusha rockets nonstop over the wall across the entire length of Israel’s very narrow and highly populated coastal plain, from Tel Aviv to Haifa, killing more Israelis every day.

Suicide bombers would get through or around the wall. In all likelihood, suicide bombers from Israel’s own million-strong Palestinian community--20% of Israel’s population--would take up any slack that might result, if only temporarily, from the building of such a wall. Israel would retaliate, temporarily reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza, and replay the nightmare again and again.

All this would happen because for most Palestinians--especially the millions of descendants of the approximately 650,000 refugees who fled or were expelled at the creation of Israel--the problem isn’t the West Bank and Gaza; it’s the continued existence of Israel itself.

One of Arafat’s greatest failings was that in the eight years since signing the Oslo accords, he never educated his people to accept the central principle of Oslo: that they had to give up the idea that one day all of Israel would become part of the Palestinian state.

No other Palestinian leader would be any more able to succeed where Arafat has failed. Even a leader willing to let the Israelis withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza without killing them along the way or afterward would not be able to stop the many factions that now have absorbed into their existential and moral lexicon the necessity of suicide-bombing, jihad and a bloody struggle to the end of time.

But a Jordanian leader would succeed in this task very well.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II has a strong and disciplined army easily capable of controlling all of the Palestinian factions. Having once incorporated the West Bank into Jordan itself, Jordan could again--but this time temporarily--take it over, together with Gaza, in a coordinated arrangement with Israel.

Over the next few years, it could protect Israel from the Palestinians, protect the Palestinians from each other and fulfill a deal with Israel for the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state along lines that would be fair to Palestinians as well as Israel.

The two sticking points that Arafat couldn’t deal with--what to do about Jerusalem and about the millions of refugee descendants--would be much more easily dealt with, and dealt with honorably, by Jordan.

It’s easy to see what would be in this for Israel: the freedom to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza without being fired on during the withdrawal and endlessly afterward, and the ability to make a deal with a leader who would stick to, and be able to enforce, that deal.

It’s also easy to see what would be in this for the Palestinians: An outside power, but this time an Arab one, would control the chaos, violence, retaliation and reoccupation that a simple Israeli withdrawal would guarantee.

But the sweetest deal would be for the Jordanians themselves. What alarms Jordan’s King Abdullah is an attempted takeover of his country by the Palestinians.

This alarm is so great--and in this period of leadership crisis so acute--that just this week, King Abdullah issued a warning that “any talk about Jordan serving as a substitute homeland for Palestine is harmful to both Palestine and Jordan.”

Abdullah’s nightmare is that, unable to topple Israel, West Bank Palestinians would try to enlarge their boundaries to the east with the help of Jordan’s own Palestinians, who make up about 70% of that country’s population.

By exerting leadership now, King Abdullah can avert this. He can make a deal with the Israelis that would enable them to safely move out of nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. With these territories thus controlled and pacified, he could put in place military, social and educational structures for a Palestinian state with borders limited to the West Bank and Gaza. And he could then get out of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving a Palestinian state that, instead of expanding east or west, could seek to realize its destiny within its own national space.