‘Radical pragmatism’ and the Jordanian option
Jun 4th, 2008 by MESH
In late April, MESH hosted a discussion of the “Jordanian option.” In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman, writing from Ramallah, offers his own version of it (see below, left). MESH member Adam Garfinkle reviews the earlier MESH thread, and adds his own insights. Comments are offered by MESH members Barry Rubin, Walter Reich, David Schenker, and Harvey Sicherman.
 “If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does not get control over at least part of the West Bank soon, he will have no authority to sign any draft peace treaty with Israel. He will be totally discredited. |
| “But Israel cannot cede control over any part of the West Bank without being assured that someone credible is in charge. Rockets from Gaza land on the remote Israeli town of Sderot. Rockets from the West Bank could hit, and close, Israel’s international airport. That is an intolerable risk. Israel has got to start ceding control over at least part of the West Bank but in a way that doesn’t expose the Jewish state to closure of its airport. |
| “Radical pragmatism would say that the only way to balance the Palestinians’ need for sovereignty now with Israel’s need for a withdrawal now, but without creating a security vacuum, is to enlist a trusted third party—Jordan—to help the Palestinians control whatever West Bank land is ceded to them. Jordan does not want to rule the Palestinians, but it, too, has a vital interest in not seeing the West Bank fall under Hamas rule. |
| “Without a radically pragmatic new approach—one that gets Israel moving out of the West Bank, gets the Palestinian Authority real control and sovereignty, but one which also addresses the deep mistrust by bringing in Jordan as a Palestinian partner—any draft treaty will be dead on arrival.” |
| Thomas L. Friedman, “Time for Radical Pragmatism,” New York Times, June 4, 2008. |
From Adam Garfinkle
The Jordanian option is an idea whose time never exactly comes.
When I was writing about it—urging it, as it were, as the least bad of alternatives—nearly thirty years ago, the time was not right because, as Asher Susser put it back in April, the Israeli government of the day was not sufficiently foresighted or realistic to understand the likely future of the matter. By the time later Israeli governments did understand, it was too late for the Jordanians. What Tom Friedman has been thinking all these years I can’t say, but in light of what those of us who have been following this for more than thirty years know, his column looks to be a classical example of a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious—but too late for prime time.
About a year or so ago Abdul Salem al-Majali was in Washington, carrying with him a very delicate version of a new Jordanian option. He raised it up the flag pole in a few places around town, and seems not to have noticed many people saluting. The problem with the idea, as was pointed out a few months ago, is that the Jordanians are afraid that instead of them re-containing Palestinian nationalism, the Islamicizing Palestinian national movement will finally toss the Hashemites into the proverbial dustbin of history. Israel would then be back where it was, geostragically speaking, before June 4, 1967, except instead of a Hashemite state in both east and west banks, with which it had a range of tacit understandings and some significant shared interests, it would have to deal with a far less cooperative neighbor.
This leads me more or less to the same conclusion Rob Satloff mooted earlier: It may be possible to bring the Jordanians into a kind of relatively quiet trialogue on issues like trade, water and energy, air space and other aspects of security, medical-technical cooperation and a few other items, but only up to the carrying-capacity of the Jordanian political system which, under the current king, is still not back to where it was under an experienced and shrewd Hussein ibn Talal. If one takes the idea of path dependency seriously, as I do, then this sort of functional mix might lay the ground for a larger Jordanian role in the future, which might still end up being part of the least-bad-of-all policy alternatives for Israel, the United States, and arguably the Palestinians, too. But we’re talking years here, and Israel’s problem in the West Bank, where the collapse of Fatah has indeed created a dangerous vacuum, runs on a different, faster, timetable.
So, as I said, the Jordanian option is a idea whose time seems never to be right—Tom Friedman columns notwithstanding.
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4 Responses to “‘Radical pragmatism’ and the Jordanian option”
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Adam Garfinkle is of course quite right. It is close to amusing how people writing about the Israel-Arab or Israel-Palestinian conflict waste our time with a long list of things that are not going to happen: quick fix, Hamas moderation, Jordanian solution, extending Gaza into Sinai, shelf agreement, one-state solution, shape of the table, give more concessions, and so on ad infinitum. The real point is that Hamas does not want a solution (except decades of Islamic revolutionary warfare) and Fatah/PA is incompetent, disorganized, and still too radical to accept one.
Why then don’t we devote ourselves—and governments, their time—to real issues and policy alternatives? But the starting point must be based on one simple admission: There is no solution in sight and no gimmick that will bring such an outcome. Let’s begin the discussion there.
Don’t worry! There’s plenty to talk about: the politics of Fatah/PA, will Hamas destroy them and how to prevent it, how can Lebanon be kept from being a state dominated by Hizballah-Iran-Syria, the best strategy in Iraq, stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, defeating Iran’s ambitions, promoting a positive stability in Jordan and Egypt, and you can add another twenty issues to that.
But as long as we spend a disproportionate amount of our time on pretending there is some imminent Arab-Israeli solution (or attending to the ridiculous notion that the failure is Israel’s fault), we won’t give enough attention to the real threats, issues, and options.
Yet the idea of finding the solution (opiate of the policymakers? the holy grail? the philosopher’s stone?) negates both all of our previous experience plus any sensible analysis of the current situation.
Barry Rubin is a member of MESH.
I appreciate Adam Garfinkle’s response to Thomas Friedman’s recent column summoning-up the semblance of a “Jordanian option.”
Like Adam Garfinkle, I’ve advocated some version of that option in the past, most recently in an op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2002 (here). Of course, that option has always had serious problems associated with it, several of which Adam Garfinkle noted; the nature and likelihood of those problems have changed, depending the circumstances obtaining at the time. Moreover, that option doesn’t result in an independent Palestinian state—for the existence of which there is, at least rhetorically, a consensus. (This is a consensus that would change, of course, if, after Jordan takes over the West Bank, the Palestinians manage to eject the Hashemites, take over Jordan as well as the West Bank and probably Gaza, declare a Palestinian state, and proceed with an effort to reclaim the rest of Palestine , which is to say pre-1967 Israel. At that point, lots of observers would denounce the idea of a Palestinian state having come into being by means of the Jordanian option as having been a bad idea, but of course not their bad idea.)
But, alas, every approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has serious problems associated with it. I’d leap at any that didn’t have problems and that had a reasonable chance of resulting in security for every party and maybe even peace. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any. The Jordanian option may well be unrealistic, and for all of the reasons Adam Garfinkle cites; but I’d be grateful if someone would identify an alternative option that—given what we know about politics, power, strategies, factions, ideologies, theologies and psychologies in the region—is likely to yield an actual, stable and long-lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The Jordanian option may well be, as Adam Garfinkle puts it, “an idea whose time never exactly comes.” Fine. But which idea is one whose time has come? The difficulty in answering this question may well be why some opiners may be adopting the semblance of an idea—some kind of Jordanian option—that, a few years ago, they may have dismissed as being, at best, wishful thinking, or even, somehow, a Likudnik fantasy. Is it possible that the Jordanian option is, as Churchill said about another idea, the worst idea “except for all those others that have been tried from time to time”?
One can walk away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as insoluble—and maybe it is indeed insoluble. Or one can reconsider, because there’s no alternative to doing so, ideas that were formerly dismissed—reconsider them not because they’re without serious problems, but because other ideas have failed, or seem doomed to doing so.
Walter Reich is a member of MESH.
Here in Amman, Thomas Friedman’s “radical proposal” hasn’t made much of a ripple. Amman is engulfed in its own internal affairs at present, primarily related to the sales of government lands—which at the very least have been less than transparent, and at worst, are fueling fears of corruption in the palace.
Top-level officials did not mention the Friedman proposal during recent meetings; when prompted, a former senior Jordanian official close to the palace told me today that increased Jordanian (military) involvement in the West Bank would constitute an unacceptable risk to the Kingdom, primarily related to a potential shift in the demographic balance of Jordan to 75% Palestinian vs. 25% East Banker Jordanian, effectively ending all vestiges of democracy. Despite pressures emanating from increased Egyptian involvement in Gaza, this well-connected former official told me that Jordan should avoid intervention in the West Bank at all costs.
David Schenker is a member of MESH.
The Jordanian option has always been the eighth wonder of the political world. The closer you are to it, the further away it really is. The further away from it, the closer it really is. But it has not been a way of off-loading the Palestinians since the 1967 war. The late King Hussein often told the Israelis that he would take it over again if he got all the territory that was lost; when the Israeli prime minister of the day demurred, the king would reply, “Well then, go to Arafat and maybe you’ll do better.”
Israel went to Arafat and did worse. Now it’s too late. As Alan Dowty recently observed, unless the balance of real powers among the Palestinians can be altered by diminishing Hamas, forget any diplomatic solutions. Thus the ironic impasse: Israel cannot safely withdraw from areas in the West Bank as part of a peace deal until it reoccupies and destroys the Hamas “sanctuary” in Gaza.
Harvey Sicherman is a member of MESH.