Israel And the "Jordanian Option"
This must surely be a prime representation of when irony slaughters itself laughing with glee at the twists and turns that events can take against all human agitations and plans to the contrary.Here is the Israel-Palestinian conflict which the Arab world has been reluctant to aid in finding a solution to. Reluctant? Make that utterly, brutally averse. Historically the plan was to erase Israel from the Middle East while it was still fresh and young, without an established professional military to prosecute its own cause.
Despite which, the fledgling military and the determined new state and its people persisted, denying all odds, routing those who had marched in to rout them, and made a state for themselves out of the biblical presence into the future of promise and advance against adversity.
Ancient Egypt, which sought to expand its territory and whose people flooded to settle into Gaza, finally decided caution and acceptance to be the better option to debilitating, ongoing warfare. An uncomfortable, uneasy peace results, but one without diplomacy, with no investment in attaining other than military peace; civil peace eludes.
And Jordan, created by the British Mandate in its waning days in the Middle East, controlled the West Bank, and finally, reluctantly, left it and east Jerusalem to a victorious Jewish army determined to hold that which was theirs and would continue to be theirs. Jordan, with its need to control the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in its territory, fighting a bleak war of attrition that spawned Black September, finally pacified its Palestinians to a degree.
How better to do so than have the Jordanian scion, taking the throne from his truly lamented late and conflicted father, and marrying a Palestinian woman? Nothing, however, is ever completely settled in that landscape. This, now, represents the Jordanian Royal Family; a Bedouin prince attaining to the Hashemite throne, and a Palestinian beauty, his queen.
Nation states, sheikdoms, kingdoms, autocracies, oil-fuelled theocracies forever at cross-purposes against one another, spelling continual tribal suspicion and unrest. But there remains one common enemy around whom all are able to coalesce agreeably in a spirit of hate-filled rejection: Israel.
The lingering Damoclean Sword of Palestinian return that the Saudis insist on in their plans and the others agree to, which would, if it occurred, truly wipe the geography clean of a Jewish state, is a clever solution, but one that isn't doing much flying in the turgid diplomatic air of the Middle East. Israel, reasonably, sees no reason to water down its Jewish majority any further.
Kindly Jordan, the sole Arab state that offered solace however grudgingly, as a haven for Palestinians, is highly resentful of Israel's recommendations that it become "Palestine", and absorb all those Palestinians who desire to return from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere, consolidating them along with its current 50% Palestinian population.
Leaving the Jordanian Bedouin, in its turn, a decided minority. The shoe can fit the other foot, after all.
Jordan's parliament is so incensed over the potential that looms of absorbing those Palestinians that Israel is so willing to deed back to them in the event that "peace talks" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail entirely, it is threatening to withdraw its own peace agreement between Jordan and Israel.
The Hashemite Kingdom does not relish the thought of itself becoming the much-hailed new Palestinian state.
The very thought of such a contretemps must have King Abdullah II shuddering, and his nights made a hell of recurring nightmares at the very prospect of absorbing hundreds of thousands of more Palestinians, that troublesome tribe whose headache-inducing propensity to destabilizing civil authority is legendary wherever they have temporarily settled, awaiting their opportunity to return to "Palestine".
"It would mean Jordan's demise and the obliteration of our national identity", according to independent candidate Salameh Ghoweiry, making a campaign speech at the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the assassinated and late-unlamented leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Precisely.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, November 09, 2010
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