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State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
Marc Lynch
1999
3. Who Says Jordan Is Palestine?
King Hussein announced on July 31, 1988 that he had decided to sever administrative ties between Jordan and the West Bank, officially accepting the permanent loss of half the kingdom. This decision shocked most observers, who assumed that a dominant position in the West Bank represented a primary interest governing Jordanian foreign policy. While Jordan routinely changed its strategies toward the West Bank in response to shifts in threat, power, and opportunity, change in Jordanian preferences with regard to the final status of the West Bank hardly seemed conceivable. The severing of ties was interpreted as part of the ongoing strategic interaction with Israel and the PLO. Nevertheless, despite predictions that Jordan would renew its bid for the West Bank when the opportunity arose, it did not. This chapter explores the decision to sever ties, evaluating rationalist and constructivist hypotheses; chapter 4 explores the question of whether Jordan’s identity and interests changed.
I advance a public sphere explanation for the decision and its consequences based on both strategic interaction and communicative action. The decision to sever ties followed strategic logic, in which the stakes and the opportunities were shaped by shifts in public conceptions of Jordanian and Palestinian identity. The reception of the decision within the Arabist public sphere involved communicative deliberation aimed at securing an Arabist consensus about the meaning of the decision. Over the course of this competitive framing, Jordan sent increasingly costly signals, behavioral and discursive, to confirm the sincerity of the severing of ties, culminating in the decision to recognize the declaration of a Palestinian state. Jordanian policy became bound when the Arabist deliberation produced a consensus interpretation favorable to Jordan. After 1989, debate about Jordanian state and national identity after the severing of ties erupted inside a reconfigured Jordanian public sphere. This deliberation produced a powerful consensus around a Jordanian state identity separate from Palestine, generating dramatically different conceptions of Jordanian interests in the West Bank and facilitating the Jordanian move to a peace treaty with Israel. The initial strategic decision thus became the object of a communicative dialogue, first in the Arabist and then in the Jordanian public sphere, which produced a substantively new consensus on Jordanian identity and interests.
The second crucial issue is the stability of preferences: did the severing of ties change Jordanian interests in the West Bank? I argue that this case represents a major example of change of underlying preferences over outcomes in the process of strategic interaction, with extremely significant empirical and theoretical implications. Rationalism and constructivism offer substantively different predictions about subsequent Jordanian behavior, based primarily on the core claims about change in identity and interests. From a rationalist perspective, the severing of ties changed the strategies of various actors, but did not fundamentally affect their interests or identities. Jordan stepped back from the struggle over the West Bank in order to better achieve its underlying preferences, but did not change in any real sense. The constructivist position, in contrast, argues that the severing of ties between Jordan and the West Bank produced a major turning point in the political life of Jordan which went beyond positions, affecting basic identity and interests. Close ties to the West Bank, long considered a basic and primary interest, came to be interpreted as a threat. A Palestinian state, long seen as a threat, came to be seen as an essential partner for maintaining stability. Both theoretical approaches make specific and falsifiable predictions about behavior. The rationalist position suggests that Jordan would reverse its disengagement from the West Bank should the opportunity present itself. The constructivist position suggests that if a new consensus has been secured on Jordanian identity, then Jordan would not reassert its claim to the West Bank even if circumstances turned in its favor. In chapter 4 I evaluate converging streams of evidence, including changes in Jordanian institutions, shifts in identity discourse, and Jordanian behavior toward the West Bank and the PLO as a test of these hypotheses.
This change in Jordanian preferences does not offer support for fluidly changing identity or interests. Indeed, what makes the change so interesting and important is precisely the consistency of Jordanian concerns in the preceding decades. The West Bank was a fundamental part of Jordan’s avowed state identity, posited as essential to Jordanian interests, and a major dimension of all Jordanian foreign policy strategies. Despite intense Arab pressures, uninterest among Palestinians, and serious internal challenges, the Jordanian regime maintained its preference for a leading position in the West Bank. While Jordan altered its strategies in response to changing circumstances, its interests remained the same. The rise of the PLO, the Israeli capture of the West Bank, Black September, and repeated expressions of the Arab consensus all failed to change Jordan’s preferences. The West Bank, constructed as a fundamental part of Jordanian identity, stood as the centerpiece of Jordanian interests. Between 1967 and 1988, Jordanian behavior conformed to what would be expected on the basis of this stable preference; even when Jordan backed away from its claim on the West Bank, such as in 1974, it always sought an opening for a reassertion of influence. The burden of proof, therefore, is on my argument that after 1988—unlike all earlier periods—Jordanian preferences changed.
Severing ties required a struggle to establish interpretive frames within multiple public spheres: Jordanian, Arabist, international. By 1988, the international consensus clearly accepted the difference between Palestine and Jordan and the artificiality of their union. Decades of Arab and Palestinian persuasion had succeeded in establishing this consensus for virtually everyone except for Israel—and for Jordan. The severing of ties, and the communicative deliberation which it initiated, aimed above all at demonstrating Jordan’s sincere commitment to this evident international consensus. The disengagement took on meaning as a political act through public debate in these interconnected and competitive public spheres. Within each, actors struggled to render competing interpretations authoritative by imposing a frame. During the course of competitive framing, Jordan was bound by its discourse and its arguments. This interpretive struggle did not simply complement the “real” disengagement: to the extent that actors made decisions based on them, the interpretations were the reality. Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank remained unaffected by the claims and counter-claims of Jordan and the PLO, the situation on the ground scarcely changed. At stake in the severing of ties were claims to represent the Palestinian people, claims largely without empirical referent. To a large degree, the severing of ties and what followed nvolved only claims, interpretations, and understandings. For these struggles, material power is important but not determinate. The ability to produce a consensus frame, to draw effectively on the norms of a particular public sphere, to claim to speak in the name of a collectivity, and to construct effective arguments, should be considered real power resources.
To anticipate the argument of chapter 4, the move from deliberation in the Arabist arena to the Jordanian public sphere was the decisive point in transforming Jordan’s preferences. The 1988 severing of ties with the West Bank, combined with the unprecedented opening of the Jordanian public sphere in 1989, unleashed the first serious public discussion of Jordanian identity in the history of the Jordanian public sphere. This public debate transformed prevailing conceptions of Jordanian identity and interests. By the early 1990s, this debate produced an effective consensus on the formula of “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine,” with Jordan defined in terms of East Bank borders. Conceptions of interests shifted in response to this change in identity, strongly supporting the constructivist position on interests. This changing sense of identity and interests best explains Jordanian positions on Palestinian-Israeli final status issues, including the high levels of coordination between Jordan and the Palestine National Authority (PNA) and Jordan’s outspoken support for a Palestinian state. This consensus did not extend to the question of internal identity, however, with the status of Jordanians of Palestinian origin remaining a crucial unresolved question for the Jordanian political system.
In the first section of this chapter, I establish the consistency and centrality of Jordan’s preference for a leading role in the West Bank, demonstrating that this role was a fundamental component of Jordan’s conception of interests, deeply rooted in identity, institutions, and norms. In the second section, I analyze several earlier controversies over Jordan’s relations with the West Bank, and demonstrate both the strategic nature of Jordan’s actions—in that its preferences toward the West Bank remained stable—and the ways in which the public sphere shaped Jordan’s discursive strategies. In the final section, I analyze the severing of ties and show why the Arabist dialogue in 1988 produced a dramatic change in Jordan’s strategies, which later led to a transformation in Jordanian preferences.
Jordanian-Palestinian Relations in the Arabist Public Sphere
The annexation of the West Bank in 1950 transformed Transjordan into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, composed of two national communities with potentially divergent understandings of state interests. While some ethnic differences divided the two communal groups, such as the largely bedouin character of Transjordanian society, they were not divided by language, religion, or culture. Integration into a single Jordanian identity within shared state institutions was encouraged by the Arabist discourse of the Hashemite regime, which did not belong to either ethnic/national group. The national identity of the communal groups was reinforced by the demands of international argumentation, however, especially the drive to develop the Palestinian national identity. Both Jordan and the PLO actively constructed national identities, with the loyalties of the Palestinian citizens of Jordan falling between the competing claims. Each wave of Palestinian refugees altered communal identities and relations. Debate over Jordan’s identity overlapped between domestic and international public spheres, despite Jordanian efforts to remove its national identity from the realm of legitimate international debate. The purpose of this section is not to present a detailed political history of the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship (Bailey 1984; Day 1986), but to explore two issues: first, the development of Jordanian discourse about the relationship between the West Bank and Jordanian identity; second, Arabist deliberation about this relationship.
Jordan’s identity was deeply interwoven with international debates about Palestinian and Arab identity. Palestinians developed a strong sense of distinctive identity within the broader framework of Arabism in their confrontation with the Zionist movement and the British mandate (Khalidi 1996). After the merger in 1950, the state attempted to merge Transjordanian and Palestinian identities into a single unitary Jordanian identity. As the Palestinian identity submerged into Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s, this project could be plausibly framed in Arabist terms as a normatively valued “unification” rather than an imposed “annexation.” However critical most Arabists were of Jordanian policies with regard to Israel and the West, Arabist unity discourse made it very difficult to justify calls for the division of an Arab state into two smaller units. Political opposition tended to be cast in ideological, rather than communal, terms; even resentment over the dominant position of Transjordanians or of the relative underdevelopment of the West Bank was largely expressed in terms of distributional demands within the framework of a single entity (Mishal 1977, Cohen 1982, Plascov 1981, Dann 1989). Challenges to Jordan’s borders called not for the creation of a smaller Palestinian entity but for Jordan’s dissolution and merger into a larger Arab entity. After Jordan lost control of the West Bank in 1967, the integrationist position became increasingly untenable. Rather than a call to separate the West Bank from Jordan, appeals could now be framed in terms of liberating the West Bank from Israel. Jordan’s increasing need to articulate and defend the principle of a single political identity in the early 1970s served notice on the breakdown of the unitary identity claim. By 1974, Jordan had been forced to recognize the Arab consensus in favor of the PLO claim to represent the Palestinian people.
Because of the centrality of the Palestine issue to the Arabist public sphere, the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship represented a major issue in Arabist argumentation. Jordan constantly needed to justify and defend its position in the Arabist public sphere, with important implications both for foreign policy—the need to live up to its proclaimed beliefs to maintain credibility—and for domestic politics—the need to maintain control of the internal arena to avoid undermining the unitary Jordanian voice in the Arabist arena. The official discourse of the Jordanian state toward the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship passed through several identifiable stages in the ongoing process of political struggle and dialogue, each based on a different conception of state identity: from a recognition of difference; to formal unity and the denial of difference; to a federal scheme and a competition for representation; to a confederal proposal in cooperation with the PLO; to recognition of two distinct sovereignties.
Prior to 1948, Transjordanian discourse recognized the difference between the Palestinian and Transjordanian entities. While Abdullah looked to Palestine as an outlet for his Greater Syria ambitions, he did not consider Jordan and Palestine to be a single entity, or Jordanians and Palestinians to be a single people (Wilson 1987, Nevo 1996). Many authors have argued that Transjordan lacked a nationalist movement in this time period, primarily because it did not have the urban centers with the notable classes which tended to lead these movements; Wilson (1987) claims that the British even tried to create a nationalist movement to pressure Abdullah. Jordanian nationalist scholarship has attempted to refute this historical claim, pointing to national congresses and political parties formed in the late 1920s as evidence of the national consciousness of the Transjordanian population under the mandate (Hattar 1985; Muhafiza 1990; Rogan and Tell 1994; T. Tal 1996). The evidence suggests that Transjordanian actors supported the Palestinian struggle, but recognized the distinctiveness of the two arenas.
The annexation of the West Bank followed from the Arab Legion’s success in occupying many of the portions of the Palestine mandate assigned to the Arabs by the UN partition plan. Abdullah convened a national conference in Jericho which voted to unite the Palestinian areas under the control of the Arab Legion with Transjordan. In the unitary constitutional framework of the new state, shared institutions were meant to produce a single Jordanian identity. All citizens were to be considered Jordanian and expressions of Palestinian identity were repressed. The unity of the two banks became deeply embedded in the identity and institutions of the state, underlying its discourse and behavior, and shaping Jordanian understandings of Arabism. Because the dominant conceptions of Arabism discouraged the assertion of any wataniya identity, including Palestinian, it provided Jordan with a powerful discursive tool for justifying the incorporation of Palestinians. The merger could be normatively defended as a successful example of Arabist unification, while calls to end it could be dismissed as illegitimate separatism. On the other hand, the perceived illegitimacy of Hashemite Arabism and the suspicion of their collusion with Israel left Jordan always on the defensive.
The formation of the PLO, following discussions of a Palestinian entity in the early 1960s, came in the context of Arabist public sphere competition (Farsoun and Zacharia 1997; Cobban 1984; Tessler 1994; Gresh 1989; Shemesh 1996). As Egypt and Iraq advanced competing proposals, the idea emerged that a Palestinian entity should be created out of Egyptian controlled Gaza and Jordanian controlled West Bank. Jordan strongly objected, arguing that the West Bank was now a fully equal part of the Hashemite Kingdom. Palestinian activism should be oriented toward Israel, not toward an Arab state with which they had freely unified. Egypt rejected the unification, arguing that Jordan only held the West Bank in trust for the Palestinian people. In the context of this Arabist argumentation, Jordan needed to tightly control internal debate in order to prevent any appeals for the separation of the West Bank from Jordan. Jordan appealed to potent Arab unity norms, asking how the division of an Arab state into two Arab states could possibly meet Egyptian norms of Arab unity. Given the Arab decision rule of consensus, the assumed Jordanian veto prevented the realization of the Palestinian Entity. No conception of Jordanian interests, whether statist, Hashemite, or Arabist, could be reconciled with allowing the West Bank to be detached from the Kingdom and made into a Palestinian Entity.
The PLO was created by an Arab summit in 1964. Whatever the instrumental functions of the PLO’s creation in enhancing the control of Palestinian action by Arab states, its impact was to articulate a particular national claim for the Palestinians. Jordan’s acceptance of the Arab consensus in support of the PLO rested on an agreement not to locate Palestinian national demands in the West Bank or Jordan, and on Jordanian hopes that it could use its large concentration of Palestinians as leverage to gain control of the PLO. In its early stages, the PLO adopted an Arabist approach to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. While Shuqayri clashed with King Hussein, the PLO at this time generally oriented its policy toward Palestinian self-determination in Israel and maintained an uneasy modus vivendi with regard to Jordan. Jordan would support the struggle for Palestinian self-determination inside of Israel, as long as the PLO did not challenge the Jordanian identity of its Palestinian citizens. This uneasy compromise never stabilized, but facilitated short-term coexistence.
Although the loss of the West Bank to Israel in 1967 forced Jordan to reconfigure its strategy, the regime resisted efforts to reconfigure state identity or its preferences over outcomes. Rather than accept the PLO claim to hold the right to struggle for the liberation of the West Bank, Jordan fought to maintain its claim to the occupied territories. Jordanian arguments foundered against the growing popularity of the PLO, but were strengthened by the Israeli and American refusal to accept the PLO as a partner in negotiations. In the postwar environment, the Palestinian Resistance emerged as the most potent expression of nationalism in the Arab world, carrying Jordan in its wake. Jordan emerged as the primary location of Palestinian institutions and armed struggle. The Arab order attempted to mediate the growing tension between Jordanian sovereignty and Palestinian institutions, most notably in the Cairo Agreement. The fundamental question came down to one of sovereignty: was this an internal Jordanian affair having to do with civil order, as Jordan claimed, or was it an Arab affair having to do with the survival of the Palestinian issue? This debate, unlike most, Jordan effectively won: state sovereignty outweighed the normative commitment to the Palestinian struggle.
In September 1970, the Jordanian state reasserted its authority, violently expelling the PLO. Black September has been framed as a Jordanian-Palestinian civil war, an interpretation that has shaped all subsequent interactions between the two national groups. In fact, significant numbers of Transjordanians participated in the Resistance, while important parts of the established Palestinian elite at least tacitly supported the state’s reassertion of control. The communal conflict did drive rising iqlimiya (communal chauvinism) in both the Palestinian and Jordanian communities, generating collective fear and mistrust as well as stronger communal identities (Sayigh 1997). Black September effectively ended the PLO challenge to the internal power structure of Jordan, and deeply affected all future political calculations of every Palestinian and Jordanian citizen. On the other hand, by delegitimating Jordan’s claim to represent the will of the Palestinians, Black September weakened Jordanian argumentation in the Arabist public sphere. The use of military force demonstrated the absence of any uncoerced Jordanian identity inclusive of Palestinians, and thus increased the power of the PLO claim to represent a distinctive Palestinian identity.
In March 1972, King Hussein outlined a new Jordanian position: the United Arab Kingdom. The UAK offered a federal constitutional structure, with self-governing Palestinian and Jordanian regions and a central federal government based in Amman under the Hashemite monarchy. While maintaining federal unity, the UAK clearly recognized the distinction between the West and East Banks, which earlier Jordanian discourse had rejected. The UAK still envisioned the West Bank as an integral part of Jordan, and the Palestinians as part of the Jordanian people. The UAK was almost unanimously denounced, with a firm consensus expressed by Palestinian factions and by the key Arab states against the proposal (Shemesh 1996; Hassan 1972; Maqsoud 1972). Public debate was almost exclusively located in the Arabist arena, despite Hussein’s assertions of widespread Jordanian and Palestinian support. While King Hussein consulted members of the Jordanian political elite, the proposal did not become a topic of public debate in an open Jordanian public sphere (S. Tal 1994). Instead, argumentation was oriented toward an Arabist consensus, with the Jordanian state speaking as a unitary actor, engaging in dialogue with Palestinian factions and Arab states. Black September was repeatedly invoked in these debates as evidence of Hussein’s intention to “liquidate” the Palestinian issue, or of Palestinian intentions to take over Jordan. In the aftermath of those traumatic conflicts, who could have faith in Hussein’s good intentions or his legitimacy among Palestinians?
The 1974 Rabat summit, which confirmed the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, involved significant argumentation at the Arabist level. The Jordanian public remained an audience, not a participant, in these debates about their identity. That Rabat coincided with an intense internal Palestinian debate over whether to pursue a policy oriented toward the West Bank and Gaza rather than all of Palestine is of obvious importance, as the Arabist consensus responded not only to shifting evaluations of Jordan’s claims but also to the changing PLO discourse (Muharrib 1975). 1 Palestinians engaged in deep deliberation over the lessons of Black September, which shaped their approach to their national struggle (Hindi 1971; Allush 1972; Hassan 1972). Jordan’s acceptance of the Rabat decision was compelled by strategic, rather than persuaded by communicative, action. Jordan nevertheless preferred to remain inside an undesirable consensus than to be outside it. Jordan adhered to the Rabat resolutions while continuing to compete with the PLO wherever possible. Again, Jordan’s strategies changed, but not its preferences over outcomes. Since the Rabat discourse took place at the state level, and was not then embedded in Jordanian institutions, discourse, or practice, it failed to bring about any significant change in Jordanian identity or interests.
The 1985 Jordanian-Palestinian agreement proposed a confederation between two independent states, rather than the federal formula of the UAK. Unlike the UAK, confederation was negotiated and proposed by Jordan and the PLO jointly, with Arafat winning PNC consent over strong internal objections (Hassan 1985). Confederation was presented as a formula that might minimally satisfy Palestinian desire for sovereignty, Jordanian preferences for close links to the West Bank, and Israeli fears of a Palestinian state. Confederation recognized a much greater degree of difference and independence between two distinct political units than did the UAK, while maintaining the idea that a special relationship bound the two units. The West Bank maintained its position in Jordanian identity discourse, however, despite some institutional reform and public discussion of Jordanian identity (Day 1986). In February 1986, Jordan suspended its cooperation with the PLO, arguing that Arafat had failed to deliver on his promises to change Palestinian policy in order to enter the peace process. Hussein blamed the PLO and declared that Jordan would pursue its own options for peace. Jordan’s new strategy included the launching of a major development plan for the West Bank, intended to win popular support for the Jordanian role, and secret negotiations with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres about the possibility of an Israeli/Jordanian condominium over the West Bank. The return to Jordanian claims on the West Bank in 1986 demonstrate the strategic nature of Jordan’s strategy in the 1985 agreement. The negotiations with the PLO had not put Jordan’s identity at stake, and had not generated significant communicative action within a Jordanian public sphere about the implications for Jordan’s identity. When the Intifada broke out in late 1987, Jordan was again engaged in strategic competition with the PLO over influence in the West Bank.
The changing meaning of the idea that “Jordan is Palestine” helps to illuminate the complex relationship between struggles over state identity and international strategic interaction. Prior to 1967, “Jordan is Palestine” was an integral part of the Hashemite effort to assimilate the West Bank. In the period of crisis with the PRM, the Hashemites found this slogan turned against them by Palestinian groups who suggested that the Jordanian claim to Palestine justified their seizure of power in Jordan. Building on old Revisionist themes, prominent Israelis also suggested that creating a Palestinian state in the East Bank might solve Israel’s problems. Israel’s entry into the discursive fray fundamentally changed the concept, by shifting the public sphere in which the question was debated and the stakes of the debate. Sharon’s “Jordan is Palestine” carried a very different connotation than did Hussein’s invocation of the same words. By the early 1980s, the equivalence between Jordan and Palestine which had been such an important part of Jordanian argumentation a decade earlier had now become a threat to be fiercely rejected in every setting. While Israelis pointed to earlier Hashemite statements to justify their own argument, this misappropriation more demonstrates the importance of public sphere structure for shaping discourse than it does the “truth” of Israeli arguments. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, then, the claim that “Jordan is Palestine” changed from a weapon in the hands of the Hashemites against “separatists”; to a weapon in the hands of Palestinians against the Hashemites; to a weapon in the hands of the Israelis against the PLO.
The Severing of Ties
King Hussein’s framing of the severing of ties stressed Jordan’s determination to strengthen the Palestinian position in the international arena and to implement the Arab consensus. The severing of ties meant that Jordan no longer claimed sovereignty over the West Bank, would no longer seek to negotiate on its behalf, and would no longer compete for influence among West Bank Palestinians. Despite speculation about the possibility of such a step after the June 1988 Algiers Arab summit, which had reendorsed PLO representation of the Palestinians and pledged support for the Intifada without Jordanian participation, the disengagement still took nearly everyone by surprise. Analysis remained guided by the assumption of Jordan’s permanent, unchanging interest in the West Bank: “Jordan will remain condemned by its geography... there is no way [it] can opt out.” 2 Shimon Peres (1995, p. 304), for example, believes that “even after he opted out, the King still expected to be invited back in.”
The uncertainty caused by the Jordanian disengagement cannot be overemphasized. Some Jordanian role, whether advocated or rejected, had been a basic component of virtually every actor’s positions toward the West Bank. Strategic framing assumes particular importance in crisis situations in which actors cannot comfortably rely upon preconceived ideas about their interests (Bohman 1996). The decision to sever ties was such a disruptive moment, significantly altering expectations and understandings: “It is forcing open all the congealed assumptions, confronting Palestinians, Israelis and outside players with a whole new set of questions.” 3 Cultivated ambiguity, the sheer complexity of the situation, and the conflicting interests of numerous actors hindered any simple interpretation. Only after a raucous emergency session did the PLO leadership welcome the Jordanian decision. Many Arab states took a wait-and-see attitude, unconvinced of Jordan’s sincerity. In Israel, the Labor Party attempted to minimize the move and keep the Jordan Option alive. Some elements of the Likud took the decision as an invitation to annexation of the Territories, while others, including Prime Minister Shamir, argued that nothing had really changed. 4 The United States downplayed the decision, suggesting that it simply represented an attempt to spur the peace process along. In sum, the initial response was divided and confused.
The practical measures involved were rather out of proportion to the political significance of the act (Robbins 1989; Susser 1990). Jordan stopped paying the salaries of about 24,000 West Bank public servants, but it maintained its role in West Bank Islamic institutions and pensioned off most of the affected employees. The bridges between Jordan and the West Bank remained open for travel and trade, maintaining the major economic connection. Jordan canceled its controversial West Bank development plan, although this initiative had been dead on the ground for some time due to lack of funds and lack of interest. The citizenship of West Bank residents was revoked, but Jordan replaced passports with temporary travel documents. As Jordan’s intentions were challenged in the Arabist public sphere, however, Jordan began to take increasingly dramatic practical measures in order to reinforce its interpretation of its action. The Ministry of Occupied Territories Affairs was abolished, replaced with a division in the Foreign Ministry; administrative documents such as drivers licenses came under a new regime, requiring applicants to come in person to Amman; a new quota system was established for Palestinian university students; Parliament was dissolved. The increasingly costly signals culminated with Jordan’s recognition of the PLO’s declaration of a Palestinian state in November.
The Jordanian frame primarily addressed the Arab public sphere, which was viewed as the most important site of consensus formation. A major issue in the framing struggle was whether the Jordanian actions had been intended to hurt or to help the PLO and the Intifada. While the intention of Jordanian policymakers may well have been the former, to challenge the PLO and set it up to fail (see below), the policy could not be publicly framed or justified in that way. Jordanian discourse inside of Jordan no less than abroad justified the disengagement in terms of Palestinian interests and Arab collective interests, not in terms of Jordanian interests. Jordanian spokesmen emphasized that the disengagement aimed at strengthening the Palestinian identity, and that it represented a voluntary response to the Arab consensus. Justifications based on Jordanian interests were conspicuously absent. While many observers are justifiably cynical about the sincerity of these explanations, it is clear that the high normative value accorded to the Palestinian national identity claim and to the Arab consensus shaped Jordanian discourse. I am not claiming that the decision was not meant to serve Jordanian interests, but rather that it could not be explained or justified in those terms. Claims based on Jordanian interests would not have been viewed as legitimate or convincing by the relevant publics. As Jordan framed its action for the purposes of public argumentation, it bound itself to behave accordingly, at least in the short term (Habermas 1996; Bohman 1996; Elster 1998).
Placing the decision in public sphere context does not exclude strategic concerns. The immediate motivations for the decision were the demands of strategic interaction within the context of public argumentation. To prove that the Jordanian action represented a real decision and not simply “cheap talk,” Jordan had to live up to its discourse by taking the mandated practical steps (Fearon 1997; Elster 1998). Jordan consistently maintained that the point of the decision to sever ties was to “end [Arab and Palestinian] doubts about Jordanian intentions.” 5 At first, the reaction in the Arab public sphere convinced Jordanian leaders of the need to maintain the disengagement. Later, the 1989 uprisings and the consequent liberalization of the political system, shifted the site of contention to the Jordanian arena.
Despite the efforts to deny any connection between the disengagement and citizens of Palestinian origin, the redefinition of state borders could not be segregated from questions about national identity. As one member of the inner circle observed: “the severing of ties was taken with specific political considerations, related to the PLO, but then [unfortunately] this decision came to be applied step by step upon Jordan itself and on its internal institutions.” 6 The bid to define a new Jordan restricted to the East Bank required a sharp distinction between Jordanians and Palestinians, a major departure in identity norms. As long as the state claimed an identity including the West Bank, Jordanians could blur the issue of national identity, stress the common rather than the unique, and encourage the appeal of unity over division. The Jordanian frame now sought to decouple the issues of state identity and national identity by developing a sharp distinction between the Palestinian issue and the question of Palestinians living in Jordan: one a question of foreign policy, the other a question of domestic politics.
Rationalist Explanations
Rationalist arguments share the assumption that preferences are stable and exogenous to interaction. Consistently articulated Jordanian preferences over outcomes in the West Bank have observably motivated behavior over an extended period of time. These preferences also follow deductively from Jordan’s position in the regional order. Economic, geographic, demographic, and political “realities” compel Jordan’s preference for a role in the West Bank, regardless of discourse, identity, or ideas. Rent-seeking offers one explanation for Jordan’s defense of its role in the West Bank and the peace process (Brand 1994). Jordan’s “role,” or its willingness to negotiate over the final dispensation of the West Bank, represented a major source of external financial and political support. Because both the United States and Israel viewed Jordan as important primarily in regard to its presumed role in the West Bank and in competition with the PLO, this role represented a major economic and political asset. Surrendering this role would mean not only the loss of these external rents, but also exposure to serious American and Israeli pressure. The combination of international rent-seeking, strategic interaction with the PLO, and material interests provides a solid foundation for the assumption of an enduring Jordanian preference for a role in the West Bank. Because systemically derivable preferences, behavior, and discourse converge, the assumption of a constant Jordanian preference for a dominant position in the West Bank seems plausible. For the same reason, however, rent-seeking offers little purchase on the Jordanian decision to sever ties. No offer of financial support preceded, or followed, the severing of ties.
The other three rationalist hypotheses introduced enjoy wide circulation and credibility at both the academic and public level: threat balancing, omnibalancing, and strategic interaction. The strategic interpretation tended to be advanced either by those who prefer negotiations with Jordan over negotiations with the PLO, or by those directly involved in Jordanian-Palestinian rivalry. The PLO presented a fundamental challenge to the Jordanian role, as well as to the legitimacy and even survival of the Hashemite regime. Decades of conflict locked Jordan and the PLO into a competitive, zero-sum relationship which guided the Jordanian calculation of threat and opportunity. While the PLO had abandoned its aims on Jordan itself, the relationship remained highly competitive, full of suspicions and mutual doubts. Supporters of the “Jordan option” minimized the significance of the disengagement in order to keep these peace proposals alive and avoid dealing with the PLO. If Jordanian interests had not really changed, and the disengagement only responded to the rise of PLO power in the West Bank, then the weakening of the PLO would quickly bring Jordan back into play. Jordanians and Palestinians who viewed the relationship as competitive and zero-sum also propounded this viewpoint. The balance of threat position tended to be argued by those who opposed a negotiated settlement in the West Bank. The idea was to emphasize Jordanian instability, fragility, and above all its intimate ties to Palestine. Based on the asserted identity of Jordan and Palestine, it only made sense that an uprising on the West Bank would travel east. Each approach assumes continuity in identity and interests. The latter claim is that Jordan was Palestine before and continues to be; the former position sees Jordan as having had an interest in the West Bank which has not changed.
Balance of Threat and Regime Survival
The main threat-balancing explanation is that King Hussein preferred to surrender his claims to the West Bank rather than lose his immanently threatened throne, rather than an international threat balancing argument. However powerful Jordan’s interest in the West Bank, regime survival took priority: “The disengagement did not become imperative... until it became clear that other alternatives could constitute a serious threat to the regime and to the existence of the state” (Andoni 1991: 167). This interpretation has become widely accepted, among policymakers as well as academics (Nevo and Pappe 1994; Arens 1995; Shamir 1994). The burden of this argument is to show that Jordanian decisionmakers did in fact perceive an existential threat emanating from the claim to the West Bank, and that they believed that severing of ties would best protect Jordan from that threat.
The omnibalancing hypothesis stresses Palestinian nationalism which might challenge Hussein’s regime; the threat balancing hypothesis emphasizes Israeli threats to make Jordan into the Palestinian state. The Palestinian threat lies in the possibility that Palestinians resident in Jordan, inspired by the uprising across the river, would see an equivalence between Israeli occupation and Jordanian authoritarianism and act accordingly. 7 The Jordanian regime evidently feared this, severely restricting public expressions of support for the Intifada. 8 The relative success of these repressive measures casts doubt upon the degree to which fear of this threat motivated the Jordanian decision. Jordanian security services seemed to have societal unrest under control during the summer of 1988. Furthermore, while Intifada discourse rejected Jordanian influence in the West Bank, at no time did it call for an uprising in Jordan. PLO leaders recognized that Palestinian unrest in Jordan would likely divert world attention from the Intifada and thus weaken its political gains, and most leaders of the Palestinian community in Jordan shared this analysis. 9 During the April 1989 uprisings in Jordan among the Transjordanian cities of the south, the PLO advised Palestinians not to join in, indicating their belief that Palestinian interests were best served if the Intifada did not spread to Jordan. With no calls for the spread of the Intifada to Jordan, and effective security controls minimizing the risks of spontaneous outbursts, Palestinian activity does not seem to provide enough threat to the Jordanian regime to justify the disengagement.
The international threat emerged from Israeli debates about possible solutions to their predicament (Sharara 1990; Lustick 1994). The Intifada energized the campaign to impose a solution to their Palestinian problem at Jordan’s expense, as Israeli public opinion became more hawkish (Arian 1997, Dowty 1998). Major figures along the Israeli political spectrum publicly raised the idea, and the crisis atmosphere raised the possibility that drastic measures might be taken by the Israeli government. One frequently cited opinion poll indicated that 49 percent of Israelis would consider a policy of transfer (Tessler 1994: 709). This Israeli threat held a high place in Jordanian discourse—probably more so than in Israel itself. Jordanians highlighted this discourse to the point that “every Jordanian official is haunted by... the argument that Jordan is Palestine.” 10
Despite the Israeli public discourse, there does not seem to have been any serious escalation in the Israeli threat immediately prior to the Jordanian decision. Such an Israeli action continued to be unlikely, and Jordanians were well aware of the powerful counter arguments in the Israeli public sphere and the international constraints on such extreme action. As Prime Minister Zayd Rifa’i bluntly explained, “This is mere talk which is difficult for Israel to carry out. To deport the entire Arab population from the West Bank, Israel would have to wage a new war.” 11 Such statements undermine the argument for the centrality of this threat for explaining the disengagement.
An argument based on the Israeli threat also has serious difficulty with the timing of the decision. With Israeli elections approaching, Labor and Likud were nearly deadlocked. If the threat of “Jordan is Palestine” motivated Hussein, then the timing of the disengagement seems spectacularly ill-considered. The move shattered Shimon Peres’s peace plan based on the Jordan option and thereby removed Labor’s strongest card against Shamir. By harming Labor’s electoral chances, the disengagement strengthened rather than weakened this threat. Jordanians were quite aware of Israeli domestic politics. The fact that the timing of the disengagement helped the electoral prospects of the party most identified with the “Jordan is Palestine” policy strongly undermines the Israel version of the threat-balancing explanation. Why would King Hussein help elect the party whose policies threatened his throne?
While the threat-balancing approach concentrates attention on perception, rather than material power, it does not really help to differentiate among different threats (Harknett and VanDenBerg 1997). For example, most analysts thought that Jordan could not afford to disengage from the West Bank because its large Palestinian population would be enraged and would rise up against the regime. After the disengagement, analysts agreed that Jordan felt threatened by the effects of the continued ties to the West Bank on its Palestinian population. What happened to the original threat? Threat is subject to contestation and interpretation. An explanation that does not take this contingency into account risks an easy slide into tautology. Overall, despite the emergence of the regime survival thesis as the conventional wisdom, little evidence exists to support it. The threat is not specified, and the solution is not obvious.
Strategic Interaction and the Balance of Power
Realism, for which variations in material power drive changes in behavior, is not particularly useful for explaining the severing of ties. Few changes in the balance of power occurred at the correct time to explain such a dramatic behavioral change, however. The great changes in the international system caused by the end of the Cold War lay in the near future. At the regional level, the Iran-Iraq war was close to exhaustion, but had not yet officially terminated. No major arms deals or financial booms or busts predated the decision. No grand alliance of Arab states threatened Jordan, and Israeli pressure had not noticeably increased. In short, changes in the distribution of material power among states do not explain the Jordanian disengagement.
A strategic interaction model based on Realist assumptions offers more purchase on the decision. The power struggle between Jordan and the PLO for the right to represent the West Bank, and between those two actors and Israel for final control of the West Bank, defines the situation. The disengagement responded to shifting incentives caused by a shift in the regional balance of power brought about by the Palestinian Intifada (Robins 1989: 173). Support for the PLO expressed by the mobilized Palestinians seriously undermined Jordanian claims to represent the West Bank and contributed to PLO ascendancy within the Arab and international arenas (Susser 1990: 606; Tessler 1994). The Algiers Arab summit then pledged Arab aid to the Intifada by way of the PLO, specifically bypassing Jordan, driving home the new power realities. The shift in the balance of power between Jordan and the PLO, by this argument, led Jordan to the decision to temporarily disengage from the West Bank. Jordan’s interest in influence in the West Bank did not change. What did change was its position based on the balance of power. The severing of ties was a tactical maneuver aimed at reversing this power shift, and would be reversed as soon as the balance of power again favored Jordan.
With both Israel and Jordan weakened relative to the PLO, the disengagement came as a tactical move to starve the Intifada and undercut the PLO’s new strength. Since the Intifada placed considerable economic pressure on the Palestinians of the West Bank, Jordan’s move might push the Palestinian economy over the edge, by removing the salaries of civil servants and by restricting the flow of money across the bridge. The PLO would be compelled to devote more time and attention to administering the West Bank. This strain on its administrative capabilities would take its toll on its ability to exploit its new international power, and perhaps prove that it did not in reality have the capability to replace Jordan. As many observers at the time concluded, “King Hussein is setting the PLO up to fail.” The disengagement was a move against the PLO in the game of representation. For a strategic interaction model, the severing of ties is therefore a change in strategy, not a change in preferences: Jordan would restake its claim to the West Bank once the PLO position weakened.
Considerable evidence supports the argument that competition with the PLO drove Jordanian behavior, but it does not follow from the existence of strategic interaction that communicative action and public sphere structures do not matter. The decisionmakers involved in the disengagement were well-known for their orchestration over the years of Jordanian competition with the PLO and their personal dislike for the PLO: “the fact that all the key members [in the decision] were involved in the period of conflict with the PLO in 1986 indicates that this is a continuation and not a break in the Jordan/PLO confrontation.” 12 Almost every member of that small group of advisers has stated explicitly, both at the time and in later interviews and articles, that the decision was directed at the PLO, although they disagree as to whether it was meant to help or to hurt their long-time rival. 13 The way in which the decision was taken is often cited as evidence that it was intended as a blow against the PLO: Jordan did not consult with or warn the PLO before acting, and it did not cooperate with the PLO to smooth the transition. 14 For advocates of this argument, many of the steps taken could be interpreted as punitive, making life more difficult on the West Bank, rather than as signals to confirm sincerity.
The form of power involved in this strategic interaction, based only marginally on material resources, had far more to do with public sphere argumentation. For the Realist, power is a function of aggregate material capabilities. The changes in the balance of power observed here, on the other hand, refer to the power of claims to leadership of the Palestinians of the West Bank, which in turn relied on three major factors: the willingness to put forward the public claim, the willingness of other public sphere participants to accept the claim, and the ability to mobilize West Bank Palestinians in support of the claim. While material power might play a role in each of these, the relationship is neither direct nor obvious. During the Intifada, the Palestinian declarations of allegiance to the PLO increased its ability to claim leadership: PLO wealth, military power, or alliances did not change. Power flows from the public recognition of claims, not from material capabilities. A public sphere synthesis, in which strategic interaction between the PLO and Jordan takes place within contested normative and communicative structures, better explains the changes in power relations. The rest of this chapter develops such a synthesis.
Constructivism, Strategic Deliberation and the Public Sphere
A standard constructivist account would also be of little help in predicting or explaining the decision to sever ties. One prominent form of norms-based theory would expect continuity in Jordanian foreign policy in the face of structural change (Katzenstein 1996; Kier 1997). The Jordanian commitment to the West Bank represented a fundamental component of Jordanian identity, deeply embedded in domestic institutions and in the discourse of Jordanian foreign policy, constitutive of Jordanian interests. A process-oriented constructivism, rather than a structural norms-based account, is needed to explain this dramatic change (Wendt 1995). I argue that the demands of argumentation in the Arabist and international public sphere, a communicative dialogue in which Jordan had to engage in order to achieve its strategic goals, bound Jordan to a particular interpretation of the severing of ties. After this frame had been consolidated at the international and Arabist levels, a dialogue inside an opened Jordanian public sphere after 1989 forced a major reconstruction of domestic institutions around the new conception of Jordanian identity. Public deliberation, rather than deeply embedded norms, explains change.
Perhaps the best entry into a public sphere account of the disengagement lies in a comparison with the Rabat Summit, where years of fierce political battle between Jordan and the PLO culminated in the Arab consensus that the PLO was to be considered the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” King Hussein, despite serious reservations, accepted this consensus. Over the next few months, Jordan made gestures in the direction of “Jordanizing” the political system and disengaging from the negotiations (Sha’ir 1987; Day 1986). Within a relatively short time, however, Jordan returned to the fray. As rationalists would predict, the 1974 disengagement changed Jordanian strategy, with nothing fundamental changing in Jordanian interests. This contrasts sharply with the 1988 disengagement, which, I argue, did involve a significant change in Jordanian identity and interests.
This difference can be traced to the changing relationship between the state, the Arab and international public spheres, and the domestic political arena. In 1974, Jordanian legitimacy as a sovereign state remained an actively contested question. Discourse between the PLO and Jordan was harsh, hostile, and fierce, tinged by the memories of the 1970–1971 Black September wars. Claims were existential, contesting the very existence of the other. The PLO was still fighting for recognition as an equal, full participant and was not beyond asserting a claim to Jordan itself. By 1988, the Arabist sphere had come to be characterized by lesser efficacy relative to participating states, and by a more rationalized style of discourse. Private bargaining, rather than public argumentation, drove Arab consensus formation. The primary challenge to the legitimacy and identity of Jordan as a sovereign state now came from Israel rather than from Arab or Palestinian radicals, and most Palestinians now recognized an interest in Jordan’s survival. The Jordanian frame in the Arabist arena emphasized the needs of the Palestinians rather than Jordanian self-interest, with clear recognition of the difference between the two entities. The PLO was firmly entrenched as a recognized international actor enjoying wide support in international bodies such as the UN. The response to the Algiers resolutions was taken in a less defensive and more considered way, after relatively rational deliberation, in which arguments over the best way to serve collective interests in the Intifada predominated. Its acceptance and application of the 1988 decision was far more of a choice, expressing Jordanian decision, than was its acceptance of the 1974 decision.
Following the Algiers summit, Jordan made repeated efforts to convince the Arab and Palestinian public sphere that it sincerely supported the Arab consensus. In private meetings and public statements, Jordanian officials argued that Jordanian policy had changed in line with the summit resolutions: “Jordan will not be an alternative to the PLO and will not speak as a representative of the Palestinian people on... the Palestine issue.” 15 Such statements alone could not convince a skeptical Arab and Palestinian audience, which had decades of experience of Jordanian tactical maneuvering within the bounds of its consistent ambitions. Such talk appeared rather cheap to the Arabist public. The severing of ties can be thought of as a costly signal, an action with real consequences whose reversal would be difficult (Fearon 1997). Jordan needed to persuade the other participants in the Arab public sphere of its frame in order to reap the benefits of its action.
Jordan’s decision to sever ties with the West Bank responded more to the competitive dynamics within the Arabist public sphere than it did to direct considerations of power or threat. Jordanian explanations for the decision consistently stressed a number of factors: the threat posed by Israeli claims that Jordan should be seen as Palestine; the need to support the Intifada; and the demands of the Arab consensus. These factors, discussed above in terms of threat, should instead be interpreted in terms of public sphere interaction and competitive framing.
“Jordan Is Palestine”
The Israeli “Alternative Homeland” discourse threatened Jordan by making Jordanian identity contestable in the international public sphere. This virtually forces the theorist to a public sphere approach: power operates within discursive structures, threat emerges from the debates within them, and norms must be secured and defended through public deliberation. While Israeli military power stood behind the threat, Israel could act only if it succeeded in forging a consensus on the validity of its interpretation. In the aftermath of the Lebanon war, which had damaged Israeli standing in the world and at home, the use of military force to expel the Palestinians would have been extremely difficult without such a normative consensus. The Israeli claim that Jordan was already the Palestinian state directly tied Jordanian security to Jordanian identity. Security threats based on identity cannot be solved by purchasing more guns or by improving the economy, however. Addressing an identity-based security threat depends upon the ability to present a more convincing identity claim. But what constitutes a convincing identity claim? Who must be convinced? It is these questions, rather than the conventional questions about power or threat, which are raised by the “Jordan is Palestine” issue and which the severing of ties sought to address. This threat assumed its distinctive potency in the 1980s by shifting the site of the contestation of Jordanian sovereignty away from the Arabist public sphere, where the question had effectively been settled, into an Israeli-American public sphere with different stakes and argumentative norms. The dominant position of Israeli interpretations within the American public sphere represented a tremendous power resource independent of the military balance.
Variants of this threat ranged from the Labor vision of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation peacefully transforming into a Palestinian state, to the extreme right vision of a mass expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan. 16 The argument was not restricted to fringe groups like the Molodet party, or even to confrontational hard-liners like Ariel Sharon. In a numerous official statements and interviews, Prime Minister Shamir and Foreign Minister Arens claimed that Jordan was a Palestinian state and that the solution to the Palestinian problem could come only through the establishment of a Palestinian state on the East Bank. 17 Only the persistence of the Hashemite monarchy blocked the creation of a Palestinian state east of the river. 18 If the Palestinian state emerged in Jordan, the international community would then presumably be willing to accept the Israeli annexation of the West Bank. That no Palestinian or Jordanian group expressed any interest in the proposal did not seem to matter. The Likud justified this argument with an odd mix of historical and identity-based political claims. First, they argued that greater Israel had always included both banks of the river, so that their surrender of the East Bank represented a major concession. Second, the British mandate had briefly included Jordan and Palestine under the same administration, which was taken as evidence of their political unity in the Sykes-Picot framework. Third, the large Palestinian population of Jordan alone represented a satisfactory reason to put the Palestinian state there, with the historical origin of this Palestinian population in Jordan because of Israeli military activity forgotten or denied. As one Israeli commentator argued: “The moment questions arise about the legitimacy of the Hashemite claim to a separate Jordanian identity, the hook that King Hussein believes he has now escaped will ensnare him again.” 19
These historical arguments constitute a theory of identity and international relations sharply at odds with established international norms. The argument sought to delegitimize the Jordanian state by denying the Jordanian identity. Since the majority of Jordanians are “really” Palestinian, and there is no real independent or coherent Jordanian identity, there is no justification for the existence of the Jordanian state: “Jordan is Palestine in all but name.” From this perspective the legitimacy of the sovereign state requires justification beyond international recognition or empirical control, the two standard measures of sovereignty in international society (Hinsley 1968; Jackson 1990). A state’s existence must further be justified as an expression of some higher moral purpose or of a legitimate nationalism. This assertion contradicts a fundamental pillar of the international negative sovereignty regime, in which recognition by the international community alone confers sovereignty (Jackson 1990). The Israeli argument proposed that an existing state, an internally stable member of the UN, with the longest sitting head of state in the world, could be delegitimized and its sovereignty challenged on the basis of its weak national identity, even though no secessionist or rebel group inside of the target state or irredentist group outside it advanced such a claim.
The PLO rejected the “Alternative Homeland” project, despite persistent attempts to attribute such aspirations to it, as a profound threat to Palestinian national interests. Palestinians did debate the identity of Jordan and the possibility of political action there in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s a Palestinian consensus rejected any aspirations on the East Bank. Palestinians universally considered the idea to be an Israeli interest rather than a Palestinian interest, providing the basis for a convergence of interests between Jordan and the PLO on the question of Palestinian political activity in the East Bank. The reality of PLO influence on the East Bank did not translate into ambitions to establish a Palestinian state there. This consensus encompassed all major Palestinian figures and movements, including the leftist groups which had most fervently called for Jordanian-Palestinian unity against the Hashemite regime in the 1970s. As a prominent Palestinian intellectual explained, “if it appeared that any Palestinian faction wanted, openly or secretly, to establish an ‘Alternative Homeland’... this would have been rejected by the Palestinian people in idea and practice.” 20 Khalidi is even more forthright, asking how his national aspirations, based on generations in Jerusalem, could be resolved in Amman: “The point is that as far as the Palestinians themselves are concerned, their homeland is Palestine, west of the river.... It is not the East Bank of the Jordan” (1988: 9).
The international argumentation forced many unresolved contradictions of Jordanian identity to the surface. Jordan needed both to convincingly present a Jordanian identity and to reconcile the place of Palestinians within it without denying the political reality of the Palestinian identity. Since at least the early 1970s, an “East Bank-first” movement urged the regime to concentrate its energies on developing the East Bank and the Transjordanian community and to abandon its ambitions in the West Bank. Despite this powerful trend, Jordan continued to aspire toward regaining the West Bank. 21 The assertion of a Jordanian “tribal identity” in the mid-1980s never succeeded in capturing a normative consensus in Jordan. Such a limited ethnic identity claim excluded too many citizens, too poorly represented the reality of Jordanian society, and too blatantly contradicted the emergent norms of citizenship. 22 The struggle with the PLO for representation of the West Bank perpetually complicated the Jordanian position. Arguments in the Arabist public sphere about Jordanian/Palestinian unity or identity could be appropriated by Israel to support their argument for a Palestinian position on the East Bank. The need to define Jordanian particularity in the international public space could not be isolated from either the Arab or domestic spheres.
Finally, one should not underestimate the extent to which the Jordanian regime found this threat useful. Decisionmakers may have felt some real threat, especially since Hussein did not have the working relationship with the Likud leadership that had facilitated his dealings with the Labor Party, and even more so with the influx of Soviet Jews which seemed to be creating greater Israeli demand for territorial expansion. Shamir reportedly assured Hussein privately that such threats should not be taken seriously (Baker 1995: 386; Harkabi 1990: 25). “Jordan is Palestine” became a crucial gambit as a justificatory strategy in the Jordanian politics of identity. The state’s appropriation of the threat became a master stroke binding the hands of Jordanians of Palestinian origin, empowering Jordanian state elites against challenges from a growing middle class which was largely of Palestinian origin. Any sign of Palestinian political assertiveness could be stifled by the argument that “Palestinian political activity will make it possible for Israel to implement its threat.” 23 The usefulness of the foreign threat for the domestic political concerns of Jordanian elites points toward the construction of the threat and its public sphere deployment.
The Intifada
Many analysts place great weight on the Jordanian regime’s fear that the Palestinian Intifada could spread to the East Bank. While this emphasis is correct, the causal logic generally remains under specified. The demands of public sphere argumentation played an important role in linking the Intifada to Jordanian action. If Jordan denied the distinction between the West and East Banks, then the Intifada might inspire the Palestinians in Jordan who felt oppressed by the undemocratic regime in Jordan. The Jordanian regime needed some formula by which the Intifada in the Occupied Territories could be separated from the political and social demands of Jordanians of Palestinian origin. The disengagement provided such a formula. If the West Bank, Palestine, were recognized as distinct and separate from the East Bank, Jordan, then Jordanians could legitimately support the Intifada as an external event—and thereby satisfy the Arab consensus—while delegitimizing Palestinian political activity in the East Bank. After 1989, Jordan permitted rallies expressing solidarity with the Intifada, in sharp contrast with its repression of the observances of its first anniversary, demonstrating the value of the severing of ties consensus. 24
It is necessary to go beyond the simple calculation of threat and interest in explaining the Jordanian response to the Intifada. The depth of popular identification with the Palestinian struggle forced Jordanian decisionmakers to directly confront questions of identity, not only of interest. From a rationalist perspective, Jordan’s interests seemed to coincide with those of Israel: to stop the Intifada as quickly as possible. 25 The uprising undermined Jordanian influence in the West Bank and strengthened the PLO, while also threatening to decisively end the Jordanian role in the peace process. Further, its spread to the East Bank could destabilize the Jordanian political system. From a simple calculation of interests, then, it made sense to cooperate with Israel to shut down the Intifada and keep the PLO out of the process. But as the Intifada escalated, making its scale as a social revolution apparent, Jordanians could not avoid stark questions of identity: would they stand with or against this manifestation of Arab identity and resistance, with or against its huge popularity among Arab publics? Could Jordanian interests be set starkly, diametrically against Arabist norms? While tacit collusion with Israel over the 1986 West Bank development plan had been marginally justifiable as a way to improve the lives of Palestinians under occupation, direct collusion with Israel against the Intifada would be a stark repudiation of Arab norms, a final exit from the imagined Arab consensus.
The severing of ties therefore responded not only to the threat the Intifada posed, but also to the transformation of Palestinian identity that it sparked. As the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories engaged in collective action, articulating a clear rejection of a Jordanian role, Jordan needed to establish a new relationship. Hani al-Khasawneh, one of the leading advocates of the severing of ties, claims that his support was not based on competition with the PLO, but rather on the need “for establishing healthy relations between the two Jordanian-Palestinian peoples” and for “building a cohesive and independent Jordan.” 26 This appeal to generalizable, higher shared interests marks an important stage in the deliberative process. This dimension of the severing of ties cannot be reduced either to “losing” the strategic interaction with the PLO or to the demands of the Arab and international consensus.
The Arab Consensus
The Arab summit convened in Algiers in June 1988 to consider the implications of the Intifada established the consensus to which Jordan acceded. After offering an impassioned defense of the Jordanian position, Hussein asserted that “we are prepared to agree to anything that our brother leaders reach consensus about.” 27 The Arab leaders pledged full support for the Palestinian struggle and again authorized the PLO as the representative of this national struggle. Why would Jordan accept an Arab consensus which it believed to be wrong and counter to its interests? The argument that the balance of power compelled Jordan to accept the decision is not satisfactory. Arab decisions are notoriously unenforceable, and the Algiers resolutions conveyed no particular threat of sanctions. Jordan’s behavior is better explained by its preference for an outcome within the Arab consensus, and its acceptance of the collective interests expressed in that consensus.
The Arab consensus played an important role in the severing of ties by establishing the authoritative frame by which the act was interpreted. The Arabist public sphere was the most relevant site of interpretive struggle. Jordanian decisionmakers gave little thought to the domestic public sphere at this point, and in late 1988 effectively shut it down. The international public sphere received less attention in contesting the meaning of the disengagement, primarily because of Hussein’s frustration with American policy (Quandt 1993; Shultz 1994; Susser 1990). The international and the Arabist public spheres worked at cross purposes: the United States and Israel attempted to minimize the significance of the decision and tried to convince Hussein to change his mind, while Arabs and Palestinians tried to consolidate the decision and make it irrevocable. Jordanian arguments consistently emphasized that Jordan’s decision came in response to the Arab consensus on Palestinian independence and to the expressed wishes of the PLO, demonstrating the priority of the Arab consensus.
The strongly positive public response in the Arabist public sphere played an important role in consolidating the severing of ties in the short to medium term. The participants in the Arabist public sphere quickly reached consensus that Jordan had done the right thing. The initial response was heavily tinged with traditional suspicion of Jordanian motives. Debate revolved around the idea that Jordan hoped to strangle the Intifada and thereby weaken the PLO and reassert its claim to represent the West Bank in international negotiations. “The Jordanian step,” this position suggested, “should be considered a form of conspiracy against the Palestinian revolution” (Ghoul 1990: 419). However, a consensus quickly formed that regardless of King Hussein’s intentions, the severing of ties objectively helped the Palestinian cause and therefore should be supported. Egypt declared that “King Hussein’s decision... represents a significant turning point in the struggle for the Palestinian cause.” 28 Numerous members of the Palestinian leadership publicly welcomed the decision, regardless of its intentions. 29 A crucial meeting between high ranking Jordanian and Palestinian delegations in mid-August produced a common interpretative frame: “the objective of the decision is to serve the Palestinian cause, highlight the national identity of the Palestinian people, and underline the PLO’s role.... the Palestinian side affirmed its full concern for Jordan’s stability, sovereignty and domestic national unity.” 30
Jordanian discourse rejected any reference to Jordanian interests, insisting on framing its action in terms of Arab and Palestinian interests. The effort to frame the disengagement in terms of Jordanian interests came from Jordan’s opponents, who recognized that imposing such an frame would prevent the securing of an Arab consensus favorable to Jordan. The fact that Jordan framed its actions in terms of support for the Palestinians and respect for the Arab consensus rather than in terms of Jordanian interests had a definite impact on the outcome. The success of the disengagement depended on securing a consensus in the Arab public sphere that Jordan had in fact acted in the collective Arab and Palestinian interest. It became imperative for Jordan to justify the action in the strongest possible terms of support for rather than competition with the Palestinians. This need clearly guided the steps taken, even if it did not motivate the initial decision. Jordanian behavior had to conform to the frame it advanced in the Arabist public sphere in order to make its explanations credible; hence the steady sequence of increasingly costly steps, often taken in direct responses to public challenges. Once this frame had been established, Jordan’s support for the declaration of the Palestinian state, long anathema, became unavoidable, in order to maintain the integrity of the frame. The combination of the Palestinian and Arab embrace of the disengagement and the demands of frame consistency blocked any short-term reversal of the decision. This Arab consensus might not have been sufficient to transform Jordanian interests over the long term without the domestic changes described in chapter 4, but it did secure the shift through the short term.
The capitulation to the Arab consensus in a sense liberated Jordan from the demands of participation in the Arabist public sphere by insulating it from criticism. A prominent theme in Jordanian discourse was that the severing of ties put an end to all doubts about the Jordanian position, responded to all criticism of the Jordanian role, and clarified Jordanian intentions. Few could deny that Jordan had both in word and deed done exactly as the Arab consensus and Palestinian discourse demanded. As long as Jordan did not reverse its position, it stood beyond reproach. This respite from attack on Arabist grounds made the turn inward of 1989, the construction of a specifically Jordanian public sphere, more plausible and justifiable.
In the international public sphere, a campaign to cast doubt upon the long-term sincerity of Jordan’s disengagement followed, in an attempt to keep the Jordan Option alive. Analysts essentially argued that the severing of ties was a change in strategy, not a change in preferences. Richard Murphy, testifying before Congress, argued that “Jordan has not disengaged itself from the peace process.... the King’s action... did change the immediate dynamics, but it did not change... his concern, his interest, or his expectations to be fully involved in the process.” 31 Israeli discourse minimized the severing of ties, attempting to portray it as nothing but King Hussein’s frightened gambit to protect himself from the PLO. Nevertheless, as Jordanian behavior and the Arabist consensus stabilized and consolidated the new situation, Arens conceded that “this option no longer exists, because King Hussein changed his position... [and] a realistic perspective on our part requires us to take this statement seriously. Hussein does not represent this population.” 32 As the hope for a Jordanian return faded, the Reagan Administration finally agreed to commence a dialogue with the PLO as the only realistic party to a negotiated settlement. The Arabist consensus helped to overcome the power imbalances in the international public sphere, shielding Jordan from these pressures.
Conclusion
The initial decision to sever ties with the West Bank followed a strategic logic based upon the demands of argumentation in the Arabist public sphere. The significance of the decision cannot be inferred from Jordanian policy intentions, however, because it only took on meaning in the process of dialogue. In order for the severing of ties to achieve Jordanian interests, Jordan had to secure an Arab consensus. Once it achieved this consensus, however, it was bound, at least in the short term, to match its actions with its discourse. Several weeks of deliberation, including both public interpretive struggle and a series of meetings between Jordanian officials and representatives of the PLO and Arab states, established a consensus favorable to the severing of ties. From that point, “it goes without saying that Jordan’s decision cannot be rescinded.” 33
If the interaction had remained at this level, it is entirely plausible that the severing of ties might have been reversed once international and Arab circumstances changed. Jordanian material interests in the West Bank remained, and the demands of the peace process would almost certainly return to a Jordanian role. What made this action fundamentally different from other policy decisions was the domestic impact. In chapter 4, I turn to the domestic politics of the severing of ties, and argue that the contestation of Jordanian identity in the Jordanian public sphere institutionalized a new conception of Jordanian identity and interests which became embedded in Jordanian state and civil society institutions as well as in political discourse.
Endnotes
Note 1: The changing of PLO preferences represents another important and interesting case that merits a study of its own. Gresh (1989) provides an overview of the internal Palestinian debates over how and where to seek a Palestinian state, and the generally shifting Palestinian consensus. Back.
Note 2: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy testimony before House Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Developments in the Middle East, July 1988 (July 27, 1988), p. 59. Back.
Note 3: Flora Lewis, “A Middle East advance?” New York Times August 3, 1988. Back.
Note 4: Shamir speech to Israeli Knesset, August 10, 1988: “King Husayn’s speech announcing his secession from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza [sic] did not create a legal vacuum because the current apparatus in the area continues to operate.” FBIS-NES-88&-;155, August 11, 1988, pp. 35–37. This position was also held by Yitzhak Rabin, then responsible for the Occupied Territories; see FBIS-NES-88–148, p. 28. Back.
Note 5: Foreign Minister Hani al-Khasawneh, interview in Sawt al-Shaab, August 3, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–149, p. 29); also see Khasawneh, interview on Dubai Radio, July 30, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–147); Khasawneh continued to make this argument a decade later; interview published in al-Mithaq May 7, 1997. King Hussein regularly used this argument as well; see press conference, Amman Television, August 7, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–152) Back.
Note 6: Taher al-Masri, in al-Dustur February 2, 1995. Masri, a prominent regime figure of Palestinian origin, resigned in protest of the implementation. In a lecture delivered in September 1989, he publicly bemoaned the direction the disengagement had taken. The lack of concern for domestic implications among the “inner circle” was confirmed by Adnan Abu Odeh, personal interview, Washington, December 1995. Back.
Note 7: Tessler (1994), pp. 716–17, cites reports that the revolutionary message of the Intifada was spreading through the mosques and media of Amman in the summer of 1988. Back.
Note 8: Brynen (1991), p. 617, cites Jordanian Public Security Directorate figures that between December 1987 and August 1988 there were 117 pro-Intifada rallies of at least 100 participants; Brand (1990) cites a figure of 114 in the same period. Back.
Note 9: A declaration by the United National Leadership of the Intifada, calling on Palestinian members of the Jordanian Parliament to resign was swiftly retracted, and there was a general Palestinian consensus that instability in Jordan would harm the interests of the Intifada; see Abd al-Rahman and Hourani (1995). Back.
Note 10: Nasuh al-Majali, Minister of Information, in al-Dustur August 10, 1988; also see Taher al-Masri’s speech to the Arab Professional Conference, in al-Rai May 14, 1990. Back.
Note 11: Zayd Rifa’i, quoted in al-Rai February 6, 1989 (FBIS-NES-89–024). Back.
Note 12: Al-Biyadar al-Siyasi, August 13, 1988: “We have no faith in Husayn’s intentions.” Back.
Note 13: Abu Odeh (1997) and personal interview; Khasawneh, interviewed in al-Mithaq May 7, 1997. Back.
Note 14: Virtually the entire Palestinian leadership emphasized this point, with Yasir Arafat explicitly denying the King’s claim to have given him prior notice (FBIS-NES-88–154). Back.
Note 15: Adnan Abu Odeh, then Chief of the Royal Court, interviewed in al-Majellah May 21, 1988, p. 17. Back.
Note 16: For an overview of the spectrum of Israeli politics embracing some version of “Jordan is Palestine,” see David Makovsky, “Is Jordan Palestine?” Jerusalem Post December 15, 1988. Back.
Note 17: Arens interview in Jerusalem Post February 10, 1989, in Israeli Foreign Relations [hereafter IFR] vol. 11, Document 12; Shamir interview in Ma’ariv March 24, 1989, IFR 11, Document 33. Back.
Note 18: The details of this argument are described by Ryan (1987). Yorke (1987) challenges the demographic figures underlying this argument, as did the Jordanian government. For skeptical reaction by prominent American Jewish commentators, see Pipes and Garfinkle (1988). For support, see Israeli (1991) and Klieman (1981). For a sample of the debate, see Yuval Ne’eman, “Why Jordan is Palestine.” Jerusalem Post August 26, 1988; Yisrael Harel, “Clearly, Jordan is Palestine.” Jerusalem Post February 25, 1991; and Ariel Sharon, “Jordan is the Palestinian state.” Jerusalem Post April 4, 1991. Back.
Note 19: Erwin Frankel, “The Hussein illusion.” Jerusalem Post August 12, 1988. Back.
Note 20: Labib Qamhawi, “A commentary on Dr.Fanik,” al-Rai January 25, 1990. Back.
Note 21: Among the prominent figures involved in the East Bank First movement include Prince Hassan, Zayd bin Shakir, Ahmed Obaydat, Jamal al-Sha’ir, Sa’id al-Tal. King Hussein was generally linked with maintaining the commitment to the West Bank. See Day (1986) for discussion of these trends before the severing of ties. Back.
Note 22: Layne (1993) presents a fascinating discussion of the attempt to develop tribe-based identity in Jordan, but places a bit too much importance on elements of official discourse with little popular resonance. See Shryock (1997) for an alternative reading of the new tribal historians. Back.
Note 23: Fahd al-Fanik, “Peace treaty finally ends the threat of the Alternative Homeland,” al-Rai October 24, 1994, and “Dangers of the Alternative Homeland,” Shihan December 12, 1994. Back.
Note 24: See Mohammed Daoudiya, “National Unity,” al-Dustur May 27, 1990; Ramadan Rawashdeh, “Who are the enemies of the people?” al-Dustur May 30, 1990; Abdullah al-Khatib, “National Unity” al-Dustur June 2, 1990; Muna Shaqir, “Mass rallies and violent behavior and national unity” al-Dustur June 3, 1990; and Bisam Haddadin, “National consensus on preserving democracy” al-Dustur June 6, 1990; for the competing interpretations. Back.
Note 25: Many Israeli commentators expressed this perception of shared interests, and expected Jordan to cooperate in suppressing the Intifada. Back.
Note 26: Khasawneh interviewed in al-Mithaq, May 7, 1997. Back.
Note 27: King Hussein speech to Arab summit, June 7, 1988. Collected Speeches, p. 264. Back.
Note 28: al-Ahram, August 4, 1988, FBIS-NES-88–151, August 5, 1988, p. 6. Back.
Note 29: Among the Palestinian leaders to publicly express this were Salah Khalaf, Jamal al-Surani, Abd al-Hamid al-Sa’ih, Yasser Abd Raboh, Nayf Hawatmeh and George Habash. Back.
Note 30: PLO statement of August 15, 1988, in al-Rai FBIS-NES-88–159, pp. 3–4. Back.
Note 31: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy, testimony before House Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Developments in the Middle East, October 1988 (October 13, 1988), p. 9 and p. 39. Back.
Note 32: Arens, interviewed in Ha’aretz May 5, 1989, in IFR 11, Document 51, p. 131. Back.
Note 33: In al-Rai August 11, 1988. Back.
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