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State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
Marc Lynch
1999
4. Jordan Is Jordan: Jordanian Debates over Jordanian-Palestinian Relations
“There was talk about return to the former union... I lived it all these years, but I found it was all wrong because each side is attached to its own identity.”
— King Hussein, August 7, 1991. 1
Despite the importance of Arab and international public spheres on Jordanian conceptions of identity and interest, the severing of ties would not have produced the enduring reconception of Jordanian identity and interests without the remarkable emergence of the Jordanian public sphere. Jordan’s need to secure and then maintain an Arab consensus bound its behavior after July 1988, and produced a new context for strategic interaction over the future of the West Bank: a change in preferences over strategies (Powell 1994). Change in Jordanian identity and interests—a change in preferences over outcomes—could only be produced by a domestic dialogue and the reconfiguration of domestic institutions. The emergence of the Jordanian public sphere in the 1990s provided a site for such deliberation. The severing of ties set in motion public deliberation over state identity and interests which produced a profoundly new conception of Jordan’s interests in the West Bank. Jordan reached a consensus on the revision of the borders of the state which was institutionalized in discourse, state and civil society institutions, and which have produced consistent behavioral patterns. The Jordanian public sphere failed to produce such a consensus on the question of internal identity and the place of citizens of Palestinian origin in the political system, however. The internal Jordanian deliberation is profoundly linked to regional and international processes: Jordan’s identity will not be fully institutionalized without a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The most important change is that most Jordanians came to believe that the interests of the downsized Jordanian state are best served by the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In this chapter, I make two arguments. First, I argue that Jordan has undergone a change in preferences over outcomes, not simply a change in strategies (Powell 1994). After long viewing unity with the West Bank as a core component of state identity and a fundamental interest, a Jordanian consensus emerged in the early 1990s that unity with the West Bank threatened Jordanian survival, identity, and interests. What had been the least preferable outcome—a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—became the most preferable outcome. This change in preferences is important both empirically, in that it is essential for understanding Jordanian behavior along a wide range of issues, and theoretically, in that it represents an observable change in first-order preferences on a central foreign policy issue. Second, I argue that Jordan’s understanding of state identity and interests changed through the process of public deliberation across multiple public spheres. Public debate inside of Jordan produced the new consensus on Jordan’s territorial scope, but these debates did not take place in isolation from regional developments. The emergence of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, along with the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, helped to entrench the East Bank boundaries of Jordan.
The Disengagement in the Jordanian Public Sphere
Dialogues in the Jordanian and the Arab public spheres could never be fully insulated from one another. While Jordanian officials proclaimed in 1988 that “we do not accept any interpretation for our move other than the explanation and the interpretation that we present,” Jordan’s position in multiple public spheres belied such claims of interpretive power. 2 Discourse from one public sphere reinforced or challenged positions in another. Nevertheless, two distinct dialogues clearly emerged, each oriented toward a different imagined consensus, focusing on different dimensions of interests, and producing different outcomes. The Arabist dialogue produced a firm consensus in favor of the severing of ties. While it would have been difficult to find anyone outside of Jordan or Israel by 1988 who thought that the return of the West Bank to Jordanian rule represented a viable option, the internal Jordanian consensus on this remained publicly unchallenged. For Jordanian public discourse, the West Bank remained naturally a part of Jordan until the public deliberation which followed the severing of ties (Lustick 1994). The domestic dialogue produced a consensus on new borders which underlay the contentious debates over Jordanian interests in the peace process, but failed to achieve consensus on the place of Palestinian-origin citizens in the political order.
Most contemporary discussion of the severing of ties focused on the Jordanian role in the West Bank, not on internal Jordanian politics. The focus on the international dialogue accurately reflects the priorities of the Jordanian regime, which privileged the Arabist consensus as the most important arena for communicative and strategic interaction. Even those analysts who gave some attention to the domestic political implications for Jordan slighted the significance of Jordanian public debate. 3 In fact, for most of August 1988 the Jordanian press formed an arena for vigorous public debate, as the public struggled to reach some consensus about the new political situation. The regime exerted state power to prevent public debate only after several weeks of debate, but before even a tentative consensus could emerge. The government shut down the nascent identity politics by reorganizing the press: forcing the private ownership of the dailies to sell their shares to the state, replacing their editorial boards, and stifling the expression of opinion. This repression and failure to achieve public consensus quickly became a major source of instability and tension in the political system, contributing directly to the uprisings of 1989.
The public deliberation in those few weeks vividly reveals the uncertainty that the severing of ties wrought among Jordanians and their eagerness to discuss it publicly. The issue was understood not simply as difference over strategies—whether the disengagement served Jordanian self-interest—but as a deeper deliberation over Jordanian identity. If Jordan had always been conceived as an Arabist entity uniting the two banks under a Hashemite throne, what was a Jordan with only one bank? Most Jordanians, socialized into the discourse defending the unity of the two banks, found it difficult to readjust to defend separation. Unity with the West Bank and the existence of a single Jordanian-Palestinian people represented fundamental, constitutive normative principles of Jordanian discourse and institutions. Despite the widespread sympathy with the Palestinian cause, the public sphere itself retained these Jordanian focal points. Columnists at first cautiously repeated the justifications offered by Hussein in his speech, musing that perhaps the step would help the PLO and end unjustified doubts about Jordanian intentions, and at the least it responded to PLO and Arab wishes. On August 3, Fahd al-Rimawi published a pathbreaking essay stressing the need for open, public debate about the decision. Scorning the surface calm, Rimawi argued simply, “let us make open what is now whispered.” 4 George Haddad, a prominent Arabist, responded with a remarkable outburst: “You want to open debate on the severing of ties and ‘Jordastinian’ unity... but I reply that I am not yet in any condition to write calmly.... I consider this one of the darkest days in the history of Jordan.” 5
Pointed analysis then burst into the public sphere, revealing sharp differences of interpretation. Even regime loyalists expressed dissatisfaction: “Despite all justifications, the severing of ties is a danger and is hurtful to all those who believe in unity.” 6 While this critique blamed the PLO for demanding the separation, rather than directly criticizing the king, the implications of the criticism were apparent: no unity among the political elite could be assumed on this issue. The press balanced the anger of pro-unity writers with the basic theme that the disengagement came as a Jordanian response to the Arab consensus and PLO demands and therefore stood beyond reproach.
The critics drew on a normative structure relying on the unity of the two banks, which had been the cornerstone of the Jordanian position for decades. Their position drew on Jordanian norms, identity, and discourse, eschewing the Arabist and leftist denunciations of Jordanian policy which the state traditionally found threatening. The dissenters were defending Jordanian unity norms, not challenging them. However, this was hardly the point. In August 1988, the regime was primarily concerned with Arabist and international deliberation and the need to convince other actors of Jordanian sincerity and conviction. Achieving Arabist consensus took significantly higher priority than did engaging with Jordanian political society. Doubts expressed at home, or difficulty in institutionalizing the decision in the domestic sphere, would only undermine the Jordanian attempt to convey sincerity and irreversibility in the Arabist public sphere. The closure of the domestic debate therefore served the demands of international argumentation. The costly steps taken by the state in order to prove its sincerity to the Arabist public—the dissolution of Parliament, the recognition of the Declaration of the Palestinian State—were accompanied by very little deliberation in the Jordanian public sphere.
The reorganization of the press in late August removed the editorial boards of the daily newspapers and installed strict censorship. The state assault on the press has generally been seen as a strike against any manifestation of societal criticism at a time of deepening economic and political crisis, combined with Prime Minister Rifa’i’s notoriously low threshold of toleration. But there is more to it than that, and it has to do with the entry of identity concerns into the debate. While the government repeatedly denied any connection between the severing of ties and the reorganization of the press, few Jordanians or Arab observers doubted the relationship. 7 Following the abandonment of claims to the West Bank, the discussion of identity would seem to be inevitable. The statist conception of debate was of the press explaining and legitimating the state decision to the people rather than effective dialogue: “the major responsibility [of the press is] communicating the guidelines of the national leadership to the citizens, explaining the government’s mission and policies.” 8 In other words, the press should offer one-way tutelage, not public debate.
Identity politics between the disengagement and the 1989 uprisings reveal the constraints exercised by the structure of the public sphere upon actors. Despite the impetus to debate, actors remained bound by the available media and the existing normative and discursive boundaries. The political turning point was not yet accompanied by the opening of the public sphere necessary for public identity politics. Public closure did not prevent people from interpreting the significance of the disengagement in private salons, but it prevented them from the public interaction from which new consensual understandings might emerge. The public sphere simply could not handle the introduction of identity at this highly politicized level. In short, the severing of ties made the public contestation of identity politics necessary. It took the upheavals of 1989 to make that debate possible.
In the context of uncertainty and enforced public silence between the press reorganization and the April uprisings, three noteworthy phenomena emerged. First, many Palestinians began to transfer their capital out of the country in anticipation of a move to strip them of their citizenship rights. Palestinian workers abroad similarly began to avoid Jordanian banks when remitting their wages to families in Jordan or in the West Bank. Together, these uncoordinated but widespread measures proved disastrous for the Jordanian economy. The value of the Dinar collapsed in half against foreign currencies. The economic impact of the disengagement is not nearly as straightforward as it is made out in retrospect, however. Economic analysts in the daily press minimized the probable economic impact of the move. 9 The closure of the public sphere directly influenced the economic impact of the severing of ties. The disengagement appeared to be, at least possibly, the prelude to disenfranchisement of Palestinians. True or not, there was no open forum in which these fears could be meaningfully discussed. The economic impact of the disengagement depended upon its interpretation, which was shaped by the government’s repression and refusal to engage with public questioning.
The second phenomenon, the spread of rumors and underground pamphlets, took on great significance as an alternative to the tomblike silence of the official public sphere. While both rumors and pamphlets are well-entrenched features of Jordanian society, this period saw an unprecedented level of such activity. In the absence of credible information, people felt great uncertainty, complementing their historically grounded distrust of the regime’s intentions. The normative structure of this counter-public played an extremely significant role in defining the new public sphere. The absence of any national public sphere forced people to rely on foreign media, which in practice often meant Israeli radio, for coverage of Jordanian news. 10 “Black pamphlets” circulated widely in the streets of Amman, accusing public officials of corruption and calling for public freedoms. As a deputy explained during a 1989 Parliament debate: “Corruption... forced the citizen to exit from his silence and express his outrage.. and the pamphlets appeared.. to expose it.” 11 The exposure of corruption at the highest levels at a time of harsh economic recession seriously undermined the credibility not only of Rifai’s government, but of the system as a whole. The emphasis on press reforms in the 1989 liberalization should be understood in this context. By surrendering some margins of control, the regime sought to relegitimate the dominant public sphere.
Third, the severing of ties emboldened the Jordanian exclusivist trend. Transjordanian political entrepreneurs seized the new opportunities to advance a claim to legitimize and advance their social power at the expense of the Palestinian-origin economic elite. This exclusivist position encountered strong opposition, but increasingly set the terms of debate. These Transjordanians saw that the disengagement represented a victory and an opportunity. Even as Hussein called for an inclusionary, identity-blind discourse, the logic of the emergent public sphere encouraged the Jordanian chauvinists. With the polity defined in terms of the East Bank, and the loyalties of Palestinian-origin citizens implicitly in doubt, the Jordanian nationalists held the upper hand in the politicization of identity. The severing of ties and the thematization of identity empowered such trends at the expense of any form of mobilization based either on Palestinian identity or on claims blind to identity.
After the severing of ties, most elites of Palestinian origin accepted an implicit bargain, largely abstaining from political activity as the price of Jordanian support for the PLO and a Palestinian state. This bargain was secured through persuasion more than through coercion. In the context of the Intifada, the Israeli “Jordan is Palestine” discourse, and the Jordanian decision to sever ties with the West Bank, most Palestinians came to agree that Palestinian, as well as Jordanian, essential interests were best served by their abstention from Jordanian politics. Despite the official discourse that “all citizens share equal rights and responsibilities,” Palestinians and Transjordanians alike perceived an implicit expectation that Palestinian citizens would avoid the exercise of political power inside of Jordan. This crucial bargain on domestic order underlay the consensus on borders that “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine.” After the severing of ties, Palestinian identity could be accommodated within the Jordanian political system by sharply distinguishing the Palestinian cause as “foreign policy” from Palestinian mobilization inside of Jordan.
The Disengagement and the April 1989 Uprisings
The severing of ties and the regime’s turn to repression of dissent directly led to the uprisings of April 1989. The disengagement from the West Bank shook the intersubjective norms governing Jordanian identity, but no new norms had yet emerged to replace them. The regime met the threat of instability with increased repression rather than with dialogue. The sudden, major change in the identity of the state, combined with the absence of a public space within which to negotiate new norms, directly led to the 1989 uprisings.
This explanation departs from the conventional explanation of the riots as a direct reaction to IMF austerity measures (Brand 1992; Satloff 1992; Brynen 1991). The conventional wisdom [“the people asked for bread and the regime gave them democracy”] relies on assumptions about the dominance of economic rationality over political ideas and identities. In the 1989 bread riots, this approach fails to account for important evidence. The deteriorating Jordanian economic situation played an important role in the increasing instability, but the economic problems had profoundly political roots. The closure of the public sphere was one of the main complaints of the uprising, judging by the statements released by its leaders (Hamarneh 1995a: 145&-;146; al-Urdun al-Jadid 1989). When asked their opinion of the causes of the April uprisings, 78 percent of Jordanians mentioned the absence of press freedoms, 81 percent pointed to the absence of a representative Parliament, and 89 percent cited the absence of dialogue between citizens and officials (Muhadin 1992). Concern for public freedoms dominated the 1989 Parliamentary electoral campaigns, and the first confidence debate in that Parliament heavily emphasized public freedoms and public participation. 12 Citizens complained that lines of communication between the government and the people no longer functioned. This condition became particularly dangerous in the conditions of radical uncertainty brought on by the severing of ties. As the identity of the state and the meaning of citizenship shifted, the system needed new publicly negotiated consensus norms of legitimation. The crisis followed directly from change in the structures of identity and the absence of a national public sphere within which new identities could be secured. Without these, the economic crisis alone would not have led to this kind of societal response.
If identity and the structure of the public sphere helped to bring on the April 1989 uprisings, they also influenced their impact. Citizens of Palestinian origin remained notably inactive, preventing the spread of the uprisings into Amman or the camps and quite possibly saving the regime. Their inactivity prevented the state from mobilizing the discourse of Palestinian disloyalty, severely constraining its ability to exert repressive force. The inactivity of the Palestinian population has been explained in a number of ways: the orders of the PLO, which did not want to destabilize Jordan during the Intifada; the concentration of security personnel in Palestinian areas; the general alienation of Palestinians who felt that local economic issues were not their problem; fear of being singled out for punishment. Palestinians in Jordan lacked a framework within which they could organize for political action. Equally importantly, most Palestinian citizens recognized the implicit bargain of the severing of ties and did not want to endanger it with active mobilization. The consensus that Palestinian interests during the Intifada were ill-served by instability in Jordan powerfully constrained their behavior in the crisis. Their choice to abstain from the April uprisings disappointed many Transjordanian political activists, who later used their inaction to question their commitment to the Jordanian political system (Hourani and Abd al-Rahman 1995). Palestinian decisions to not participate in the uprisings follow rationally from their interpretation of the severing of ties.
In response to the upheaval, the Jordanian regime began a democratization process which included elections, increased public freedoms, and a real wave of public enthusiasm and popular participation. The combination of elections to a marginally effective parliament, reining in of Public Security Directorate abuses, and widened press freedoms did not produce anything recognizably democratic, given the realities of monarchy. It did, on the other hand, entrench the norm of democracy as central to regime legitimacy. And it opened up a domestic print public sphere dominated by the questions of Jordanian–Palestinian identity that had long been suppressed. This opening finally allowed the contradictions of the severing of ties to be worked out in public. Cautiously at first, and then bursting into the semi-official daily press and into the proliferating independent weekly press, open discussion of identity transformed the Jordanian public sphere. Always the most taboo of red lines, identity now came to permeate virtually all public issues. Instead of orienting claims toward an Arab public which favored Palestinian claims, or toward an international public sphere interested in Jordan primarily for its role in Palestinian-Israeli relations, claims were now oriented toward the Jordanian political community.
The 1991 National Charter represented a formal consensus on the East Bank identity of Jordan and the foreign policy implications of that identity: “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine” (Hourani 1997; Rimoni 1991; Sha’ir 1990). The former Prime Minister Ahmed Obaydat, who had long been associated with an “East Bank-first” political trend, chaired a Royal Commission including representatives of most major political parties and trends. Negotiation of the Charter involved public deliberation similar to that seen in the negotiation of Constitutions (Elster 1993, 1995), in which actors recognized the need to produce a viable, publicly defended consensus transcending self-interest. Charter deliberations were generously covered in the daily press, and involved much of Jordanian political society in a dialogue over the most basic principles of Jordanian political order. Since the Charter was to establish general norms of Jordanian behavior, actors took the identity and interests of the collective as the frame of reference. It provided the framework for “national action” in all spheres of political life, drawing sharp lines between Jordanian and non-Jordanian, and succeeded to a large degree in obtaining consensus around these principles. Most observers have identified the crucial dimension of the Charter to be the regime acceptance of liberalization in exchange for societal recognition of the Hashemite monarchy, but the Charter was equally important in articulating the new Jordanian state identity. By declaring unequivocally that “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine,” the Charter ratified the distinction between Jordanian politics on the Inside and Palestinian politics on the Outside. The Charter maintained that both the Jordanian and the Palestinian national identities were legitimate and real, and that they were not in conflict with one another but rather stood together against the common Israeli enemy and the threat of “the Alternative Homeland.” The Charter called for a Palestinian state, which would hopefully be united with Jordan by the free will of both sides after the achievement of Palestinian sovereignty. It also guaranteed the full citizenship rights of all Jordanians of all origins. While many Jordanians bemoan the failure of the Charter to become a central reference point for political life, it does stand as a powerful expression of formal consensus.
In the following section, I examine the preferences and positions of the major political and identity groups in the Jordanian public sphere and demonstrate how they came to converge on this particular formula in the process of public deliberation; and how their acceptance of this conception of identity reshaped political parties, state and civil society institutions, and articulation of national interests.
The dynamics of competitive framing provided clear incentives for entrepreneurs to take ever more extreme positions in a bid to draw attention and support (Lake and Rothchild 1998; Snyder and Ballantine 1997). Jordanian nationalists, the first to take advantage of the new freedoms, tended to drive and dominate the political debate. Because of the general Palestinian unwillingness to publicly identify as Palestinian within Jordan, Jordanian identity extremists possessed an inherent advantage. Since the severing of ties made the East Bank the exclusive focus of state identity, “native” East Bankers seized the initiative in interpreting the change. Indeed, framing issues in terms of identity strengthened Transjordanians; Palestinians generally preferred to avoid identity frames. As one Palestinian activist complained, “there is a Satanic spirit in the press.... [they] write in an attempt to arouse differences.” 13 Whether it is better to discuss identity-based conflicts, and thereby possibly inflame them, or to ignore them and thereby allow them to fester, is a central topic in the Jordanian debate as in liberal theory more generally (Benhabib 1996). I argue that such deliberation, however dangerous, is necessary for the production of new identity norms. Without ignoring the danger that public discourse can lead to polarization and extremism, it is also only through public deliberation that preferences can change in the direction of a shared interpretive frame.
The monarchy has generally been understood as providing the ultimate guarantee against ethnic conflict in Jordan. Since the Black September civil war in 1970, all groups in Jordan have recognized the power of the state and the army against such mobilization. Furthermore, all groups have been sobered by the Lebanese experience. By serving as a balancer between the competing demands of the various groups in Jordanian society, the throne prevents the escalation of ethnic conflict and the descent into anarchy. The Hijazi origins of the Hashemite family, which only arrived in Transjordan in 1922, hinders the monarchy from articulating an ethnic Jordanian identity. King Hussein adopted a public position based on two key assertions: first, that “Jordan is the country of the muhajarin and insar”—a reference to the early days of Islam; and second, that “whoever harms our national unity will be my enemy until judgment day.” All Jordanian citizens “regardless of roots or origins have all the rights and bear all the responsibilities of citizenship.” Hussein articulated an inclusivist frame, in which Palestinians could participate as full citizens without endangering the Jordanian identity of the state. Hussein often intervened to prevent the escalation of identity debates, appealing for national unity in the face of difficult times.
Despite this inclusionary discourse, the monarchy has often been the source of division as well, manipulating tensions and mistrust between ethnic groups in order to prevent the consolidation of a united popular opposition (Brand 1988, 1995; Abu Odeh 1997). Since Black September, the regime has encouraged Transjordanian sentiment in order to guarantee a social base for the regime and to prevent opposition alliances across communal lines. Ethnic preferences in the state apparatus and the army, along with direct ties between the monarchy and the tribes, provide material benefits. The adoption of a “one-vote” electoral law, with districts carefully drawn to overrepresent the Transjordanian community, provide political benefits; this law has drawn fire as fomenting ethnic conflict and division. The tension between Hussein’s inclusivist discourse and his governments’ resort to exclusivist practices shapes the public space for Jordanian identity politics.
Jordanian exclusivists, more powerful within an identity frame, drove the debate. Prominent writers such as Fahd al-Fanik provided the intellectual support, arguing for the reconceptualization of Jordanian foreign policy interests and domestic political structures along a wide range of issues. Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, head of the largest Jordanian exclusivist party, al-Ahd, represented the major political party advancing this position. Al-Ahd quickly acquired a reputation as the “state’s party.” While it is often misinterpreted as a “tribal” party, al-Ahd advocates a state-centric nationalism in which political loyalty is more important than ethnic identity. Identity must be clearly defined and manifested in political behavior: everybody carrying a Jordanian passport must have a Jordanian political identity. As Fanik puts it, “national unity depends upon there existing a single national identity.... there can not be two national identities in Jordan” (in Hourani 1996: 168). 14 Jordanian identity means “accepting the political form of the Jordanian state... whoever lives on Jordanian land is Jordanian as long as he [sic] accepts the constitution and the Jordanian identity.” 15 Whatever one’s private sense of identity, one must publicly profess a Jordanian identity: “Jordan... is a homeland for all Jordanians and all Palestinians who choose to live in it.... all of us are citizens of the Jordanian state except the one who wants to incite events and declare openly his Palestinian identity.” 16 In June 1997, al-Ahd formed the core of a new party, the National Constitutional Party, which brought together eight centrist parties. The NCP offers a more ambiguous version of exclusivism, and its spokesmen have contested efforts to portray it as an exclusivist party. 17 The NCP publicly identifies with the state and with the regime, rather than with the Transjordanian community and the tribes. The NCP and its symbols have moderated their identity discourse under the pressure of public argument, although it is difficult to say whether this represents a tactical retreat or a change in their preferences. 18 Its poor electoral performance in 1997 raised doubts about the power of such an identification, but in late 1998 Abd al-Hadi al-Majali became the first political party leader to be elected speaker of the House of Representatives.
Competition between different strands of Jordanian exclusivism is a major component of the strategic framing process. A radical exclusivism based on a tribal Jordanian national identity also asserted itself after the severing of ties. Ahmed Awidi al-Abaddi, Member of Parliament from 1989–1993 and re-elected in 1997, has been among the most assertive public voices, advocating a primal Jordanian claim on the land and the state. 19 Abaddi’s ideology expresses ethnic hostility to Palestinians and non-Jordanians regardless of their political positions. Unlike al-Ahd, which relies upon a sharp public/private distinction and will accept all who are loyal to the Jordanian state, Abaddi refuses to permit any deviation from criteria of blood and tribe. Abaddi questioned the Jordan-Israel peace treaty, which al-Ahd supported, because it contained no provision for the return of the Palestinians who, in his mind, corrupted and threatened Jordan. In June 1998, Abaddi’s declarations about Palestinian disloyalty in a Gulf TV roundtable led to calls to strip him of Parliamentary immunity and prosecute him for harming national unity. In November 1996, Nahid Hattar, a prominent intellectual of this trend, sparked a public outcry with an article entitled “Who is the Jordanian?” 20 In the firestorm that followed, Hattar was harassed, arrested, and accused of political subversion, even as all parties struggled to answer his question. Hattar’s newspaper, al-Mithaq, relentlessly drove home the opposition of this trend to any plans that involved the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Many Jordanian public figures—even those associated with the conservative Jordanian exclusivist trend—express fear of, and often contempt for, radical Jordanian exclusivism; but the increasing power of these ideas should not be underestimated. Indeed, al-Mithaq is one of the most outspoken opposition newspapers, despite its Transjordanian identification. Radical exclusivism has an increasingly legitimate place in the public sphere, and thrives within the salons. The harsh criticism of any moves toward ties with the West Bank or toward resettlement of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan has powerfully influenced the Jordanian debate and clearly constrains state behavior. “Iqlimiyya” remains a normatively charged insult, however, and the exclusivists have not succeeded in establishing a consensus on their vision of the national community.
On the Palestinian side, Hashd, an offshoot party of the DFLP, advanced a forceful inclusivist identity claim within the boundaries of the East Bank. This is not an extreme of Palestinian exclusivism to match the Jordanian extreme: no party could legitimately take such a position in the new Jordan. The assertion of a Palestinian identity for Jordan would be equated with the Israeli assertion that “Jordan is Palestine”; the assertion of binationalism would be similarly interpreted, at least by Jordanian nationalists. While Hashd does not command a large mass following, its contribution to Jordanian public debate has been disproportionately large. Hashd sees the “call to establish special Palestinian organizations in Jordan... [as] a call to divide the ranks of the national [wataniyya] movement in the country” (Hashd 1992a). The severing of ties “prepared the way for reordering the relations between the two brotherly Jordanian and Palestinian peoples on the basis of equality and brotherhood and independence... [and] solidarity against the common enemy.” 21 In other words, Hashd endorsed the East Bank borders, but called for a legitimate place for Palestinian-origin citizens in the new political order. Palestinians in Jordan are both an integral part of the Palestinian people and an indivisible part of Jordan, and no conception of identity unable to resolve both of these facts can prove satisfactory. Palestinians in Jordan have legitimate rights and face real discrimination, requiring political action. Hashd fought for the ability both to hold a Palestinian identity and to act as a Jordanian citizen. This position has proven difficult to maintain, and Palestinian citizens have largely refrained from such political action. A more moderate Palestinian-identified party, the Democratic Party, hoping to represent the interests of the Palestinian elite, failed almost completely to advance a coherent political project.
The Islamist movement, the largest and best organized political movement in Jordan, rejected the emphasis on Jordanian/Palestinian cleavages, presenting an inclusivist identity claim that did not recognize the separation from the West Bank. Claiming to be the only party “not worm-ridden with the disease of chauvinism,” the Islamist movement attempted to downplay identity problems. Islamism offered an ideology in which Palestinians could participate in oppositional politics (Robinson 1997a). In the 1993 elections, the IAF claimed half of the Palestinian origin members of Parliament, although they attempted to downplay the significance. Invoking the traditional Muslim response to sedition, the Islamists declaim regularly: “Fitna [anarchy, civil strife] sleeps, and woe unto he who awakens it.” Because of their close relations with Hamas, the Jordanian Islamist movement often criticized the Palestinian Authority even as it argued for inclusivist Jordanian politics. At one point, the Islamist weekly al-Sabil denounced the “Arafatist Fifth Column” for instigating Palestinian identity mobilization inside of Jordan. 22 The Islamists were the political movement least convinced by the severing of ties, but in practice they recognized the distinction between the two political entities. The Islamist boycott of the 1997 elections led to a serious split in the movement, partially along communal lines; many of the Islamist leaders who preferred to participate in the political system [“doves”] were of Jordanian origin, while many of the most adamant in support of the boycott [“hawks”] were of Palestinian origin.
Arabists similarly decried the separation of Jordan and Palestine as an artificial division of the larger Arab nation. Unlike the Arab critics of the Jordanian “annexation” of the West Bank, many Arabists active in the Jordanian public sphere celebrate the Jordanian “union” with the West Bank as an outstanding example of real Arab unity (Tal 1986, 1993). They call for an inclusivist identity incorporating the West Bank, and denounced the severing of ties as “separatism [infisaliyya].” Fahd al-Rimawi, editor of a major Arabist weekly, argues that the process of intermingling of populations has progressed to the point where it is impossible to really speak of two peoples. For political purposes, he recognizes the utility of the assertion of such separate identities but, he contends, the vast majority of “Jordastinians” have little use for these formulations. The primary use of the identity differentiation is to prevent the consolidation of a united opposition front and to further the agenda of prioritizing Jordanian state interests over Arab nationalist interests. Rimawi remained unfazed by rancorous identity debates, dismissing them as futile attempts by self-interested chauvinists to invoke a nonexistent reality: “I don’t feel any danger from chauvinist attempts at division.... our unity is just fine despite the efforts of some saboteurs who try and create chauvinism.” 23 Despite the strong Arabist convictions of most Jordanians, however, Arabist parties have become marginalized. The identification of Arabist parties with Syria or Iraq, in particular, has been a target of the articulation of specifically Jordanian identity and interests.
Finally, a liberal position, heavily represented in the semi-official daily press, relies upon the concept of citizenship to overcome identity-based differences. 24 This position accepts the consensus on the revision of state borders, while opposing the exclusivist vision of identity for domestic politics. This position most accords with the public position of King Hussein, and its supporters often invoke his prestige and his public statements. Both the Constitution and the 1991 National Charter explicitly guarantee full rights to all citizens regardless of roots or origins. The liberals place their hopes in the power of open debate to overcome discrimination and the rise of exclusivist identity positions, and are the most dedicated in their defense of the public sphere, although they occasionally call for an end to destructive, irresponsible identity discourse. While their position relies on identity-blind citizenship and public sphere debate, the liberals frequently are on the defensive.
Many opposition figures decried the emphasis on identity politics, which divided the opposition, and blamed the regime for their appearance. In February 1997, Layth Shubaylat released a provocative open letter warning that “the state is collapsing and society is dividing”; his trenchant critiques of regime policy have landed him in jail repeatedly. 25 Toujan Faisal, Shubaylat’s ideological opposite in most regards, similarly accused the Palace of manipulating identity tensions in order to prevent society from unifying. She, like many more moderate serious political observers, warned that the manipulation of communal tensions could spin out of control and cause Jordanian society to splinter. In February 1997, the coalition of opposition parties denounced identity extremism: “We reject allowing parochialism and sectarianism to emerge with their evil manifestations.. We should unite the people and not divide them.... The Jordanian national opposition parties call on everybody to halt this harmful debate.” 26 The outlines of an elite, establishment opposition emerged in 1997, although it failed to establish a political party to contest the elections. This coalition, revolving around the unlikely combination of the Palestinian-origin Taher al-Masri and the Transjordanian-origin Ahmed Obaydat, articulated an inclusivist internal order along with a clear acceptance of the East Bank borders. As the opposition formulated plans for a comprehensive National Conference in the summer of 1998, defense of national unity and rejection of Jordanian-Palestinian conflict, combined with acceptance of the severing of ties and the need for a Palestinian state, were prominent components of its alternative national agenda.
Jordanian Institutions: Consolidating Change
Unlike earlier Jordanian strategies toward the West Bank after 1967, the revision of Jordan’s borders after 1988 became embedded in domestic institutions. The institutionalization of the new consensus on the borders of the state, embedded in state and civil societal institutions, stabilized the new foreign policy preferences (Katzenstein 1996a; Lustick 1997). The new norms moved from the state and Parliament into societal institutions, including the press, political parties, and the Professional Associations. Not everything changed; in particular, the failure to revise the Constitution, which enshrined the principle of unity, left a window for opponents of the decision to criticize its legality or reality. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, institutional change had progressed to a point that made any return unlikely. A return to the West Bank by the late 1990s would involve institutional and discursive transformation as dramatic as the unification in 1950 or the severing of ties itself.
State Institutions
Institutional change began within the state apparatus. Every state agency underwent a comprehensive review of its policies in order to conform with the new concept of Jordan, changing regulations on everything from drivers licenses to marriage regulations. Jordanian employees in the West Bank were pensioned off based on their years of service and their activities discontinued. New sets of regulations were drafted governing travel permits, green cards, applications to public universities. A Palestinian office in the Foreign Ministry replaced the Ministry for Occupied Territory Affairs, dramatically symbolizing the new conception of the West Bank. Officials emphasized that the measures applied only to those Palestinians resident on the West Bank, not to Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin resident on the East Bank. In other words, the severing of ties was initially intended to affect borders without affecting domestic order or state identity.
Since the severing of ties, observers have noted an unpublicized but widespread “Jordanization” of the state apparatus. While the state has always been the primary employer of the Transjordanian community, since 1988 it is perceived to have become much more “ethnically pure.” A widespread belief exists that there is an ethnic division of labor in society: Transjordanians control the public sector, Palestinians control the private sector (Center for Strategic Studies [hereafter CSS] 1995; Hourani and Abd al-Rahman 1995; T. Tal 1996). Successive Prime Ministers (Abd al-Salam al-Majali, Zayd bin Shakir, Abd al-Karim Kabariti) have been perceived as sympathetic to the conservative Jordanian nationalist trend and hostile to Palestinians. This “hostility,” interestingly, has not interfered with their ability to build good relations with Arafat and the PNA; the severing of ties consensus reconciles precisely these two positions.
Parliament
The dissolution of Parliament, with its West Bank representation from pre-1967 days, marked a particularly significant step in the institutionalization of the new borders. The justification for the freezing of Parliamentary life had long been that new elections could not be called as long as half the Kingdom was under occupation. Dissolving Parliament delivered a deeply symbolic political statement that the West Bank no longer constituted part of the state. The election of a new Parliament from the East Bank had long been considered a point of no return in discussions about Jordan-West Bank relations. Once taken, this step strengthened the interpretation that a substantively new era had begun: “the elections deepened the legality of the severing of ties... [because] the postponing of Parliamentary life had been deeply tied to the situation of the West Bank” (Abu Roman 1989: 26). The drafting of an electoral law specific to the East Bank powerfully symbolized the new conception of the Jordanian political community.
Despite its lack of real power, the Parliament represented an important locus of Jordanian national identity. The 1989 elections produced a major victory for the Islamist movement, brought in numerous independent and opposition figures, and almost completely defeated regime-identified candidates. This independent, popular Parliament became a central site for national political commentary and an active forum for debate, and would eventually produce a series of important, relatively liberal laws governing the press and political parties, and revoking martial law. The ardor for the Parliament cooled over the years, in the face of its impotence before the executive branch. Nevertheless, Parliament continued to play an important symbolic and practical role in the political process, and its election from East Bank districts affirmed the borders and identity of the state. In 1993, in the wake of the Oslo accords, many voices called for the postponing of elections until the status of Jordanians of Palestinian origin could be made clear (Riedel 1994; Hourani 1995). Nevertheless, elections went ahead as scheduled, as the King and most Jordanians came to agree that Jordan should not allow its political life to be held hostage to Palestinian developments. Changes to the election law and gerrymandering produced a much less independent and effective Parliament than in 1989, to the dismay of political society. Palestinian representation was low, not least because of the conflicting official statements about the relationship between voting in these elections and possible forfeiture of the right of return (Riedel 1994). In 1997, despite a popular consensus against the electoral law, elections went ahead in the face of a boycott by the Islamic opposition and significant state repression. Palestinian representation in the 1997 Parliament was exceptionally low, as tribal candidates dominated the voting and most politically active Palestinians honored the opposition boycott. 27
Citizenship and Passports
Prior to the severing of ties, Jordanian law considered all West Bank residents, as well as West Bank refugees on the East Bank, to be Jordanians, carrying standard Jordanian passports (al-Hadawi 1993). After the disengagement, the citizenship laws developed new criteria based on place of residence. Those whose normal place of residence was the West Bank were to be considered Palestinian while those who normally resided on the East Bank were to be considered Jordanian. As the Minister of the Interior explained, “who is Jordanian and who is Palestinian is determined by his natural, regular place of residence”—not by blood, political preference, or outside attribution. 28 Those classified as Palestinian under the new system were to receive temporary two-year passports for convenience, but without citizenship. The government emphasized that participating in the Jordanian system would in no way prejudice the citizen of Palestinian origin’s right to choose to become a citizen of any independent Palestinian state which some day might be created.
Reports of the confiscation of the passports of citizens of Palestinian origin entered the public sphere in the mid-1990s, raising new questions about state policy. 29 The government downplayed the issue as isolated, individual cases, but the Parliamentary Committee on Public Freedoms continued to pressure the government to explain its policies. In the state of confusion, uncertainty and state-society distrust which characterized the period after the peace treaty, the combination of persistent reports of such actions and of government denial fueled popular concern. In late 1995, the issue would be blurred again after the government offered five-year passports to residents of the West Bank. The passport would not be compulsory, and would not connote Jordanian citizenship. Jordanian exclusivists, infuriated by an apparent step back from the severing of ties, complained bitterly. Regime spokesmen countered that “granting Palestinians five year passports does not mean that they are Jordanians, because a passport does not mean nationality” or give their carriers the right to take residence in Jordan, to vote in elections or to run for office. 30 This effort to sever the administrative dimensions of the passport from the politics of identity found few takers. Prime Minister Zayd bin Shakir’s warning that “the issue of citizenship is a very sensitive one and we reject that it becomes an issue of debate” did little to stem the debate. 31
It is important to remember that the 1967 refugees from the West Bank had been full Jordanian citizens at the time of their exodus from West to East Bank, giving them a very different status both in international law and in Jordanian law from the 1948 refugees. 32 This legal difference did not always translate into political differentiation. Referring to the election activities of the Palestinian-origin Islamist Mohammed Awida, a Jordanian exclusivist wrote: “I advise him to pack his bags and nominate himself in the appropriate place, for the elections in Palestine are near and his discourse will succeed there better than in Amman.” Al-Sabil responded that “these words are not new and not surprising, considering their source which is full of hatred and evil, but what is new is that these words were published.” This point refers back to the structural shift in the public sphere, as issues of identity previously beyond the pale moved to center stage. “When Mohammed Awida and Taher Masri and others [from the West Bank] came to Jordan they carried Jordanian nationality, and had been resident on land under Jordanian sovereignty and they left it under the force of occupation.. if the Jews occupied Kerak [the southern, tribal stronghold of Jordanian nationalism] and its residents fled to Amman, would we say to them, you are no longer citizens?!” The struggle to frame the relationship between citizenship and identity could hardly be more forcefully presented: why should the citizenship of former residents of the West Bank be implicated in the debates over Jordanian identity? Was the severing of ties retroactive? Furthermore, as Taher al-Masri asked Abd al-Hadi al-Majali in a public exchange, what criteria could possibly be used to conclusively identify every citizen as Jordanian or Palestinian, given intermarriage, long residency, and overlapping identities?
The clearest flaw in any strict correspondence between passport and identity lay with the population of the refugee camps. Controversies over the camps regularly exploded, over the suspected intentions of Jordan to expel the refugees, to resettle them permanently in Jordan, or even to maintain the status quo. In 1997, a project funded by international agencies to improve living conditions in the camps was framed as evidence of regime intentions to resettle the refugees in Jordan. Despite regime claims that “there is no political goal” and that “this and every government has been consistent in rejecting resettlement,” the tawtin frame remained active. 33 Jordanian officials consistently denied any intention of accepting the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Rejection of tawtin represented a fundamental point of consensus across the entire Jordanian political spectrum, similar to the consensus found in Palestinian, Lebanese, and general Arab political opinion. Of course, there were sharply conflicting interpretations within the tawtin frame about what constituted resettlement. Considerable evidence suggests that regime officials do not share the popular consensus rejecting any resettlement of Palestinian refugees, but rather are taking a more flexible approach. 34 The process of Jordanization mingled uneasily with Palestinian and Jordanian peace treaties, which seemed to surrender any real hope of the return of Palestinian refugees to Palestine. The consensus against tawtin both constrained state behavior and, I would argue, constituted Jordan’s conception of its interests in the refugee negotiations. Certainly, Jordan had complicated and crosscutting interests, in terms of retaining access to UNRWA funding and achieving a final status settlement with Israel, but the underlying consensus against resettlement was consistently expressed in Jordanian discourse and practice.
Jordanian exclusivists relentlessly pursued the idea that the Jordanian state had accepted the principle of resettling the Palestinian refugees and were no longer committed to the Jordanian consensus. Radicals searched every government statement and every government policy for evidence of a resettlement decision. 35 Everything from improvements of the camps to administrative redistricting “proved” that resettlement was nigh. For the radicals, resettlement of the refugees represented the worst possible outcome, since it would permanently ratify a demographic situation unfavorable to Transjordanians and prevent the consolidation of the Jordanian identity and state. The fear that Jordanians would “lack sovereignty in their own country” permeated radical discourse. Radical exclusivists opposed the peace process, unlike the conservative exclusivists, because they saw it as inevitably leading to the resettlement of the Palestinians in Jordan. The issue of resettlement divided the radical and conservative Jordanian exclusivists in interesting ways. The radicals accused the conservatives of secretly supporting resettlement, because their support for the peace process could not have any other implication. Conservative exclusivists thus had to respond to attacks from Palestinians and liberals, who accused them of working against the interests of the Palestinian community, and the radical Transjordanians, who accused them of working too much for the interests of the Palestinian elite. The ability of the exclusivists to raise havoc in the public sphere over anything that looked like resettlement did constrain the Jordanian government. Their extreme distaste for the protagonists probably meant that this particular stream of argument did not shape state understandings of Jordanian interests, however.
Civil Society
While the state could be restructured by fiat, societal institutions resisted what could be viewed as state encroachment on civil society. The institutional restructuring could succeed only by brute state force—power—or by successfully establishing new norms about Jordanian identity—argumentation. Advocates of the new Jordan repeated the mantra that “the severing of ties must be implemented comprehensively.” This implementation was expected to extend deep into civil society and not be restricted to state and official institutions. In general, the more deeply embedded and autonomous the civil society institution, the more it resisted the demand for change—the professional associations and the Islamic movement being the key examples. Less well-entrenched or autonomous institutions, such as the press and the newly legalized political parties, proved more responsive. Within a few years, however, virtually all Jordanian institutions had at least begun to restructure around the new state identity.
Professional Associations
The Professional Associations proved most resistant to the attempt to impose change in identity norms from above. These Associations had long been a center of opposition political activity in Jordan, given the illegality of political parties and the constraints upon political and societal organization (Hamarneh 1995; Abu Bandura 1993). Since the early 1970s, the professional associations had represented the primary site of open political contestation for the Jordanian elite, and had succeeded in carving out relative autonomy from the state. In October 1988, the editor of the leading daily newspaper unleashed a fierce assault on the political role of the Professional Associations. 36 There had always been a Jordanian-Palestinian dimension in the political role of the Associations, because of the Palestinian domination of the private sector and the prominence of Palestinian factions in their elections (Hamarneh 1995; Brand 1988; Sha’ir 1987). After the severing of ties, this dimension became explicit. 37 Majali called to solve the “problem of Palestinian representation” in the Associations by dissolving the organizational links between their West Bank and East Bank memberships. The Associations, he concluded, must implement the separation between Jordan and Palestine, or else they must surrender their political role. In either case, defenders of the Associations saw a direct strike against their independence, and reacted by tenaciously defending their West Bank branches.
The liberal transition in 1989 temporarily eased the pressure on the Associations, but the linkage between identity politics and political opposition in the Associations carried forward. The battle over the Associations wove together themes of political opposition, identity, and the boundaries of Jordanian political action. In late 1992, the participation of West Bank lawyers in the Association elections drew fire in press articles such as the bluntly titled “Sever your ties, oh lawyers!!” 38 One exclusivist complained that the Association had “surrendered its right to represent itself... despite the severing of ties... Jordan’s Associations remain only a waiting station for our West Bank brothers.” 39 In June 1994, exclusivists charged the Associations with failing to adapt to the new Jordanian realities: “It was assumed that the Associations would change their situation in line with the severing of ties, but they... consider themselves outside the Jordanian framework.” 40 Engineer Association President Layth Shubaylat’s response rejected the attempt to impose a narrow interpretation of Jordanian identity and interests: “These are injurious words which divide the nation.... while he claims that it is a ‘patriotic duty’ to expel these [Palestinian] members... we say that it is a patriotic duty to silence this pen which aims at destroying the unity of society.” 41 The resistance to the demand to sever organizational ties in the Associations generally framed its opposition in terms of resistance to state encroachment on civil society—a democracy frame—rather than in terms of an identity frame.
By February 1995, the Associations had emerged as a center of opposition to the peace process and normalization with Israel. The elected leaderships of most Associations opposed normalization, which undermined regime claims to represent the will of the Jordanian majority. The elected councils of the Associations adopted binding resolutions forbidding their members from dealing with Israelis. In February and March, the government challenged the results of Lawyers and Doctors Association elections by invoking an identity, rather than a democracy, frame. The Minister of Justice challenged the West Bank lawyers’ participation as “an issue of state sovereignty,” citing the incompatibility of the West Bank participation with Jordanian identity and legislation. The bitterness of the campaign, the depth of the ensuing debate, and the participation in that debate of a wide range of personalities demonstrate that the public recognized the importance of the Associations as the testing ground of competing visions of Jordanian identity and norms.
In November 1995, the government struck at the Associations again, proposing fundamental revisions of the Association laws which would eviscerate their political and professional role. Despite a show of concern over the Associations’ failure to provide professional services, the regime made little effort to conceal that its actions were intended to break societal opposition to the peace treaty. It claimed that the elected leadership did not really represent the silent majority in the Associations and threatened to appoint new, truly representative, leadership. At the height of the campaign against the Associations and their “unrepresentative” political positions, the Islamist ticket embarrassingly swept 40 of 49 seats in the Engineer elections, which re-elected the imprisoned opposition leader Layth Shubaylat as President with over 90 percent of the vote. After boycotting the 1997 national elections, Islamist candidates swept almost all civil society elections, pointedly demonstrating the unrepresentative character of a Parliament devoid of opposition. A leading Islamist commentator pointed out that “the election of the opposition in the Associations destroys the government claim, both at home and abroad, that its actions enjoy popular support.” 42 The government implied that “the opposition has a Palestinian face,” while opposition leaders insisted that they represented a popular front which crossed communal lines. If positions expressed by civil society could be labeled Palestinian, they could be dismissed as outside the Jordanian national consensus; if they represented the voice of a democratically elected leadership, they could not be so dismissed.
In terms of an identity frame, based on the logic of the severing of ties, it was hard to dispute the need to separate the Jordanian and Palestinian branches of the Associations; however, in a democracy frame, the autonomy of civil society demanded the defense of their institutional integrity. The public sphere rallied behind the Associations, primarily on the grounds of protecting democracy against state repression. The frustration of one regime supporter is extremely telling: “How do these people want to play a role in two states? [the Government] was right both legally and politically.... only the political salons and the press don’t seem to understand this political era.” 43 Through this public deliberation over the Associations, the broader consensus on the East Bank conception of Jordan was strengthened, even as the Associations resisted the separation. Justifications and arguments were presented on both sides in terms that accepted the boundaries between the two entities; even the most ardent defenders of institutional unity argued their case in terms of helping Palestinians achieve their independent state, not in terms of maintaining a Jordanian role in the West Bank.
Political Parties
Other civil society institutions lacked the Associations’ entrenched position and adapted more readily to the new borders. The new identity norms played a major role in the formation of political parties. The public deliberation over the adoption of a new Political Parties Law emphasized the goal of establishing the Jordanian identity of political parties. The first parties to be formed and recognized were Jordanian exclusivist parties with close ties to the state, such as al-Ahd (Haddad 1994; Hourani 1995). The Muslim Brotherhood formed a political party, the Islamic Action Front, to contest elections, after a heated internal debate over the legitimacy of democratic participation (Robinson 1997a; Abu Roman 1991). Underground ideological parties, such as the various branches of the Ba’th and the Jordanian Communist Party, hastened to emerge as legal Jordanian parties by demonstrating their financial and operational independence. Palestinian factions, as discussed below, had the most turbulent road to legality. Unlike the Associations, these political parties were new creations without deeply embedded institutional structures or constituencies. The older parties often had difficulty making the transition from underground activity to legal activity. Constant government inspection of party finances, complaints of internal authoritarianism, and the difficulties of attracting a mass membership left most parties weak and ineffective.
The Political Parties Law ratified in 1993 mandated that parties must not have any outside organizational or political ties. While Arabist parties tied to Syria and Iraq and smaller Islamist parties were targeted by the “Jordanian character” dimension of the law, the primary intent was to establish Jordanian parties independent of the Palestinian arena. Palestinian factions did obtain licenses, but they did so only by accepting and validating the normative principle of a sharp distinction between Jordanian and Palestinian. Few of these parties proved successful in the electoral arena, and none explicitly claimed to represent the Palestinian community. The generally low rates of participation in Jordanian elections by the Palestinian communities partially explains the weakness of these parties, but their problems go deeper. Electoral districting ensured that Palestinian population centers would be underrepresented (Hourani 1995; Riedel 1994). More fundamentally, the identity structure of the new Jordanian political arena discouraged Palestinian political participation and prevented the articulation of a legitimate generalizable interest in their name.
Fateh, the largest Palestinian faction in Jordan, chose not to organize a party. Jordanian officials recognized that Fateh would be able to exert a powerful influence over Jordanian politics if it so chose. The power of the “Jordan is Jordan, Palestine is Palestine” formula lay in this implicit bargain. For Fateh, Jordanian support for a Palestinian state far outweighed the advantages of playing an active role in Jordanian electoral politics. As the PLO splintered over the Oslo process, and the establishment of the PNA created tremendous organizational problems on the ground, Arafat badly needed the support that Hussein could provide.
Other Palestinian factions did organize into Jordanian parties. As discussed above, Hashd generated the most public debate. In the early 1990s, the Jordanian wing of the DFLP reconstituted itself as an independent Jordanian party, arguing that “after the severing of ties we felt that something had really changed.” 44 Hashd became a test case for the broader questions of political parties and identity. As early as April 1991, Jordanian exclusivists attacked the newly reconstituted party: “is it logical that there be a Jordanian party with the goal of guaranteeing the right of part of the Jordanian people to preserve a non-Jordanian identity and to express it in a framework that is not the Jordanian state?” 45 In early 1992 the question resurfaced. 46 Parliamentary debates over the Political Parties Law in 1992 and 1993 were obsessed with “Palestinian factions pretending to be Jordanian parties.” 47 As parties began to apply for licenses in late 1992, the debate escalated: “In this new era... with a National Charter aimed at eliminating the phenomenon of dual loyalty and dual nationality... is it rational to license a party that has a non-Jordanian nationality and has loyalty to something other than Jordan?” 48 After the Interior Ministry rejected its first application, public opinion leaned toward granting the license on democratic grounds despite deep unease on identity grounds. Public opinion could be mobilized behind the right to form opposition parties—the democracy frame—but not around the right of Jordanians of Palestinian origin to be represented by Palestinian parties. Despite complaints of “hired pens in the service of a coordinated campaign... about the necessity of licensing certain parties that have non-Jordanian foundations and financing and affiliation and loyalty,” the Interior Ministry eventually granted the license. 49 In February, Fahd al-Fanik offered an eloquent statement of the logic of identity in the public sphere, writing that “the democratic process of Jordan will influence Hashd more than Hashd will influence it, and the result will be the focus of Hashd on Jordanian national issues... from a Jordanian perspective.” 50
Despite its attempts to develop a Jordanian Palestinian identity, Hashd suffered defections and a power struggle between its “Jordanian” and “Palestinian” factions. A party conference in September 1994 affirmed close control by the DFLP over the nominally independent party, igniting a firestorm of criticism within the Jordanian public sphere. Most of the party’s public figures left the party, expressing their anger that the party had failed to live up to its ambition of becoming a truly Jordanian party. In July 1995 the Interior Ministry took the smaller and more “Palestinian-ized” Hashd to court over its “foreign connections.” 51 Politically moderate Palestinian-origin defectors formed smaller liberal or leftist parties, but struggled to mobilize support absent a clear identity.
More important than the details of Hashd’s struggle for legal recognition is what this case reveals about identity politics in the new Jordan. First, the primary arena for contesting interpretations was the Jordanian press, which allowed a wide range of positions to be articulated in the search for consensus. The strongly felt need to establish consensus on political identity drove participation in this debate, and the fear of the consolidation of unacceptable norms prevented concerned writers from abstaining from comment. The party did change in the course of this debate, as it sought a publicly acceptable formula for combining a Palestinian and a Jordanian identity. Third, the debate was primarily driven by the Jordanian exclusivists. Centrists, liberals, and Palestinians were almost always on the defensive when identity politics came to define the political situation. Only when conflict could be framed in terms of an issue like normalization or democracy, which could unite Jordanians of all origins, could these actors reclaim the offensive.
The contrast between the experience of a primarily Palestinian party like Hashd and the experience of the Jordanian-identified National Constitutional Party is instructive. The NCP received tremendous coverage in the media, mostly positive in the semi-official dailies, with more criticism from the opposition weeklies. The NCP leadership was composed mainly of former government ministers and regime figures, lending it an air of power. Despite all these advantages, however, the NCP failed to be much more successful than other political parties in the 1997 elections, demonstrating the general weakness of political parties in the new Jordan.
The Press
The press, as the primary media for public sphere debate, played an important role in shaping identity discourse. Before the passage of a new Press and Publications Law, some new independent weeklies began to publish abroad. After the passage of the new law, Jordanian streets were filled with dozens of new political weeklies, all seeking market share and aggressively pushing the bounds of public discourse. This weekly press significantly transformed the Jordanian public sphere. Identity politics sold newspapers, and the weekly press pushed every red line in pursuit of market share. Political entrepreneurs took advantage of this willingness to publish a wide range of views and used the weekly press as a forum for advancing their competing identity projects.
The 1993 Press and Publications Law was a fundamental part of the attempt to institutionalize a liberalized political system. Along with concern for “responsible” freedoms, a major theme in public debates about the new Press Law was the need for all publications to be Jordanian, with no external ties or support. Palestinians were again the major target of the debate, although ties to Syria, Iraq and Iran also aroused significant attention. Like the state, the Parliament, the Professional Associations, and political parties, the press became a site for situating the distinct Jordanian identity. Harming national unity was one of the specified red lines in the Law. The ownership provisions in the new Press Law favored Jordanians, which helps to account for the prominent position of Jordanian exclusivists in many weeklies. Shihan, the one well-established weekly, was owned by the Transjordanian-origin Riyad al-Haroub, and highlighted Jordanian-Palestinian tensions and published leading exclusivist writers. Proposed revisions to the 1993 law tightened these ownership provisions. 52 The 1997 temporary press law, which closed down most of the weekly press, did not focus specifically upon the identity issue, but did target all manifestations of societal criticism of regime policies. The 1998 revised Press and Publications Law aimed to control the public sphere even more tightly, and the alleged harms to national unity and attacks on Arafat’s PNA played a key role in the framing of the new legislation. 53
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which Jordanian-Palestinian identity issues came to dominate press debate. Discussion of identity politics, long banned, became commonplace. Among the many issues framed in communal terms were the privatization of the state; administrative reform; electoral districts and the election law; press reporting; the professional associations; economic reform; university admissions; military spending; public spending on refugee camps; the allocation of water; subsidies for agriculture. Deliberation about the relationship between identity and politics appeared regularly. Identity extremists were the first to take advantage of the new freedoms. As early as September 1989, two prominent liberals warned that “for the first time in the history of the Jordanian press there appear hateful essays trying to arouse hatred and envy” (Masri and Arar 1989). The implications of these public debates were not universally negative, however. Given the absence of consensus identity norms, public debate was essential for the production of a new consensus. The real sense of grievance and discrimination felt by both Palestinians and Transjordanians deserved a public hearing (CSS 1995; Hourani and Abd al-Rahman 1995). Liberals, particularly those of Palestinian origin, felt that debate had not gone far enough, and that fundamental issues of discrimination and inequality remained untouched. Jordanian exclusivists, for their part, vented the “fear of being charged with chauvinism [iqlimiya], which has become a terrorist weapon easily waved in the face of anyone to prevent him from thinking aloud about the future of Jordan.” 54
Opinion was sharply divided about the benefit of public discussion of identity. Participants and readers alike began to question the liberal premise that debate would secure a more stable consensus. Mohammed al-Subayhi, for example, observed in October 1995 that “the only result... has been the forming of two trenches inside the Jordanian state.” 55 Rather than producing a new consensus on identity, debate seemed to be polarizing positions and exacerbating problems. As opposed to the consolidation of a consensus on the external dimension of state borders, the Jordanian public sphere seemed unable to produce a consensus about the internal questions of national identity. Fahd al-Fanik bemoaned this failure, noting that “we are the country in the world which talks the most about national unity, but we have not yet answered the most basic question: who are we?” 56
The Islamist Movement
Islamic organizations resisted the new Jordanian discourse, combining a principled rejection of the severing of ties with opposition to the reinterpretation of Jordanian interests in the peace process. The one institutional cluster in the West Bank unaffected by the disengagement remained the Islamic waqf, over which Jordan retained custody until late 1994. Islamist discourse framed the severing of ties as an illegitimate division of the Islamic umma: “The Islamist movement stands clearly and doctrinally against the disease of division... which infects the Jordanian-Palestinian body.” 57 However, even the Islamist movement accepted the severing of ties as a change of strategy which best protected the interests of both Jordan and Palestine, even if it (unlike most other actors) did not change its underlying preferences. In late 1995, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Abd al-Majid Thunaybat, noted that “we were the loudest voice in rejecting the severing of ties and in considering unity to be the basis of relations... but today confederation [between Jordan and the West Bank] is nothing more than an invitation to the Alternative Homeland.” 58 In other words, despite their commitment to unity as an outcome, the Muslim Brotherhood accepted the severing of ties as a necessary strategy.
The debate over the Islamists and the severing of ties revolved around the relationship between the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Islamist resistance movement (Hamas). This relationship would become a subject of public controversy, as Israel and Arafat pressured Jordan to curtail Hamas activities in Jordan. For Arafat, the Hamas presence implied that Jordan viewed the Islamic movement as a potential alternative to the PLO, despite Hussein’s repeated reassurances. 59 In April 1996, Arafat accused Jordan of supporting Hamas political and military activities, and of using Hamas to destabilize the PNA. The fact that many Hamas representatives in Amman were Jordanian citizens demonstrates the difficulties of neatly separating the Jordanian and the Palestinian identities. When the Jordanian government did try to crack down on Hamas activities, its actions became part of the broader state-society confrontation. Jordan’s acceptance of Musa Abu Marzouq from an American jail; its securing of the release of Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli prison after a failed Mossad assassination attempt on Khalid Misha‘al in Amman; all seemed to signal Jordanian support for Hamas, despite Hussein’s constant declaration that Jordan would not recognize anyone other than the PLO (and then the PNA) as the representative of the Palestinian people. Indeed, one Jordanian columnist speculated that “this represents an attempt to form a Jordanian lobby in Palestine as a balance to Fateh’s extensions into Jordan.” 60
The Islamist defense of unity was reflected in strong organizational ties: the severing of ties made an exception of Islamic waqf institutions; Hamas maintained offices in the Muslim Brotherhood’s building; and Jordanian Islamists consistently placed Palestinian issues at the forefront of their political agenda. In November 1994, the Islamist weekly al-Sabil emphasized that “the physical unity of the two banks can not be ended.” Ibrahim Ghousha, Hamas representative in Jordan, summed up the dominant Islamist position: “We are in favor of unity... the severing of ties was a temporary measure.... It is the right of the Palestinian identity to make itself prominent and the right of the Jordanian identity to make itself prominent, but we search for a wider Islamic identity.” 61 Despite these strong words in favor of unity, identity tensions did emerge in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front (Robinson 1997b). Calls by Islamist doves, such as Bisam al-Amoush’s for a focus on Jordanian identity and Jordanian interests, and Abdullah al-Akaylah’s for participation in the government, set in motion significant dissension within the Islamist organizations. 62 Abd al-Mana’m Abu Zant, a prominent Islamist hawk, blasted the reformers who wanted to focus on the Jordanian arena, warning “God save he who would Jordanize the Muslim Brotherhood!” 63 As Jawad al-Anani notes, the Islamists were not immune to the identity debates: “the dialogue going on in the nation about the divisions between Jordanians of different origins has influenced the position of the Islamist movement... which fears division along geographic lines.” 64
“Jordanian-Palestinian Relations” Opinion Surveys
The Center for Strategic Studies carried out an unprecedented public opinion survey in 1995 and a follow-up survey in 1997 on the subject of Jordanian-Palestinian relations (CSS 1995b; 1998a). 65 Both surveys found a sharp distinction between elite opinion leaders and the general public. In each case, the elite sample proved far more inclined to Jordanian or Palestinian exclusivism, to total separation between the two entities, and to the promotion of distinct national identities and interests. The popular sample, on the other hand, was more sympathetic to close relations between the two identities and entities and generally rejected Jordanian chauvinism. In 1995, when asked about the degree to which the groups had merged into a single identity, 69 percent of the popular sample replied that there had been a great deal of integration, while only 49 percent of Jordanian-origin elites thought so. Only 30 percent of the popular sample suspected Jordanians of Palestinian origin of dual loyalties, compared to 54 percent of Jordanian-origin elites who harbored such suspicions. In 1997, 63 percent of the national sample supported Jordanian-Palestinian unity, compared to only 37 percent of the elite sample. Such differences suggest that the changes in identity wrought by participation in the public sphere affect participants more than they do readers, who perhaps draw their ideas about identity more from the face to face public interaction in which they actively participate. The high level of intermarriage, interaction, and shared lives of Jordanians and Palestinians, especially in Amman, undermines the clarity with which political commentators define Jordanian and Palestinian identities and interests. Above all, the discrepancy suggests the extent to which Jordanian-Palestinian controversies inside of Jordan are driven by political entrepreneurs with access to the media, whose attempts to inflame identity issues are driven by other interests. These findings give considerable support to theories of ethnic conflict which highlight the role of intra-elite competition in driving identity politics (Lake and Rothschild 1998; Gagnon 1994.95).
International Behavior: Jordanian Interests in the West Bank
The final step for the constructivist public sphere argument is to demonstrate that the reconfiguration of Jordanian identity had significant implications for international behavior. While the discussion in the chapter to this point reconstructs and evaluates the process of public deliberation in Jordan (c.f. Bohman 1996; Chambers 1996), for the purposes of International Relations theory it is necessary to link these public deliberations to state behavior. One dimension where this linkage will be explored (in chapters 6 and 7) is Jordanian behavior in the Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiations, which directly followed from the redefinition of Jordanian identity and interests. The drive to center Jordanian state interests involved the explicit renunciation of Palestinian interests as a Jordanian state concern. Only by eliminating the Palestinian dimension of Jordanian identity could Jordanian interests be defined in such a way as to permit the conceptions of interest involved in the peace treaty. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on Jordanian behavior toward the West Bank after the disengagement and the Jordanian position on Palestinian-Israeli final status issues as the most important indicators. Above all, Jordan’s shift from opposition to support of a Palestinian state manifests the change.
King Hussein has, on a number of occasions, explicitly explained Jordanian preferences on Palestinian-Israeli final status issues. He has found it necessary to directly respond to the assertions by Israeli leaders, who invoke assumptions about Jordanian preferences based on Jordanian fears of a Palestinian state, by asserting Jordan’s right to define its own interests rather than accept the attribution of its interests by outside observers. In the mid 1990s, Hussein has defined a set of clearly defined Jordanian state preferences, which sharply diverge from Jordanian preferences as articulated as recently as 1987. First, Jordan prefers to see an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Second, Jordan wants close economic ties with the Palestinian state, and with Israel, to allow the development of the region. Third, Jordan will entertain the possibility of political confederation (not federal unity) only on the condition that Palestine has achieved its full sovereign independence and freely chooses this confederation. Fourth, Jordan considers the PLO, and now the PNA, the legitimate representative of the Palestinians, and refuses categorically to negotiate or substitute for the PLO in any negotiations. Jordan will not be the alternative spokesman for the Palestinians any more than it will be their Alternative Homeland. Finally, Jordan’s national unity is not subject to discussion, and all citizens enjoy full rights and responsibilities until the opportunity comes for them to choose otherwise. These avowed preferences might be challenged as “only” public positions, not indicative of Jordan’s “real” concerns. The fact that Jordan has consistently and publicly articulated these preferences over a period of years, and behaved in a manner consistent with them, belies such an interpretation, however.
The most direct behavioral indicators of the significance of the severing ties are Jordan’s subsequent positions on the West Bank: did Jordan reassert its claim? As an operational indicator of opportunity, I use the proposal of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. It is significant that confederation represented the farthest feasible compromise, because confederation implies the existence of two sovereign states rather than Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. At no time did any Jordanian official so much as hint at reversing the disengagement and restoring full unity.
The Jordanian position on confederation has remained consistent since the achievement of the “severing of ties consensus”: any talk of confederation is before its time until the Palestinians possess a sovereign state. Confederation was not a new idea (N. Tal 1993; Hassan 1985; Gresh 1989). It had been adopted as the official goal of the PLO at the 1983 Palestinian National Council session, and had been the basis for the February 1985 Jordanian-Palestinian agreement. In the 1990s, confederation carried new significance. The severing of ties penetrated deep into Jordanian society and the new conception of Jordan came to structure virtually all public discourse. In the West Bank, the Intifada had clearly expressed Palestinian rejection of renewed Jordanian rule. By the early 1990s, a Jordanian consensus had consolidated on the revision of its borders to exclude the West Bank, matching the long-established Palestinian consensus. Virtually all of Jordanian political society accepted the redefinition of Jordanian interests such that ties to the West Bank represented a threat rather than an opportunity, and that a Palestinian state now protected, rather than threatened, Jordanian security.
Confederation came up during the negotiations over the framework for the Madrid peace talks in April 1991, with the United States and the Labor Party preferring confederation between the West Bank/Gaza and Jordan as a final status arrangement. Israel insisted that Palestinian representatives (not from the PLO) participate only within a Jordanian delegation, in order to structurally link Jordan and the West Bank in the negotiating process (Quandt 1993; Shamir 1994; Arens 1995). Jordan had the opportunity, and considerable American and Israeli encouragement, to assert a claim to negotiate on behalf of the West Bank. In the aftermath of the Gulf war, the PLO was extremely weak and even more of a pariah to the American and Israeli leaderships than before, while Hussein’s popularity in the West Bank had rebounded noticeably. Rather than take advantage of this situation, Jordan insisted on maintaining a distinct Palestinian delegation within the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and rejected every attempt to treat them as a single delegation (Abass 1995; Ashrawi 1995). Jordanians complained about even the joint delegation that emerged, arguing that because of the severing of ties Jordan had nothing to do with representing the Palestinians. 66 They feared that Jordanian interests would get buried beneath the more controversial Palestinian demands. Even more, they feared that a joint delegation would undermine the new distinction between Jordan and Palestine driving the new conception of Jordanian identity and interests. Support for the joint delegation format depended on maintaining absolute clarity about the distinction between the two delegations. 67 Nobody expressed the desire to exploit the opportunity to assert Jordanian power over the Palestinians to reclaim the West Bank.
In March 1992, a proposal of confederation emerged as a way out of the blocked Washington negotiations. The return of some form of the Jordan option was a real possibility, as both Israeli and PLO figures publicly speculated about a Jordanian role to break the impasse. The loud Jordanian public outcry startled most observers and almost certainly played a decisive role in killing the idea. 68 For several weeks, discussion of confederation dominated the Jordanian public sphere, with opinion running strongly against. The emergent consensus did not reject popular Jordanian-Palestinian unity, but rather rejected the institutional form and timing of the proposal. The majority of writers saw the confederation under existing circumstances as serving Israeli interests by preventing the creation of a Palestinian state. The plan was also seen as a threat to Jordan, in that it would facilitate turning Jordan into Palestine. 69 Where the pre-1988 consensus had assumed the political and economic benefits of a prominent role in the West Bank, this deliberation revealed a conviction that any ties to the West Bank could prove an existential threat to Jordan. Jordanian interests were thus sharply distinct from—and compatible with—Palestinian interests.
In August 1993, just before the revelation of Oslo, a confederation proposal again ignited fierce denunciations in the Jordanian public sphere. Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians all vetted confederation, with Jordan the only party to express strong reservations. Jordan refused to be taken for granted in a confederation agreement, and refused to be party to such an agreement unless a sovereign Palestinian state were achieved first. Nevertheless, public opinion reacted strongly to the appearance of the idea in the international public sphere: “Has Jordan withdrawn from its decision to sever ties after King Hussein vowed Jordan would never do so?” 70 Commentators again stressed the danger to Jordan inherent in any role in the West Bank: “it is well-known that both Jordanian and Palestinian political circles reject confederation as a conspiracy on Jordan.” 71 Why should Jordan, a sovereign state, unite as an equal partner with an unformed Palestinian entity under effective Israeli control? This consensus constrained any movement toward restoring ties even under propitious circumstances; it also constituted a new conceptions of Jordanian interests. Beyond constraining state behavior, this consensus informed the state’s articulation of its preferences: Jordanian leaders and the public alike came to believe in this definition of threat and of interests, and interpreted political interaction accordingly.
Oslo shocked and angered the Jordanians, and sparked serious concerns about the future of Jordan, but in fact the Oslo process fit well with and reinforced the East Bank conception of Jordan (L. Tal 1993). The Palestinian defection from coordination removed the normative and practical barriers to the Jordanian pursuit of self-interest. When challenged on its exclusion of “Palestinian” interests from its negotiating agenda, Jordan could now respond by referring such questions to the Palestinian negotiators or to the multilateral talks. The establishment of the PNA began the construction of a Palestinian institutional structure on the West Bank, replacing vestigial Jordanian institutions.
The Jordan-Israel Washington Declaration of July 1994 recognized Jordan’s special status in the Jerusalem holy sites, which brought the sensitive issue of Jerusalem into the spotlight. Interpreted by Arafat as an unacceptable encroachment on Palestinian rights, this led to sharp exchanges in the Arabist public sphere and another explosion of resistance to involvement in the West Bank in the Jordanian public sphere. While Jordanian officials claimed that the Article only recognized longstanding reality and that the recognition of some Arab claim in Jerusalem was an Arab victory, their arguments failed to convince either the PNA or the Jordanian critics. Most observers saw this controversy as an Israeli attempt to drive a wedge between Jordan and the PNA. This controversy ended with Jordan’s extension of the severing of ties to the West Bank religious courts and institutions which it had maintained after 1988, demonstrating the power of the new borders for guiding behavior.
The November 1995 decision to issue five-year passports to West Bank residents to facilitate travel ignited unusually loud criticism, as it came in the context of Jordanian-Israeli peace and increasing belief that the Palestinian-Israeli process would not allow the Palestinian refugees to return. 72 The radical exclusivists were most outspoken in their criticism: “When the Jordanian Nationalist Movement agreed to the peace treaty, this was because of our belief that it had destroyed the Alternative Homeland threat... and now, the Jordanian people are shocked to find that the peace treaty will lead to establishing the Alternative Homeland.” 73 From this perspective, the focus on the Jordanian identity and interests had been the primary fruit of the treaty, and they were appalled to find their increasingly consolidated position suddenly contestable. The fierce public reaction compelled the state to alter its behavior, by forcing it to live up to its publicly avowed principles. King Hussein’s reported anger at this domestic pressure suggests that he perceived this particular dimension of the consensus as a constraint. The regime and public opinion continued to hold very different interpretations, even within the shared consensus on East Bank borders. Even if the regime had intentions of reversing the severing of ties, which is unlikely, they could no longer be publicly avowed. A return to the West Bank had acquired such negative normative connotations that it no longer represented a legitimate option for state policy. The question of the place of Palestinians inside of Jordan had no such normative consensus, however, as the recurring controversies over the future of the refugees indicate.
In November 1997, King Hussein reacted angrily to an Israeli suggestion that Jordan shared Israel’s interests in preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state. Israeli officials, in an attempt to reduce international pressure for progress on negotiations with the PNA, argued that the Jordanians shared their fear of a Palestinian state. This Israeli claim implied that Jordan’s public discourse since the severing of ties misrepresented true Jordanian preferences. Hussein responded with a furious open letter to Prime Minister Majali, clearly directed at Israel and the international public sphere as well as the Jordanian public sphere, in which he acidly asserted that Jordan was fully capable of defining its own interests. 74 In the course of this letter, Hussein provided one of the most explicit statements yet of Jordan’s vision of a final status agreement. Most crucially, Hussein forcefully restated Jordan’s support for a Palestinian state and denied any Jordanian fears of sharing a border with that state. Jordan’s refusal to return to the West Bank had become so manifest, to Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis, that it did not even need to be stated.
Several common themes emerge from these instances. First, Jordan rarely initiated controversies over confederation, more often reacting to PLO or Israeli statements. Hussein called for “confederation to be struck from the Jordanian political vocabulary” and warned against other parties “taking Jordan for granted.” The opportunity to reverse positions presented itself on numerous occasions, but Jordan neither instigated such discussions nor took advantage of them. Second, every action framed in such terms drew immediate, harsh criticism in the Jordanian public sphere. Opposition to a return to a Jordanian role in the West Bank spanned the political and identity spectrum, from Jordanian exclusivists to Palestinian leftists. Even Islamists, who rejected the severing of ties on principle, opposed confederation under 1990s conditions. A clear, powerful societal constraint stood against any reversal of the disengagement. Framing any issue in such terms, even if it had not been intended in that way, served to delegitimize the policy, whether redistricting, the extension of municipal boundaries, water distribution, or the improvement of living standards in the camps. Third, Jordanian debates inevitably interpreted such proposals as serving Israeli or PLO interests, never as serving Jordanian interests.
Four possibilities present themselves as to why Jordan did not reengage: the opportunity never arose; the regime tried but failed; threat remained overwhelming; or Jordanian identity and interests changed. The first does not hold: the above instances show several opportunities. The second explanation has some adherents. The appearance of the issue could be seen as a trial balloon, a testing of political currents to see if public opinion would bear an act. The evidence suggests, however, that state policymakers did share the public conceptions of the identity and interests of the new Jordan and the nature of the threats it faced with regard to the West Bank, but not necessarily with regard to the future of the refugees. The proposals tended to originate among Palestinian or Israeli actors, not from Jordanians, as the “regime trial balloon” argument would suggest.
It is harder to differentiate between changing identity and interests and continuing reaction to threat. Arguments against confederation constantly warned of the dangers to Jordan. It is necessary to look carefully at the specific threat invoked, however: the fear that confederation would serve to transform Jordan into Palestine, and that links with the West Bank could destabilize Jordan. This perception of threat is clearly the product of the change in identity and the understanding of interests. The idea that close ties to the West Bank represented a threat to Jordan represents a fundamental change from the longstanding conviction that Jordan had a deep interest in control over the West Bank, and does not follow directly from objective realities. Only given the new identity frame did such contacts appear threatening. In other words, perception of threat is as much the outcome of the transformation of identity as it is the cause of Jordanian behavior.
Since the severing of ties, Jordan has established close working relations with the PNA. The two sides have signed an impressive array of functional agreements, even if many remain unimplemented. King Hussein and Arafat meet regularly to coordinate positions, and a steady stream of top government officials travels between Gaza and Amman. In a 1997 opinion poll, 86.5 percent of Jordanians considered relations with the PNA to be “good” or “very good,” and only 1.8 percent said “bad” or “very bad.” 75 Hussein has intervened repeatedly on behalf of Arafat with Israeli leaders, most dramatically in the endgame of the negotiation of the Hebron Agreement in January 1997. The consistency of Hussein’s declarations in support of a Palestinian state and rejecting any alternative to the PNA represent real Jordanian convictions about Jordan’s interests.
One of the most contentious issues in Jordanian-Israeli relations has been Israel’s continued obstruction of trade between Jordan and the West Bank, blocking one of the major presumed economic benefits of peace. Crucially, such trade relations would differentially benefit the Palestinian elite, strengthening those sectors with material and identity based interests in closer Jordanian-Palestinian relations. As the West Bank market became more important to the Jordanian political economy, these trade networks would work to reconstruct Jordanian identity and interests in much the same way that Jordan’s trade relations with Iraq reconstructed Jordan’s Arab relations in the 1980s (see chapter 5).
This should not be misunderstood as a claim that relations between Jordan and the PNA have become conflict-free. Serious conflicts over economic relations, Jerusalem, Hamas, and the like have generated friction and revealed continuing suspicions and hostility between the two leaderships. These conflicts differ in kind from conflicts before 1988, however. Disputes revolve around distributive rather than representation issues. 76 The dominant questions have become the extent of sovereignty exercised by each side over matters of mutual concern, such as the use of the Jordanian Dinar as a Palestinian currency or control over bridge crossings. Only Jerusalem partially contradicts this analysis, but even there Jordan has conceded, albeit under pressure, the priority of Palestinian political rights. While the PNA and Jordan continue to compete for power, and over the distribution of benefits in final status arrangements, they no longer compete for the right to represent the Palestinian people. Suspicions remain, particularly on the part of Arafat, that Hussein is conspiring with Israel and Hamas against the PNA, but these primarily reflect frustration and political gamesmanship. By severing ties with the West Bank and constantly recognizing the PLO throughout the 1990s, Jordan has qualitatively changed the nature of conflict and cooperation. This constructivist analysis has important policy implications: the persistent assertion that Jordan is only biding its time before renewing its bid, which reflects the rationalist assumption of fixed preferences and strategic response to changing power relations, is fundamentally mistaken. 77
Nor does this imply that Jordan wants a complete separation from the West Bank. Most Jordanian scenarios involve close functional cooperation with a Palestinian state, including significant economic interdependencies. Total separation is not seen as a viable alternative, any more than is a return to Jordanian rule over the West Bank. The construction of economic and functional cooperation depends upon the ability of each side to convince the other of the sincerity of its political positions. Building trust depends on convincingly demonstrating that Jordan’s renunciation of the West Bank is final. The renunciation, and the redefinition of Jordan’s identity and interests, therefore should increase, rather than decrease, the prospects for cooperative interaction.
The national identity of Jordanians of Palestinian origin remains the most unsettled and disruptive question in Jordanian politics. Full participation of Palestinians in the Jordanian political system could have important foreign policy implications. This is not impossible; indeed, the peace process, the structural economic adjustments taking place in the 1990s, and the move to a post-Hussein regime suggest a possible shift in the ruling coalition. Privatization and the slashing of state subsidies has hurt the Transjordanian tribes more than any other social group, while strengthening the hand of the Palestinian private sector; the eruption of riots in the southern cities in 1996 and 1998 serve notice of the growing discontent among the tribes. The economic orientation of the peace process is toward trade with Israel and the West Bank, which favors the Palestinian elite over the Transjordanians, whose trade networks are with Iraq and the Gulf. The peace process seems to almost certainly imply the large-scale resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. All of these factors point to an increased role for the Palestinian elite in the ruling coalition and a decreasing reliance upon the Transjordanian tribes. Hashemite discourse on identity in the 1990s has repeatedly called for full citizenship and participation for all citizens, which would imply a greater role for the Palestinian elite. King Hussein enjoyed great personal popularity in the tribes. Hussein’s successors may have less support among the tribes, however, and see opportunities to align with the Palestinian elite. Hence, it is feasible to imagine a shift in the ruling coalition toward the Palestinian elite—a trend that Jordanian nationalist political entrepreneurs have been vocally denouncing as “a creeping transformation of Jordan into Palestine.” 78 Even with such a shift, a return to the physical unity of the two entities seems unlikely, given the transformations in Jordanian identity and interests.
While the East Bank consensus has been firmly institutionalized, it is not beyond all debate or question. Opponents note that the Constitution, which specifies Jordan’s borders as including both Banks, has never been amended. Therefore, the severing of ties remained unconstitutional. Arabist and Islamist deputies based one strand of criticism of the peace treaty with Israel during the Parliamentary ratification debate on the premise that the treaty accepted the severing of ties, which was contrary to the Constitution and to Jordanian and Arab identity. 79 These challenges failed to undermine the strong consensus, however. Whenever political unity with the West Bank is introduced in the public sphere, it is immediately challenged, condemned, and dismissed as contrary to both Jordanian and Palestinian interests. Confederation remained a principled goal, but only after the achievement of a fully sovereign Palestinian state able to exercise its free will to choose political unity.
The formation of a Likud government in June 1996, and the subsequent deterioration of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, posed new opportunities for a Jordanian reassertion. As press reports immediately indicated, “Palestinians were concerned that Jordan and Netanyahu may find a common interest in preventing the creation of a Palestinian state.” 80 While I return to the impact of Netanyahu’s election and peace policies in chapter 7 and the Conclusion, the important point to close with here is the significance of the change in Jordanian preferences. Many Israelis assume the consistency of Jordanian preferences and will not believe that King Hussein has changed his basic interest in competing with Arafat and regaining the West Bank. If my argument is correct, then policies based on this belief are profoundly mistaken. Jordanian response to Netanyahu’s initiatives offer a crucial test; to this point, Jordanian support for the PNA and for a Palestinian state supports my conclusions.
The theoretical implications of the transformation of Jordanian identity and interests are threefold. First, the empirical change after 1988 is important. Given the centrality of the assumption of the stability of identity and interests, demonstrating such a major change in preferences in an issue area of fundamental importance to the Jordanian state should help to establish the empirical plausibility of this research agenda. Second, the wider discussion offers little support for those constructivists who contend that identity and interests are constantly in flux, that they change regularly and fluidly. Jordan clung to its West Bank-inclusive identity and interests in the face of Arabist consensus, public denunciation, Palestinian diplomatic efforts, civil war, and the growing realities on the ground. Only the conjunction of the Intifada, the severing of ties, and the unprecedented liberalization of 1989 produced the necessary conditions for the production of a new identity consensus. Therefore, the findings on Jordanian-Palestinian relations offer support for both rationalists and constructivists, and demonstrate the need for synthesis. Third, the empirical discussion helps to develop the positive theoretical argument for the role of public deliberation in producing a new consensus on identity and state interests.
Endnotes
Note 1: Quoted in Andoni (1991), p. 63. Back.
Note 2: “Jordanian measures to serve Palestinian representation.” Sawt al-Shaab August 6, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–155). Back.
Note 3: Anne Ponger, “What they’re thinking on the East Bank” Jerusalem Post August 24, 1988. Back.
Note 4: Fahd al-Rimawi, “The importance of the other opinion,” al-Dustur August 3, 1988. Back.
Note 5: George Haddad, “The accursed blessing and the anticipated results,” al-Dustur August 4, 1988. Back.
Note 6: Mahmoud al-Sharif, “Screams of joy for the termination of unity,” al-Dustur August 4, 1988. Back.
Note 7: Minister of Information Hani al-Khasawneh, interviewed in al-Majellah September 7, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–175, p. 26); and in al-Sharq al-Awsat August 27, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–171, p. 33). Back.
Note 8: Sawt al-Shaab, “A step we awaited,” August 25, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–168) Rifa’i quoted in al-Dustur September 1, 1988 (FBIS-NES-88–170). Back.
Note 9: Fahd al-Fanik, al-Rai August 8, 1988; Taysir Abd al-Jabir, August 13 and August 20, and Abdullah al-Maliki, August 2, in al-Dustur. Back.
Note 10: Muhadin’s (1992) opinion survey conducted in 1991 found that 74% of respondents found foreign media credible, compared with 11% who felt that way about the Jordanian media. The press fared better than the electronic media,with 64% of Jordanians relying on the press as their primary source of political news, compared to 10% who most followed TV. Back.
Note 11: Abd al-Latif Arabiyyat, Parliamentary debates published in Darwish (1992), p. 377. Back.
Note 12: Parliamentary debate as published in Darwish (1992), and unpublished transcripts in Majlis al-Noab (Parliament) archives, Amman. Back.
Note 13: Asa’ad Abd al-Rahman, al-Dustur March 25, 1995. Back.
Note 14: In Hourani 1996: 168. Back.
Note 15: Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, al-Rai December 26, 1992. Back.
Note 16: Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, Rasalat Majlis al-Umma, June 1994, p. 12. Back.
Note 17: Majali says that any Jordanian who accepts such an identity is welcome in the party. The Amman branch of the NCP was led by Marwan Dudin, a longstanding official of Palestinian origin. Party members also frequently point to examples of ethnic tensions in other parties, especially the Islamic Action Front. See Bilal al-Tal, “The National Constitutional Party,” al-Rai June 21, 1997. Back.
Note 18: Hakim al-Khayr, spokesman for the Constitutional Party, interviewed in Shihan December 18, 1997. After the elections, the party split repeatedly, with the dominance of al-Ahd being a primary complaint. Back.
Note 19: Interview, Ahmed Awidi al-Abaddi, Amman, May 1995. Abaddi (1986) explains his conceptions of nationalism in his study of the Jordanian tribes. For a fascinating discussion of Abaddi’s belief system, see Shryock (1995, 1997). Examples of Abadd’s arguments can be found in: “Muhajarin and Insar,” Shihan October 15, 1994; “Always We Pay the Price,” al-Bilad January 18, 1995; “Jordan Is the Most Valuable Thing We Possess,” Shihan September 17, 1994. Back.
Note 20: Nahid Hattar, “Who Is the Jordanian?” al-Hadath, November 1, 1995. Back.
Note 21: Taysir al-Zibri, “On the concept of citizenship,” al-Dustur May 12, 1993. Back.
Note 22: Al-Sabil April 23, 1996, p. 2. Back.
Note 23: Fahd al-Rimawi, personal interview, May 1995; “National unity,” al-Dustur June 11, 1990. Back.
Note 24: Sultan al-Hattab, “Citizenship or origins?” al-Rai November 19, 1993, is a good example. Back.
Note 25: Published in Shihan February 7, 1997. Back.
Note 26: Opposition parties statement, in al-Majd February 11, 1997 (FBIS-NES-97–030). Back.
Note 27: ‘Arib al-Rentawi, “Parliament and Jordanians of Palestinian Origin,” al-Dustur November 10, 1997. Back.
Note 28: Interview with Interior Minister Ra’ouf al-Dajani, al-Rai September 10, 1988. Dajani reflects on the intentions and application of these passport laws in al-Dustur September 16, 1995. Back.
Note 29: Among many examples: “ ‘Bidoun’ in Kuwait.. also in Jordan?” al-Sabil January 25, 1994; Majid al-Khadri, “Withdrawing citizens’ passports is in whose interests?” al-Sabil July 5, 1994; “Stories from the passport office,” al-Majd April 10, 1995; “Parliament opens the file on the confiscation of passports,” al-Sabil September 26, 1995. Back.
Note 30: Al-Sharq al-Awsat October 23, 1995. Back.
Note 31: Prime Minister Zayd bin Shakir, response to a report issued by the Parliamentary Committee on Public Freedoms, September 17, 1995. Reported by Rana Sabbagh, Reuters. Back.
Note 32: The exchange occurs in al-Sabil July 11, 1995. Back.
Note 33: Quotes from M.Tarshishi, Director of Palestinian Affairs, in al-Dustur August 30, 1997, p. 8. Back.
Note 34: Personal interviews with Marwan Dudin and Salim Tamari, members of the Jordanian and Palestinian delegations to the multilateral refugee negotiations, June 1997; see Arzt 1995. Back.
Note 35: The newspaper al-Mithaq was most active in identifying such deviance, which may explain why it was viewed by the government as more of a threat than other opposition vehicles. Back.
Note 36: The article and the unpublished responses by the Association presidents are collected in al-Urdun al-Jadid 12/13 (1988). Back.
Note 37: Rakan al-Majali, “The unprofessional associations” al-Rai October 6, 1988. Back.
Note 38: Fahd al-Fanik, “Sever the ties, oh lawyers!” al-Rai December 3, 1992. Back.
Note 39: Salameh Akour, “Questions.” Sawt al-Shaab March 9, 1993. Back.
Note 40: Fahd al-Fanik, “Professional Associations outside of history,” al-Rai June 16, 1994. Back.
Note 41: Layth Shubaylat, “Response to Fanik,” Shihan July 2, 1994. Back.
Note 42: Samih al-Mayateh, “The attack on the Associations,” al-Sabil October 24, 1995. Back.
Note 43: Abdullah Rudwan, “In defence of the decision,” al-Rai March 13, 1995. Back.
Note 44: Taysir al-Zibri, interviewed in al-Rai, February 6, 1993. Back.
Note 45: Fahd al-Fanik, “Citizenship, not resettlement,” al-Rai April 19, 1991. Back.
Note 46: For example, see the debate between al-Ahd leader Abd al-Hadi al-Majali and Hashd leader Bisam Haddadin, published in al-Dustur April 12, 1992. Back.
Note 47: Transcripts of Parliament debates, Majlis al-Noab archives in Amman. Debate of Political Party Law in First Special Session of 11th Parliament, June 21 to July 5, 1992. Back.
Note 48: Salameh al-Akour, “Words on party licenses,” Sawt al-Shabb October 3, 1992. Back.
Note 49: Salameh al-Akour, “Why all this crying about national unity?” Sawt al-Shaab December 23, 1992. Also see Hamada Fara‘na, “Party licenses and democracy,” al-Dustur December 22, 1992. Samih al-Khalil, “National unity is not a line that can be drawn in the newspaper,” al-Dustur December 25, 1992. Back.
Note 50: Fahd al-Fanik, “Hashd faces a choice,” al-Rai February 13, 1993; Salem al-Nahass, “Who chooses whom?” al-Rai February 15, 1993. Back.
Note 51: To date the legal controversy has not been resolved. Mohammed al-Subayhi, “The fate of Hashd is in the hands of the Interior Ministry,” al-Dustur July 13, 1995; and the half page ad taken out by Hashd in its defence on July 16 in al-Dustur. Back.
Note 52: Text published in al-Sabil. Back.
Note 53: Jordan Times April 16, 1998. Back.
Note 54: Fahd al-Fanik, “What about Jordan?” al-Rai September 7, 1993. Back.
Note 55: Mohammed al-Subayhi, “In whose interest?” al-Dustur October 4, 1995 and “Who is the chauvinist?” al-Dustur November 4, 1995. Back.
Note 56: Fahd al-Fanik, “Crisis of identity... who are we?” al-Rai November 20, 1993. Back.
Note 57: Samih al-Mayateh, “The Islamist movement and Jordanian-Palestinian relations,” al-Dustur July 25, 1993. Back.
Note 58: Thunaybat interview published in al-Sabil December 5, 1995, p. 15. Back.
Note 59: al-Sabil April 16, 1994 and April 23, 1994 for the Islamist position. Back.
Note 60: ‘Arib al-Rentawi, “Jordan and Hamas,” al-Dustur October 5, 1997, p. 18. Back.
Note 61: Ibrahim Ghousha interviewed in al-Bilad May 17, 1995. Back.
Note 62: Bisam al-Amoush, interviewed in al-Hadath, June 23, 1997. Back.
Note 63: Abu Zant interviewed in al-Hadath May 6, 1997. Back.
Note 64: Jawad al-Anani, al-Dustur February 24, 1997. Back.
Note 65: Fahd al-Fanik, “Low Walls,” al-Rai February 22, 1995; and, all in al-Dustur: Musa Kaylani, “The survey,” February 15, 1995; Hamada Fara’na, “The survey,” February 2, 1995; Mohammed al-Subayhi, “Delusions of unity,” February 11, 1995. Back.
Note 66: Fahd al-Fanik, “Does Jordan have interests in the negotiations?” al-Rai November 29, 1991; Tareq Masarweh, “The joint delegation does not represent anybody.’ al-Rai December 14, 1991. Back.
Note 67: Tahir al-Udwan, “The question of Palestinian representation and Jordanian national interests,” al-Dustur July 22, 1991; Saleh al-Qullab, “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine,” al-Dustur July 27, 1991. Back.
Note 68: Muna Shaqir, “Confederation: why is it desired now?” al-Dustur March 22, 1992; Taysir al-Zibri, “Confederation... between principled position and conditional tactic.” al-Dustur March 24, 1992. Back.
Note 69: Fahd al-Fanik, “So-called confederation,” al-Rai April 1, 1992. Back.
Note 70: Salameh al-Akour, “Confederation once more,” Sawt al-Shaab July 26, 1993; Nowal Abassi, “No to confederation,” Sawt al-Shaab July 30, 1993; Samih al-Mayeteh, “Confederation: why now?” al-Dustur August 2, 1993. Back.
Note 71: Arafat Hijazi, “Confederation: a trap for Jordanians or for Palestinians?” Sawt al-Shaab August 15, 1993. Back.
Note 72: George Hawatmeh, “Caught between two moods” Middle East International November 17, 1995. Back.
Note 73: Ahmed Awidi al-Abaddi, quoted in al-Sharq al-Awsat November 18, 1995. Back.
Note 74: Text of letter published in al-Dustur, December 3, 1997; ‘Arib Rentawi, “Husayn’s letter to the Prime Minister,” al-Dustur December 6, 1997; Zeev Schiff, “King Hussein’s letter,” Ha’aretz December 17, 1997. Back.
Note 76: Jarbawi (1995) offers a less sanguine view. Back.
Note 77: For example, Ehud Ya’ari, “The waiting game,” Ma’ariv August 9, 1996. Back.
Note 78: Nahid Hatter, “Palestine for Palestinians and Jordan for Jordanians,” al-Hadath, November 15, 1995. Back.
Note 79: Parliamentary debates as printed in al-Dustur November 1994. Back.
Note 80: Christian Science Monitor June 20, 1996. Back.
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