The Death of Oslo and the Rebirth of the Jordan-is-Palestine Option

By Matthew M. Hausman

The “Jordan-is-Palestine” model for resolving the Arab-Israeli stalemate is an idea that, despite historical precedent and logic, was beaten into silence by Israel’s enemies in the Arab-Muslim world and their enablers in the West.  Critics denounced the concept as preposterous, reactionary and counterproductive.  And yet, the idea has been resurrected from within Jordan itself.  There can be no dispute that Jordan was created in a sovereign vacuum on land that had comprised most of the Palestine Mandate.  However, the creation of Jordan (then Transjordan) in 1921 satisfied a geopolitical need unencumbered by a Palestinian national myth that had not yet been invented. 

In contrast, the Oslo “peace process” is based on the false premise that a native, ancestral population was displaced by the Jewish State and must be repatriated at Israel’s expense.  Because Jordan embodies the concept of Arab self-determination as contemplated by the San Remo Conference and the Palestine Mandate, and because most Jordanians identify as “Palestinian” as that term came to be known after 1967, it is high time to consider a homeland in Jordan as the political solution to the Mideast conflict.

The Oslo Process was heavily skewed against Israel from the start because it demanded validation of the Palestinian narrative and, thereby, the delegitimization of Jewish historical claims.  After cajoling the country into accepting the farce of Oslo, the Israeli left made it politically incorrect to assert traditional Jewish claims, or to mention that the Palestinians lack unique cultural or ethnic characteristics, or indeed any ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.  The peace process was focused on resolving the plight of Arab refugees and in perpetuating the fraud that their ancestors came from ancient Israel while the Jews were merely colonial interlopers.  The truth – that Jews have the longest history of continuous habitation, that they preceded the Arab-Muslim conquest by thousands of years, and that the Palestinians are largely descended from an immigrant population that grew during the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods – was suppressed under layers of Freudian self-denial.

One need look no further than the operational definition of “refugees” employed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (“UNRWA”) to see past the façade of Palestinian nationality.  Unlike other relief organizations that sought to ameliorate the condition of wartime refugees through resettlement, UNRWA’s sole purpose was and is to maintain the statelessness of Arabs who became refugees in 1948 regardless of whether they now live in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon or Syria (and irrespective of whether their forebears came from Egypt, Algeria or elsewhere), and thereby to transform them into a people though they possess none of the cultural or institutional hallmarks of nationality.  According to UNRWA, Palestinian “refugees” are those Arabs who had established residency in Mandatory lands between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost their homes and means of livelihood during Israel’s War of Independence, and who reside in areas where UNRWA services are available. To put this in perspective, no similar agency was created to serve the needs of the nearly 800,000 Jewish refugees who were summarily expelled from Arab-Muslim lands and dispossessed of whatever assets they owned in 1948, and who subsequently were taken in by Israel.

The improbable definition employed by UNRWA begs the question of how Palestinians could be designated as refugees based on a minimum residency requirement of only two years if they are truly descended from people who continuously inhabited the land for hundreds of generations.  Clearly, these people were not required to be native born or descended from indigenous ancestors to qualify as “refugees,” and in fact many were either immigrants themselves or the progeny of immigrants.  Moreover, they were not expelled from an existing country with recognized borders that was innately “Palestinian” or that ever exhibited the trappings of sovereignty or national character.  Indeed, no sovereign nation existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea from the time the Romans conquered the Kingdom of Judea until Israeli independence in 1948.  There was, however, a continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Gaza, dating back to antiquity, and a Jewish majority in Jerusalem for generations.

Given that the proponents of Oslo sought to suppress this history and ignore away the historicity of ancestral Jewish claims, the peace process from its inception was set on a collision course with Israeli sovereignty and national integrity.  Moreover, the basic premise of Oslo, i.e., that the Jewish homeland should be further divided after much of its territory had already been taken to create an autonomous Arab state in Jordan, was repudiated by the Arabs when they rejected the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 and launched a genocidal war against Israel and her people.  The peace process was doomed to failure because it demanded that Israel cede historically Jewish land (much of which had been intended for inclusion in the Jewish homeland under San Remo and the 1922 Mandate), while it failed to demand with equal vigor Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation or the meaningful cessation of antisemitic incitement.  The conceit of Oslo was that it validated apocryphal Palestinian pretensions while it simultaneously denigrated historically verifiable Jewish claims and treated Israel as a colonial aberration.

The architects of Oslo paid lip service to the need for mutual recognition, but they never chastised the Palestinian Authority for failing to amend its charter calling for Israel’s destruction (which it had agreed to do as a precondition under the Oslo Accords), for continuing to engage in terrorism and antisemitic incitement, or for stating repeatedly that it would never recognize a Jewish State.  Although American and European meddlers insisted that Israel consider hot-button issues like the Arab “right of return,” it became increasingly clear as the process wore on that matters of existential concern to Israel could not really be negotiated, and that she was expected simply to capitulate to all Palestinian demands – no matter how expansive or outrageous.  It was assumed, for example, that Israel would give up Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem without discussion, although these were historically Jewish lands and though Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab or Muslim nation, and certainly not one called “Palestine.”  Most galling was the continual promotion of the Palestinian Authority as moderate despite its oft-stated goal of the phased destruction of Israel, the starting point of which was to be the much ballyhooed two-state solution.

At its very core, Oslo rejected international precedent that had long recognized the Jews’ ancient connection to the Land of Israel.  It ignored, for example, the import of the San Remo Conference of 1920 and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922, which recognized the right of close settlement and that Jews were entitled to live anywhere in their traditional homeland.  After Transjordan was created on most of the Mandatory lands under British control, the goal for the remainder was unrestricted Jewish habitation west of the Jordan River.  There was no discussion of a “Palestinian” homeland because there were no Palestinians at the time.  Rather, Arab self-determination was addressed by the establishment of the French Mandate in Lebanon and Syria and the British Mandate in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Transjordan.  In contrast, the San Remo Resolution and Palestine Mandate recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and … the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”  Unfortunately, historical reality never fit the Oslo scheme. 

The San Remo Resolution applied to land designated for inclusion in Mandatory Palestine on both banks of the Jordan River.  Nevertheless, before the Palestine Mandate was signed in 1922, the British gave Transjordan to the Hashemites after they were forced out of the Arabian Peninsula by the Saudi royal family.  Indeed, the Hashemites were the ancestral rulers of Mecca, said to be descended from the tribe of Mohammed, and had no connection to that portion of the former Ottoman Empire that would become Jordan.  Thus, they constituted a foreign ruling class presiding over a population that was composed largely of immigrants from other parts of the Arab-Muslim world who were strangers to Hashemite sovereignty.

Jordan today is governed by a Hashemite minority that engages in apartheid-like discrimination against the Palestinian majority.  Though Palestinians generally are accorded citizenship, they are effectively disenfranchised through electoral gerrymandering and are in many ways treated as aliens who must someday return to “Palestine.”  In addition, thousands have been stripped of their citizenship in order to perpetuate the fiction that they are stateless vagabonds whose rightful place is a country that never existed.  Despite their peace treaty with Israel, the Hashemites discriminatorily enforce the Palestinians’ separateness to make them yearn for the liberation of “Palestinian Arab lands” from “the Zionists.”  Given the Hashemites’ commitment to promoting Palestinian hostility towards Israel in this way, the peace treaty is essentially worthless.  It offers no long-term security for Israel, but serves only as subterfuge to provide the Hashemite rulers with the appearance of moderation while they exacerbate Palestinian discontent and direct it away from themselves and towards the Jewish State.

Although antisemitism and anti-Zionism are effective tools for distracting many Palestinians from the real causes of their misery in Jordan, it has become clear at least to some that Arabs in Israel, including Judea and Samaria, enjoy a higher standard of living and have far more personal freedoms than those living in Jordan or anywhere else in the Mideast.  There are also some among the Palestinians who have come to accept their own demographic reality and understand how it affects the prospects for resolving their situation.  Specifically, there are about five million Arabs who identify as Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, and only 1.5 million living in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem; and there is a nascent recognition among some Jordanian-born intellectuals that Israel simply cannot accept an Arab “right of return” that would destroy her demographically as a Jewish state.

Some have also conceded that the Jews are indeed indigenous to Israel, that Jordan is composed of territory that historically was part of the Jewish homeland, and that the Jews, in an effort to promote peaceful coexistence, agreed to relinquish their claims to ancestral lands that had been carved off by the British for the creation of Jordan.  Those who accept these facts have come to realize that Jordan in fact constitutes a Palestinian homeland and is the key to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict – at lease territorially.  Among the most vocal Arab proponents of the concept is Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian expatriate writer who now lives in the UK.

Zahran has written extensively about the Palestinians and their place in the Mideast, and about how their present leadership – whether the PA in Judea and Samaria or Hamas in Gaza – has no interest in mitigating the conditions of Palestinians living elsewhere.  He also understands that this leadership will not accept a two-state solution or permanent peace with a Jewish nation.  Consequently, he has become a proponent of the Jordan-is-Palestine paradigm based on demographic reality and historical precedent.  First, he acknowledges that Jordan already has a Palestinian majority, and that it constitutes 78% of the land originally included in the Palestine Mandate.  Second, he is aware that the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Resolution, and Palestine Mandate all contemplated Arab self-determination and that the Jews agreed under those resolutions and conventions to cede the East Bank of the Jordan River to all Arabs then living in Mandate lands.  Thus, he recognizes that Jordan is actually part of the original Jewish homeland, which the Jews nonetheless agreed to give up for the sake of regional harmony.

The state envisioned by Zahran would be a secular democracy, the first in the Arab-Muslim world, and would have a federal system guaranteeing the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, including Christians, Bedouins, Circassicans and Chechens.  It would have a constitution providing for freedom of speech and religion, separation of mosque and state, and separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.  The state would also criminalize terrorist, racist and antisemitic incitement, and would officially recognize the Jews’ historical connection to much of the land within its borders.  Those who believe as Zahran does are open in their emulation of Israel’s government and political society, and are fully aware that Israel is the only true democracy in the entire Mideast.

The intrinsic value of a solution designating Jordan as the Palestinian homeland is that it aims to alleviate facts on the ground (e.g., a population that feels “Palestinian” regardless of its questionable national history) without undermining Israeli integrity, and in fact is predicated on recognition of Israel’s legitimacy.  In contrast, the peace process spawned by Oslo is based on a revisionist creation myth that repudiates Jewish history, and presumes that Palestinian claims are inherently valid while Jewish claims are not.  Thus, it offers little incentive for good-faith negotiations, bilateral acceptance, or mutuality of recognition.  Because the Arabs are not really expected to concede anything under Oslo, the end result of the process would be a foregone conclusion – and one that by design would undercut Israel’s long-term survival.

The Oslo illusion was finally shattered by Mahmoud Abbas’s assertion that Israel was responsible for derailing the peace process (though it was the PA that persistently refused to come to the negotiating table) and by his statement on Egyptian television last November that the Palestinians would never accept a Jewish state.  His refusal to negotiate was based on preconditions (including a moratorium on Israeli construction) that were never required under Oslo; and his televised repudiation of Israel’s legitimacy was only the latest in a string of similar comments that have been ignored by the Obama Administration, the European Union, and the enablers of Oslo.

Clearly, the peace process is dead.  Although the land-for-peace formula did produce a cold treaty with Egypt that nevertheless lasted more than 30 years, it has been eviscerated by the new Islamist regime; and the disengagement only facilitated the Hamas takeover in Gaza.  Moreover, Palestinian leadership routinely affirms its doctrinal opposition to anything more than a “hudna” with a Jewish nation, while the EU and the Obama Administration continue to blame Israel exclusively for the lack of Mideast peace.  Therefore, it seems that now is the time to change course and consider the establishment of a Palestinian homeland in Jordan, assuming that sufficient Arab support for such a plan can be mustered.

In light of current Palestinian unrest in Jordan, including protests that threaten to topple the Hashemite government, the window of opportunity for implementing such a plan is probably limited.  Furthermore, given that last year’s “Arab Spring” only empowered fundamentalists who had no interest in constitutional democracy, the outcome of the discord in Jordan could well be the entrenchment of yet another Islamist regime.  Therefore, if the Palestinians really want their own country, and if there truly are moderates among them who desire secular government and regional peace, the time may well be nigh for them to seize the day and create the first real Arab democracy in the Mideast.