Why the ‘Jordanian Option’ Won’t Die

TEL AVIV — In January 1968, only a few months after Israel conquered the territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol received a memo. The reasonable way to deal with the newly occupied territory, wrote the memo’s author, a professor named Benjamin Akzin, was to join it to Jordan, the country from which it was taken during the 1967 war.

Akzin’s memo, which is recounted in a new book by the historian Yoav Gelber, was one of the first articulations of what is known as “the Jordanian option.” It’s still alive today.

Last month, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority reported that the Trump administration had recently presented him with a peace deal based on a Palestinian confederation with Jordan. Both Mr. Abbas and the Jordanians rejected the proposal. But don’t expect the idea to go away. For 50 years, the idea that the solution for the West Bank must include Jordan has proved resilient.

The long-forgotten 1968 memo explains why. An agreement with Jordan might not be stable, wrote Akzin, but one with the Palestinians would be even less so. Plus, a contract between two established states is preferable to a contract with a state that doesn’t yet exist. With Jordan, Israel can trust arrangements such as demilitarization of certain areas. If Jordan breaches the agreement, there are sanctions that can be used to ensure a return to compliance — the kind of sanctions that only a real country comprehends.

Since 1967, Israel hasn’t been able to identify a Palestinian leadership that can be trusted to keep the peace and maintain order. Likewise, Israel doesn’t really believe that a tiny Palestinian enclave trapped between Israel and Jordan could be economically viable. And so it has always hoped that Israel’s eventual separation from Palestinians will include a guarantee of — to put it bluntly — adult supervision.

The “Jordanian option” is much more mainstream than Israel publicly admits. Even Shimon Peres, the foreign minister who forged the Oslo accords with Yasir Arafat 25 years ago, did not believe that a stand-alone Palestinian state was a good idea, recounted Avi Gil, Mr. Peres’s longtime confidant, in a recent book. “He never abandoned the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation,” writes Mr. Gil. (Disclosure: I am the editor of Mr. Gil’s book, as well as Mr. Gelber’s.)

What exactly would this confederacy entail? There are many versions of this idea, but most suggest that the Palestinians get something that is less than a fully independent state, while Israel gets a partner that is more than an unreliable Palestinian neighbor. To achieve this, Jordan takes over some parts of the West Bank, keeps its role as guardian of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and becomes the political and economic center of gravity for Palestinians who live on both sides of the Jordan River. The Palestinians will be the citizens of a confederated Palestine, or Jordan.

The Jordanians oppose the idea of confederation, and so few Israeli leaders are willing to publicly promote it. But from time to time their true colors show. A decade ago, Gen. Giora Eiland, Israel’s national security adviser in the early 2000s under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote several influential articles in which he preached a return to the “the Jordanian confederation option of years past.” Ayelet Shaked, an influential minister from the right-wing Jewish Home party, has likewise envisioned a future in which parts of the West Bank would be linked to Jordan. A few days ago, Gideon Saar, a former minister and a powerful figure in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, spoke about the possibility of a “link in the future between an Arab autonomy in Judea and Samaria and the Kingdom of Jordan.”

And, of course, there are the reports that the Trump administration, led by Jared Kushner, is also pushing the Jordanian option. Though the Israeli government flatly denies it, at least one report said the idea came from the Israelis.