The key to understanding the Jordanian dilemma regarding sovereignty in the Jordan Valley can be found in the lengthy history of different survival maneuvers made by the Hashemite Kingdom.
Jordan is one of the few success stories of the Arab world. Despite its continuing economic hardships, its internal structural tensions, and a large Palestinian population along with the prominence of the Muslim Brotherhood, it has brought relative calm to its residents for one hundred years.
Moreover, Jordan was founded artificially – without economically sustainable resources, trapped between neighbors who are mostly greedy, hostile, and violent – and is also cursed with a link to the Palestinian issues which pose threats internally and externally. This relative stability exists due to the Hashemite regime. Of all the regional leaders, it is the only one that for generations has consistently and bravely maintained a responsible policy, under almost impossible conditions.
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The most difficult condition facing the kingdom is the tension between the responsibility of the Hashemite dynasty and destructive radicalism, which has brought continuous destruction on Arab societies in the region, since their gaining independence. Its roots are deep in the illusions of grandeur the Arab political public has become addicted to, and the unwillingness of Arab society to commit to an internal building process that would secure its place in the modern world. The Chinese also believe in their greatness and have been working hard for generations to produce achievements and prominence on the global stage. The radical Arabs are convinced that they have been robbed of their leading stature in the region, and the world, through murky plots and that it can only be restored through a combination of untamed violence and unfounded outrage.
Against this backdrop, various enthusiastic and at times pathetic, Arab leaders – from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Assad dynasty in Syria, on one side, to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Islamic State barbarians on the other – have gained public support.
Most of the pan-Arab public, during the reign of Nasser, and many in his circles, including a large part of the Jordanian public, accused the Hashemites of treason simply for not being dragged into the destructive adventures of these radicals. To maintain the legitimacy of the regime and appease the furious public, the king was forced to pretend he supported their shallow slogans. The political story of the kingdom is the history of maneuvering between this pretending and responsible leadership that Jordan has sought to maintain.
This tension can be seen in Israeli-Jordanian relations. The late King Abdullah I maintained close ties with pre-1948 Israel – then-British Palestine. In 1948, the king ostensibly used his army as part of the pan-Arab plan to eliminate Israel. It actually undermined, with then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's tacit consent, the conquest of what would later be called "the West Bank."
Still, Israel and Transjordan agreed to divide Jerusalem between them in order to prevent its internationalization. Abdullah supposedly fought to "free Palestine," but in fact, Israel was his partner and the Palestinian national movement and Egypt his enemies.
If it weren't for the pan-Arab pressure and its influence on the Jordanian elite, Israel and Jordan would have signed a peace treaty in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s, King Abdullah I's grandson, King Hussein was forced to maneuver between the joint interest of Jordan and Israel to fight the radicalism of Nasser and the Palestinians. Hussein's maneuvering allowed for his political survival until the summer of 1967, when he had to capitulate to Nasser and join the war.
After the 1967 Six-Day War it was impossible for Israel and Jordan to reach an agreement that would return most of the West Bank to Hussein, mainly because until the Egyptian President Anwar Saadat's peace initiative, a notion of an armistice with Israel was out of the question, even in exchange for all of the territory. Since the mid-1970s, the PLO has entrenched its standing in the Arab world and in the international arena in such a way that even after the Saadat peace initiative, Jordan could not have reassumed most of its sovereignty there. In the following decade, the Hashemite regime recognized the need to drop its demand that Israel return the West Bank, in order to distance itself from the Palestinian threats to its internal status.
Since then the Jordanian king has been interested in a strong Israel that deals with the national Palestinian movement and keeps the threats against the kingdom at a distance. This is done by maintaining Israeli rule in the West Bank, by preventing the founding of a sovereign Palestinian state, and with an Israeli buffer in the Jordan Valley. The Jordanians maneuver between their practical strategic needs and the political necessity to loudly say the exact opposite.
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