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Report 10 Jordan Option
-E

أنت الزائر رقم:

Ariel Sharon and
the Jordan Option

Gary
Sussman

March 2005

(Gary Sussman is based at Tel
Aviv University.)

An
avid enthusiast of Ariel Sharon and his unilateral
disengagement plan recently opined that the plan “has one
inborn defect: it has no vision, has no diplomatic horizon and
is devoid of any ideological dimension.”[1] This view of the
Israeli prime minister — tactically brilliant but lacking as a
strategic thinker — is common but mistaken.
Sharon
clearly belongs in the pantheon of master tacticians in modern
politics, but he does indeed have a long-term strategy — and
disengagement fits right in.His
vision is no longer the creation of limited Palestinian state
on some 50 percent of the West
Bank,
as many have long assumed. Instead,
Sharon
envisions a Palestinian state on a significant portion of the
West
Bank,
possibly as much as 80 percent.
Sharon
is all too aware that such an entity is not “viable.” He
assumes, in fact, that a two-state arrangement cannot be
sustained and will not bring an end to Palestinian-Israeli
strife.In
the long term, the Israeli premier hopes that the Palestinian
state will meld with
Jordan.
His assumption is that unilateral disengagement from
Gaza
and parts of the West
Bank,
his plan for a carefully managed transition away from direct
Israeli rule over the majority of the Palestinians, will set
this process in motion. Over time, Sharon calculates,
contiguity between “Palestine” and its neighbor to the east,
as well as increased trade, cultural ties and the
“democratization” championed by the Bush administration, will
induce Palestinians on both the West and East Banks of the
Jordan to agitate for Palestinian-Jordanian federation
themselves. If one assumes that
Sharon
has quietly held on to his once openly expressed belief that
“Jordan
is Palestine,”
his break with his old supporters among the settler movements
and the right becomes easier to understand.

Sharon’s
Intentions

Politicians
are far more forthright than we believe. They very often mean
what they say. If one, for example, reads former South African
President F. W. de Klerk’s speeches from 1989 until well into
the negotiations process that eventually ended apartheid, one
is struck by how candidly he set out his agenda. De Klerk
sought to impose a limited democracy, blunting universal
democracy with significant guarantees for the white minority.
He hoped to do so by controlling the pace and scope of the
transition. He also believed that he could outsmart the
African National Congress, which he assumed to be
significantly weakened by the collapse of its patron, the
Soviet
Union.
In a similar way, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to engineer a
process that ensured the perpetuation of Soviet-style
communism, albeit reformed. That perestroika and
Pretoria-stroika failed to secure their objectives is, of
course, another matter entirely.

Major
speeches of political leaders and statements by their aides
are a vital guide for those not privy to the leaders’ inner
thoughts. Ariel Sharon has been less than charitable in
indicating where he is ultimately headed, but he has been
clear about his immediate objectives. In statements since
December 2003, when he announced his disengagement plan,
Sharon
has repeatedly noted that he wishes to buy
Israel
more time to fashion a Palestinian statelet amidst the
settlement blocs, bypass roads and military bases in the
West
Bank.
He has been coy, however, about what might
follow.Sharon
has not changed his fundamental views on the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Like many Israelis, he deeply mistrusts Arabs. As
Dov Weisglass, the prime minister’s trusted policy adviser,
explains, he “believes that the Arab world views
Israel as
an imposition, and won’t come to terms with its existence.”[2]
Hence Sharon
rejects the very premise of a comprehensive, negotiated
two-state deal that would lead to peace and reconciliation —
the sort of deal that his erstwhile rivals in the Labor Party
hoped would usher in “a new Middle
East.”
The guiding assumption of all major official and unofficial
peace initiatives to date — whether the
Oslo
accords of 1993 and 1994, the Saudi initiative of March 2002
or the Geneva
accords of December 2003 — has been that a comprehensive deal
will remove the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the list of
regional irritants, paving the way for harmony, cooperation
and integration. The most noted and sanguine exponent of this
vision, of course, has been Labor Party leader Shimon Peres.
For Ariel Sharon, however, there is no new
Middle
East at
the end of the tunnel. Instead, he seeks to use unilateral
measures to manage the conflict so as to favor
Israel.
This conflict management paradigm is, in essence, a modern
variation upon the traditional Revisionist Zionist notion of
the “iron wall,” as espoused by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.[3] Prior to
Israel’s
declaration of independence, Revisionists dismissed the idea
of negotiated compromise with Palestinian nationalism.
Instead, they called for building a figurative “iron wall”
between Israel
and Arab interlocutors until a “moderate” Arab leadership
emerged that was no longer intent on destroying the Jewish
state-in-the-making. The second intifada convinced Israelis
that an iron wall is still
necessary.Sharon’s
deep wariness of the Arabs explains why he long opposed the
creation of an independent Palestinian state. His traditional
view was that Israel
needs to settle beyond the coastal plain if it is not to be a
“mass of concrete from Ashkelon to
Nehariya — all within the range of Arab guns and having to
rely on friendly powers for protection.”[4] Unlike his former
allies in the religious right wing of the settler movement,
however, Sharon is
willing to amend his tactics to serve his strategic
objectives. It is not incidental that he recently accused the
settlers of having a “messianic complex.”

Sharon
initially opposed the separation barrier that
Israel is
building in the West
Bank,
only relenting when he realized that he could not defy growing
public support for the project. Then he swiftly appropriated
the barrier in service of his agenda. Similarly,
Sharon
realized that he cannot fight the increasingly hegemonic idea
of partition of the territory between the
Mediterranean
and the Jordan
River.
As he is acutely anxious not to confront the
United
States,
the turning point for him was President George W. Bush’s
embrace of the “two-state solution” in a Rose Garden speech on
June
24, 2002.
But Sharon
has a very different notion of a two-state solution than the
one envisioned by the Palestinian Authority and the
international community. One might describe his vision as the
“one and a three quarter-state solution.” Since
coming to power in February 2001,
Sharon
has astutely harnessed concepts like statehood, the barrier
and unilateral disengagement to maximize Israeli territorial
gains and deflect demographic pressure from
Israel
toward the east. In recent weeks, the indefatigable Shimon
Peres, now deputy prime minister in
Sharon’s
disengagement government, has proclaimed that while the Likud
Party has secured the spoils of political power, his party has
won the battle of ideas. In one sense, Labor Zionism’s thesis
of the need for territorial partition to achieve peace has
indeed emerged ascendant. Sharon
has also embraced the Zionist left’s idea of unilateral
separation, suggesting an impressive tally of victories for
Labor Zionism. The ascendance of the unilateralist paradigm as
Sharon
understands it is, however, a great victory for Revisionist
Zionism. The notion of an iron wall, as well as the belief
that there is no solution to the conflict, has gained wider
currency in Israel.
In dialectical fashion, Sharon
has synthesized key ideas promoted by the Zionist left, in
order to further his vision of what a secure
Israel
would be.Sharon’s
Logic of Unilateralism.The
Israeli premier and his aides have been most transparent in
stating the objectives behind the unilateral disengagement
plan. As noted above, it is first and foremost an articulation
of Sharon’s
dismissal of the conflict resolution paradigm, whereby the
“final status issues” in the conflict — chiefly borders,
settlements, Palestinian refugees and
Jerusalem —
can be resolved at once. A leading architect of the
disengagement plan, Eyval Giladi, argues that it is impossible
“to reach a final status agreement in one step.” Giladi
rejects the notion that peace will bring security. Instead, he
posits that security brings peace.[5] Moreover, the plan seeks
to free Israel from the “road map” to a negotiated two-state
solution, sponsored by the Quartet of the US, UN, Russia and
the European Union and promulgated in May 2003.

Sharply
contradicting his undertakings to the international community
and his later comments at the February 8, 2005 Sharm al-Sheikh
summit, Sharon
made it clear to a group of Israeli ambassadors that “there
will not be a direct transition from the disengagement plan to
the road map.”[6] A
successful flight from the road map ensures that
Israel
reasserts control over the diplomatic process and manages it
on Israeli terms. Speaking in the West
Bank
settlement of Ariel, prior to his summit with George Bush in
April 2004, Sharon
noted, “Only an Israeli initiative will keep us from being
dragged into dangerous initiatives like the
Geneva
and Saudi initiatives.”[7] Sharon’s
failure to take any diplomatic initiative in his first term
created a diplomatic vacuum that others filled. His plan was
partly a response to such efforts. Dov Weisglass concedes that
the plan “compels the world to deal with our idea, with the
scenario we wrote.”[8] By reasserting control,
Sharon
intends to avert the final status negotiations with the
Palestinians that are stipulated in phase three of the road
map. In such an exchange, Palestinian concessions on the
question of the right of return would need to be matched by
Israeli flexibility on Jerusalem,
settlements and borders. Tellingly, Weisglass likened his
scheme to “formaldehyde” applied to ensure that “there will
not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
The
unilateral approach, then, allows
Sharon
to address the issues of settlements and borders without
negotiations and on terms that greatly favor
Israel.
Sharon
assumes that “painful” measures, like the removal of small
settlements, will allow
Israel
to control the scope of the withdrawal. In private
conversation and in numerous media interviews, the prime
minister has noted that his plan “constitutes a mortal blow to
the Palestinians” and their quest for statehood, and will make
it impossible to return to the 1949 armistice lines.[9] His
pet journalist Uri Dan explains that Sharon’s “cruel
separation” plan is premised on making tactical sacrifices in
exchange for strategic gains in the West Bank.[10]
It
is striking that Sharon
continues to be reluctant to return to a bilateral process,
even though his arch-nemesis Yasser Arafat is no longer the
Palestinian leader. The disengagement scheme was after all
presented as a means to bypass a recalcitrant and ruthless
Arafat. Though Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, may be
emphatic in eschewing violence as a means of struggle, he is
no less committed to the bottom lines from which Arafat
refused to budge at Camp
David
in July 2000. These are positions that
Sharon
could never agree to.

Withdrawing
to What?

Given
that Sharon
is keen to avoid a withdrawal on the scale of the
Geneva
blueprint, the critical — and still unanswered — question is
what his red lines for a withdrawal are. His spokesperson
Raanan Gissin notes that his plan “will remove the issue of
other major evacuations, major withdrawals in
Judea
and Samaria,
particularly the major clusters of settlements.” The plan, as
Gissin notes, leaves
Israel
“the most vital percentages that we need.”
Sharon
has long held that Israel
requires greater “strategic depth” and can attain it through
establishing “security zones” — swathes of occupied territory
from which Israel
would not withdraw. Clarifying the nature of the zones, Gissin
suggests that “there will be an eastern security zone and a
western security zone: the eastern 10-15 kilometers and the
western 3-5 kilometers from the 1967 borders.” Pressed to
quantify the percentage of the West Bank left to the
Palestinians, Gissin confirms that it would be 58 percent.[11]
Sharon’s former national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy,
corroborates this percentage,[12] as does journalist Ben
Kaspit, who detailed Sharon’s strategy days before the
December 2003 Herzliya speech in which he first laid it
out.[13] In the widely cited Haaretz interview in which he
used the term “formaldehyde,” Weisglass intimated that
disengagement will ensure that 190,000 [of 240,000] settlers
“will not be moved from their place.” Relocating 50,000
settlers living in the West
Bank
and Gaza
(the figure of 240,000 excludes settlers residing in
East
Jerusalem
and its surroundings) will leave
Israel
still controlling a significant portion of the
West
Bank.
Such a withdrawal would roughly conform to the plan proposed
in July 1967 by Gen. Yigal Allon, who was then deputy prime
minister in a Labor government. The aforementioned interviews
would, therefore, confirm what many critics have long assumed
about Sharon’s
intentions.

Eyval
Giladi, on the other hand, speculated further that the final
figure for “West
Bank
territory on the western side of the barrier will be a
fraction below 10 percent.”[14] That percentage was
corroborated by Ehud Olmert, then deputy prime minister and
now serving in the new position of vice prime minister.[15]
The trajectory of the separation barrier adopted by the
Israeli cabinet on February 20, 2005 also points in this
direction (see map).

These
assessments suggest that Sharon
entertains a set of possible withdrawal scenarios, ranging
from a case in which
Israel
would evacuate 60 percent of the West
Bank to
one in which Israel
would leave just below 90 percent. Many presume that
Sharon
will determine the Palestinian entity’s final borders with the
separation barrier, and that, accordingly, the barrier’s ever
changing route through the West
Bank
and East
Jerusalem
tracks with Sharon’s
evolving thinking on the proportions of the Palestinian entity
that he will countenance. The rulings by the International
Court of Justice and the Israeli Supreme Court on the barrier
have constrained Sharon’s
ability to impose a scenario at the lower end of those he
envisages. But a further incentive for a larger-scale
withdrawal is that such a pullout would abet
Sharon’s
long-term efforts to maximize territorial gains.

Reframing
the Conflict

Sharon’s
first objective is to create a subservient Palestinian state
with provisional borders and then seek to limit subsequent
territorial concessions to that state. A Palestinian state
with provisional borders is promised by phase two of the road
map. In contrast to the Palestinians, however,
Sharon
seeks to avoid phase three of the road map for as long as
possible. Weisglass conceded that
Sharon
embraced unilateral disengagement only when it became apparent
that there was no Palestinian partner for an interim
arrangement that postpones phase three. Arafat’s refusal to
accept this idea underpinned
Israel’s
efforts to marginalize him. In
Sharon’s
eyes, a limited Palestinian state, where the maximum number of
Palestinians lives on the minimum amount of land, is a
strategic asset. Such a statelet improves
Israel’s
hand in final status negotiations, because the conflict can be
more easily portrayed as a disagreement between two sovereign
states. Israel
will no longer have to deal with the PLO, which represents the
refugees. As Azmi Bishara explains,There
is a vast difference between negotiating a final settlement
with a state and with a national liberation movement. Dozens
of states have borders disputes; there is nothing particularly
urgent or unsettling about them, unlike national liberation
causes. Sharon has no intention of broaching the latter, and
the Palestinians will forfeit the opportunity to broach them
too if they accept the creation of a state outside the
framework of a just, comprehensive and permanent solution, a
state amputated at its inception and that Sharon intends to
make the permanent solution.[16]

Disengagement
also allows Israel to
stake the moral high ground in the conflict. For this reason,
Sharon
will go beyond the avaricious 60 percent that many assume he
plans to return. At the same time, he has made a determined
effort to lower the expectations of the Palestinians, Israelis
and the international community regarding the extent of the
eventual withdrawal. Sharon
assumes that nurturing a pessimistic outlook among others will
serve him when he makes overtures that, ultimately, fall below
former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” at
Camp
David.
The more territory he agrees to evacuate, the stronger his
case will be for demanding annexation of the rest. When the
Palestinians, as he expects, spurn these overtures,
Israel
will yet again be able to hold Palestinian dogma responsible
for unilateral Israeli annexation.Disengagement
has two additional advantages. One is that limited withdrawal
will allow Sharon to
demonstrate to Israelis and the international community the
trauma associated with territorial “concessions.” In doing so,
he can undermine a comprehensive peace deal in a Machiavellian
manner. As a prominent settler leader, Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun,
explains, “He needs national trauma to impress upon the
Israeli public and the international community that it is
impossible to do this again.”[17] A second advantage is that
the plan relieves the domestic pressure that demographic
concerns place on Sharon.
Israelis are obsessed with demography — the relative
percentages of Jews and non-Jews in the population of
Israel-Palestine. Their fear of a declining Jewish majority
has led to a dramatic paradigm shift, in which an independent
Palestinian state and “the potential military threat from such
a state” are viewed as the lesser evil.[18] In giving up
Gaza,
Sharon
readjusts the demographic balance and reduces domestic
pressure for a comprehensive deal. Moreover, by removing
Gaza
from the equation he weakens the Palestinian hand in a later
bargain.Above
all, the plan will allow Ariel Sharon to fight for the
territorial assets he deems vital. In contrast to his
predecessors, Sharon
does not expend valuable political capital fighting symbolic
battles. This trait is also what distinguishes him from
religious hawks. The letter he obtained from Bush in April
2004 is testament to his strategic focus. Time gained as his
unilateral game plays out is time to deepen
Israel’s
hold on key settlement blocs and create yet more facts on the
ground. As Sharon
declared to a settler audience, “Ma’aleh Adumim will grow
stronger, Ariel, the Etzion bloc, Giv’at Zeev will remain in
Israeli hands and will continue to develop.
Hebron
and Kiryat Arba will be strong.”[19] Even the most liberal of
Likud leaders, Ehud Olmert, has made clear that these
communities will not be conceded. Beyond creating more facts
on the ground, the decision to let
Gaza go
makes it easier to build an internal Israeli coalition to
fight to keep these blocs.

Sharon
and his key Likud allies recognize that alternative
“solutions,” like transferring major Arab-Israeli communities
to the Palestinian entity or carving the
West
Bank
into totally disconnected cantons, are not feasible. The
former option, which is explicitly supported by Avigdor
Lieberman of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party and
implicitly endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu,
Sharon’s
major rival within the Likud, can only become possible if the
Zionist left also champions it. To date, only Ephraim Sneh,
who was defense minister under Barak, has briefly courted the
idea. Public support for the idea from the political center
may increase over time as concerns over demography are fueled.
As journalist Aluf Benn notes, “The solution of withdrawal
from the territories is no longer enough for the angry
prophets of demography, Professors Arnon Sofer and Sergio
Della Pergola.”[20] But a critical mass of support is not yet
close to being formed.Sharon
supported the canton option when he first entered
politics.[21] But the intensified international scrutiny of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the years of the second
intifada has taken this option off the table for
Israel’s
image-conscious hawks. Ehud Olmert notes, “The canton program
will create a situation that the world will not be prepared to
live with, and rightly so, because it will not allow for
territorial contiguity and does not give the Palestinians the
minimal basis to enjoy independent life under self rule and
sovereignty. The plan effectively turns them into something,
pardon me for the infuriating comparison, similar to the old
South
Africa.
The world will not live with this.”[22]

Living
with a Limited
Palestinian
State

Sharon
appreciates that something the White House will call “a
Palestinian state” is a given. He is now trying to create
greater domestic and international consensus for a limited
Palestinian state — though one much larger than
Sharon’s
detractors are prepared to admit. He will even acquiesce in
greater sovereignty for the Palestinian entity than his
predecessors may have been willing to do. One might call his
current project “the 20 percent (of the
West
Bank
for Israel)
coalition.” In other words, he seeks to realign Israeli
positions on the Palestinian issue around borders he considers
vital to Israel.
His unilateral measures, therefore, are a way of repackaging
the notion of the two-state solution. Seen from his
perspective, such an approach is rational.
Sharon,
after all, believes that a negotiated peace like the one
spelled out in the Geneva
accord will not resolve the conflict.

The
Israeli premier can already count several successes in his
endeavor. For starters, his plan is viewed as the only game in
town. Secondly, his letter from Bush recognizes Israeli “facts
on the ground.” Domestically,
Sharon’s
gelding of the Labor Party represents a triumph in efforts to
realign the Israeli political topography. At present, the
biggest threat to his agenda comes from the religious right
and ideologues and disaffected legislators in the
Likud.The
creation of a limited Palestinian state is fraught with risks
for Israel,
which could find itself with a highly unstable neighbor. As
Gideon Levy notes, there can “be no independent Palestinian
state between Ofra and Etzion. There can be no just solution
with Ariel and Ma’aleh Adumim.”[23] Not all Israelis seem
bothered by a Palestinian state that lacks territorial
contiguity and may, as a result, be unviable. One right-wing
commentator suggests that the “idea that a country requires
geographical integrity is an odd one.” Instead, he posits that
a “country’s viability” is “chiefly a function of the quality
of governance.”[24] Without denigrating the importance of
governance, a cramped, non-contiguous entity inhabited by poor
and aggrieved people would likely continue to generate attacks
on Israeli civilians. Some cynics in
Israel
might silently approve of such an outcome, which could
reinforce their thesis that the Palestinians do not want
peace.Another
issue is sovereignty. The democratic transition literature
suggests that sovereignty is a precondition for democracy — an
association conveniently overlooked by
Israel
and the international community in placing so much emphasis on
Palestinian “reform.” Yet there is every reason to assume that
even a negotiated Israeli territorial retreat might lead to a
Palestinian state whose sovereignty is diluted.
Israel
may well insist on controlling the external border crossings,
in order to prevent weapons smuggling, or on mastering
Palestinian airspace.
Israel
will probably insist that the new state be demilitarized.
Israel
will also violate the Palestinian entity’s sovereignty in
cases where it perceives itself to be under military threat.
Furthermore, Israel
may also insist that it has the right to veto diplomatic
relations between the Palestinian state and entities deemed
hostile to Israel —
Iran,
for example. Such demands will limit both the internal and
external aspects of sovereignty. Internal sovereignty implies
that a government enjoys decisive and unrestricted sanction,
while external sovereignty entitles a community to set policy
free of the meddling of other agents. “Sovereignty,” as David
Held notes, “by its very nature implies a degree of
independence from external powers and dominance or ultimate
authority over internal groups.”[25]

Israel’s
instinct will be to limit Palestinian sovereignty as is
universally understood. Even if
Israel
were to secure the support of certain Palestinian elites,
willing to collaborate for their personal interests, for such
a limited entity, Israel
would face the possibility that ordinary Palestinians would
not accept the entity as a state. “A state exists chiefly in
the hearts and minds of its people; if they do not believe it
is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life.”[26] An
outcome in which Israel
limits the scope and substance of Palestinian sovereignty will
serve to ensconce the binational reality in which Palestinians
and Israelis find themselves. If the Palestinian state is not
recognized by the Palestinians as a state it will be akin to
the South African bantustans of yore. It is hard to imagine
that Ariel Sharon is not aware of the risks implicit in a
state whose sovereignty and contiguity is limited — which
leads us to the tacit part of his disengagement
plan.

The
Jordan
Option?

It
is worth recalling that the
“Jordan
option” — whereby a Palestinian entity federates with
Jordan —
was the endgame that Sharon
espoused when he entered politics in 1974. For many years, he
vocally supported the removal of the “artificial kingdom” in
Jordan.[27] At least one prominent Jordanian believes that the
Israeli premier’s tactical maneuvering should be evaluated in
the light of his past predilections. When he was still foreign
minister, current Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher noted,
“We are afraid that the day might come when Israeli leaders
might argue ‘Jordan
is Palestine.’
Why are we worried? The wall will effectively divide the
West
Bank
into three parts. It will make life impossible for
Palestinians: dividing them from their work, their schools,
their lands. If that happens, what options do Palestinians
have? They will leave, voluntarily or by force, for
Jordan.”[28]

Indeed,
a variant of the idea, euphemistically labeled as the
“regional solution,” enjoys support in the Israeli security
establishment. Press reports intimate that Giora Eiland, head
of the National Security Council, has presented the “regional”
option to Sharon.
Besides receiving a favorable response from the premier,
Eiland has a mandate to present the plan to the international
community.[29] The salient difference between the current
Israel Defense Forces command and the ex-general
Sharon
is that the former fancy that such an accommodation can be
negotiated. The more prudent Sharon
appreciates that neither the Palestinians nor
Israel’s
neighbors will agree to the idea.

How
might Sharon
succeed in effecting this binational outcome to the conflict?
He and his spokespersons often note that the disengagement
plan buys Israel
time. If Sharon
has in mind a two-state outcome that will usher in peace, then
why play for time? The reason is not only that time gained
allows Israel to
strengthen its hold upon crucial settlement blocs. More
importantly, the time that Sharon
will purchase through his plan allows another demographic
trend to progress, namely, a change in the internal Jordanian
demographic balance between Palestinians and Transjordanians.
Palestinian refugees residing in
Jordan
already constitute a majority, but gerrymandering by the
Hashemite regime has ensured that they are vastly
under-represented in the legislature. Moreover,
Transjordanians continue to dominate the kingdom’s key
institutions, most importantly the security apparatus. This
balance could shift, especially if
Jordan is
pressed into majority-rule democracy as some might think
Bush’s rhetoric of “transforming” the Middle
East
implies. In such a scenario, the region could be home to two
“Palestinian entities” — a limited state on the remnants of
the West
Bank
and Jordan.
Cut off from Israel by
the separation barrier, the Palestinians would look to
Jordan as
their cultural and economic hub. In such a sequence,
Sharon
probably envisages the collapse of the two states into one
entity. The merger would not necessarily require force or
direct Israeli involvement. One development
Sharon
could anticipate is the rise of irredentist movements in both
polities, calling for voluntary association based on the will
of the two peoples. Heightened Jordanian sensitivities and
current US
interests prevent Sharon
from discussing this broader objective with the candor he uses
to discuss West
Bank
settlements.

In
order for Amman to
become the “new Jerusalem,”
Israel
would need to connect the two territories by giving
up the Jordan
River
Valley.

What
was once seen as a vital threat to
Israel —
continuity between Jordan
and the West
Bank —
could be seen by Sharon
as an Israeli interest. No Iraqi army is going to be marching
through Jordan
any time soon. To boot, leaving the
Jordan
River
Valley
will aid Israeli efforts to secure the moral high ground and
alleviate Israeli demographic fears by giving West Bank
Palestinians room to the east for population expansion. In the
context of his disengagement scheme,
Sharon
has also made it clear that Palestinians should seek their
economic prospects in
Jordan
and Egypt.
The fact that there is unlikely to be an eastern separation
barrier between the valley and the hilly areas of the central
West
Bank
adds weight to the idea that Sharon
will give up parts of the
Jordan
River
Valley.In
essence, Ariel Sharon proposes an undeclared waiting game with
Jordan.
He assumes that Israeli withdrawals will put
Israel
in pole position for such a game, in which
Jordan’s
dependence on the international community for economic aid
makes it vulnerable. He further assumes that the national
resolve of Palestinians and Jordanians is weaker than that of
the Jewish people. This last assumption may be somewhat naïve;
Jordanian nationalists are determined to preserve a distinct
entity and have actively been doing so since 1988.[30]
Similarly, Palestinians continue to be committed to the
two-state outcome and a Palestinian state. Misguided
assumptions about one’s opponents are an inherent flaw of
unilateral games — as F. W. de Klerk can testify. A managed
transition might take on a life of its own. Writing before the
current uprising, however, Palestinian intellectual Salim
Tamari perceptively suggested that the “conditions that will
arise from a truncated state will also compel Palestinians to
rethink the pan-Arab component of their culture” and make the
binational idea “increasingly of greater relevance to
Palestine’s
relationship with Jordan,
than its relationship with
Israel.”[31]
Tamari
raises a provocative issue. Ironically, it might well be that
the bubbling binational discourse — which focuses on
Israel-Palestine, not
Jordan —
inadvertently serves Sharon’s
agenda. On the one hand, it undermines the hegemony of the
two-state solution as understood by the Zionist left,
Palestinians and much of the international community.
Moreover, a progressive-led debate on Israeli-Palestinian
binationalism creates important space to consider the
alternative binational option.

It
might well be easier to forge a domestic Israeli consensus
around such an agenda. The Zionist left has traditionally
supported this position. In March 1990, Shimon Peres lamented
that the Likud’s efforts to stymie the
Jordan
option would “open the door to the Palestinians, the PLO and
Arafat.”[32] For the likes of Peres, for whom the two-state
solution is a means to an end — securing a Jewish-majority
democracy in Israel —
yet another political U-turn would be no problem. Perhaps this
explains why Peres gleefully cooperates with
Sharon
in government. On the right, elements of the settler movement
and the Likud support a variant of the idea. When the time
comes, a limited Palestinian entity linked to
Jordan
could quite easily be repackaged as a natural extension of
former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s plan to grant the
Palestinians wide-ranging autonomy on civil matters, yet leave
Israel
in control of West
Bank
and Gaza.
The repackaged Palestinian state and a subsequent
Jordanian-Palestinian union could well emerge as the common
denominator for the Zionist movement.

[1]
Ari Shavit, “Year of Truth,” Haaretz, December
30, 2004.

[2]
Haaretz, July
21, 2004.

[3]
Avi Shlaim, “Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians,”
Logos 3/3 (Summer 2004).

[4]
Quoted in Colin Shindler, The Land Beyond Promise:
Israel,
the Likud and the Zionist Dream
(London:
I.
B. Tauris, 2002), p. 285.

[5]
Haaretz, July
13, 2004.

[6]
Haaretz, December
31, 2004.

[7]
Haaretz, April
13, 2004.

[8]
Ari Shavit, “The Big Freeze,” Haaretz, October
8, 2004.

[9]
Jerusalem Post, September 9, 2004; Yediot Aharonot, April 5,
2004; Haaretz, April 5, 2004; Haaretz, April 13, 2004;
Haaretz, June 7, 2004.

[10]
Jerusalem
Post, May
5, 2004.

[11]
Jerusalem
Post, January
6, 2005.

[12]
Jerusalem
Post, December
31, 2004.

[13]
Ben Kaspit, “Sharon’s
Plan,” Ma’ariv, December
5, 2003.

[14]
Jerusalem
Post, November
25, 2004.

[15]
Makor Rishon, May
14, 2004.

[16]
Azmi Bishara, “Palestinian
State as
Israeli Demand,” al-Ahram Weekly, December
23-29, 2004.

[17]
Ari Shavit, “Apocalypse Now,” Haaretz, January
28, 2005.

[18]
Jerusalem
Post, June
7, 2004.

[19]
Haaretz, April
13, 2004.

[20]
Aluf Benn, “Demographic Politics,” Haaretz, February
2, 2004.

[21]
Uzi Benziman, Sharon,
An Israeli Caesar (New York: Adama Books, 1985), p.
131.

[22]
Makor Rishon, May
14, 2004.

[23]
Gideon Levy, “Don’t Disengage,” Haaretz, April
18, 2004.

[24]
Bret Stephens, “Toilets in the Sand,”
Jerusalem
Post, September
3, 2004.

[25]
David Held, Political Theory and the
Modern
State
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p.
225.

[26]
Joseph Strayer quoted in Ian Lustick,
Unsettled
States,
Disputed
Lands:
Britain
and Ireland,
France
and Algeria,
Israel
and the West
Bank
(Ithaca,
1993), p. 38

[27]
Benziman, pp. 191, 259.

[28]
Washington
Post, January
30, 2004.

[29]
Haaretz, June
4, 2004.

[30]
Marc Lynch, “No Jordan
Option,” Middle
East
Report Online, June 21, 2004.

[31]
Salim Tamari, “The Dubious Lure of Binationalism,” Journal of
Palestine
Studies 30/1 (Autumn 2000).

[32]
Shindler, p. 264.

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