Hussein Prods the PLO

Frustrated, bitter and deeply uneasy at what the future could bring, King Hussein of Jordan has announced that he is severing his country’s remaining administrative and legal ties with the West Bank--the territory that was unilaterally annexed by Jordan 38 years ago and was subsequently lost to Israel in 1967’s Six-Day War. With this action Hussein appears at once to have resigned his prospective role as spokesman for Palestinian interests, given Israel’s right-wingers a major boost in that country’s scheduled Nov. 1 elections, and--most important in terms of his own security--cleared the way for an eventual full separation of Jordan from the West Bank and its 800,000 Palestinian inhabitants.

To be sure, the ambiguous language of Hussein’s statement leaves various doors ajar. For now the king has announced only that he is dissolving the powerless lower house of Jordan’s parliament, which nominally represented Palestinian interests, and is ending a poorly funded West Bank development program that wasn’t going anywhere anyway. He may move further shortly to cut off other funds to the West Bank, including salaries for teachers and local officials. But for now he has held back on taking the most dramatic steps that are open to him. He has not revoked the passports of West Bankers, nor has he closed the bridges connecting the two banks of the Jordan River.

Hussein acted after concluding that the U.S.-sponsored peace process was at a dead end and that in the view of most Palestinians and other Arab governments the Palestine Liberation Organization now has the lead political role on the West Bank. He acted as well at a time when the eight-month-old uprising in the occupied territories has prompted more talk among Israeli hard-liners that Jordan is the Palestinian state. Hussein’s kingdom is in fact 60% or more Palestinian. Continued unrest on the West Bank could send many of these people crossing into Jordan. Hussein addressed that point directly: “Jordan,” he said, “is not Palestine.” By seeming to renounce Jordan’s claim to the West Bank, the king has at least set the legal basis for closing the border to prevent such an inundation.

In announcing his own apparent withdrawal from the West Bank, Hussein has openly challenged the PLO to try to do better than he was able to do, both in political organization and--even harder--in keeping the area economically afloat. Meanwhile, the right-wing Likud faction in Israel has been given a political windfall. The key foreign-policy plank in the Labor opposition’s platform has for years been the “Jordanian option”--the hope if not quite the prospect that negotiations with Hussein could produce a reasonable territorial compromise and bring peace. That option seems to be vanishing, leaving matters pretty much up to the Likud and the PLO--neither of which has ever shown much interest in either reason or compromise when it comes to discussing the political future of the West Bank.