Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its cagey monarch, King Hussein Ibn Talal, have been waging an uphill battle against a paradox.
On the one hand, like a menacing khamsin sandstorm, the uprising has threatened since last December to billow eastward and tear apart the carefully woven ethnic patchwork that is the Hashemite Kingdom. Home to about one-third of the world's Palestinians, tens of thousands of whom still live in refugee camps, the East Bank of the Jordan is almost as natural a target for the frustrated demands of Palestinian nationalism as is Israel. Hussein's kingdom was engulfed in chaos once before when the Hashemites and Palestinian fedayeen battled in the 1970-71 civil war; preventing recurrence has been imperative.
At the same time, to hermetically seal Jordan from the Palestinians of the West Bank and, in a larger sense, to remove the kingdom from the politics of Palestine, could be almost as disastrous to Jordan's fortunes. For more than 20 years, Jordan has exploited its peculiar demography and proximity to Israel to carve out a strategic niche for itself as the indispensable Arab address for talking peace with the Jewish state. Jordan has reaped handsome rewards by jealously guarding its role as the potential peacemaker. Indeed, no other country receives both U.S. aid because of its contribution to the peace process and Arab aid in recognition of its confrontation with Israel.
The Palestinian uprising jeopardized this careful and profitable balancing act. If, as pundits are wont to say, the uprising has revived the intercommunal conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, it has diminished the vitality of the traditional interstate conflict between Israel and its neighboring Arab states as well. As a result, making peace with Jordan becomes less possible, less urgent, and, therefore, less prized.
In sum, Hussein's dilemma of recent months has been to keep his distance, but not too much distance--to avoid both intimacy irrelevance.
An iron hand at home
In its early stages, Jordan weathered the competing challenges of the intifada-as the uprising is called in Arabic (and now in Hebrew as well)-with a mix of tactical pliancy on the inter-Arab level and benign but unyielding firmness on the domestic front. Indeed, that is much the same formula its monarch, Hussein, has deftly used to stay alive and on the throne for more than three decades. While Israel daily battles--both physically and psychologically--the uprising, Jordan has been able to maintain a safe distance. Its streets are tense but not turbulent, its mosques crowed but not clamorous, its refugee camps rumbling but not rock-strewn.
In the early days of the uprising, the Jordanian government set the tone for dealing with unacceptable behavior by arresting several dozen political agitators, including members of George Habash's radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Some demonstrations of solidarity in support of the uprising, including, sit-ins and a rally of Islamic fundamentalists at Jordan University in Amman, have been permitted. Many others have been banned. Despite some winter fears of a mirror uprising in places like Irbid and Zarqa, the eastern
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