Lion of Jordan (96 page)

The rise to power of Binyamin Netanyahu in May 1996 marked a break with the pragmatism that characterized Labour's approach towards the Arab world and the reassertion of an ideological hard line. It was back to the iron-wall strategy, and with a vengeance.
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Netanyahu viewed Israel's relations with the Arab world as one of permanent conflict, as a never-ending struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. His image of the Arabs was consistently and comprehensively negative, and it did not admit the possibility of diversity or change. Much of Netanyahu's vehemence and venom was reserved for the Palestinians. He launched a fierce assault on the notion that the Palestinian problem constituted the core and heart of the Middle East conflict. For him the Palestinian problem was not a genuine problem but an artificially manufactured one. He denied that the Palestinians had a right to national self-determination and argued that the primary cause of tension in the Middle East was inter-Arab rivalry.

Netanyahu denounced the Oslo Accord as incompatible with Israel's security and with the historic right of the Jewish people to the whole Land of Israel. He had led the right-wing opposition to the agreement that was signed on 28 September 1995, popularly known as Oslo II. It provided for further Israeli troop withdrawal beyond the Gaza and Jericho areas and the transfer of legislative authority to a democratically elected Palestinian Council. As soon as he got the chance, Netanyahu set about arresting and derailing the process that the Oslo Accords had set in motion. By making it clear that he remained absolutely opposed to Palestinian statehood, he all but pulled the keystone from the arch of peace. His aim was to preserve direct and indirect Israeli rule over the Palestinian areas by every means at his disposal. The main elements of his strategy were to lower Palestinian expectations, to weaken Yasser
Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, to suspend the further redeployments stipulated in the Oslo Accords, and to order the construction of 2,000 new homes in the Jordan Valley.

In relation to the Arab states, and especially Syria, Netanyahu was similarly determined not to proceed any further down the path of land for peace. He believed that his tough position would compel the Arab states themselves to compromise further on their rights. He stated openly that he was going to change the rules of the game. But his strategy was fraught with danger because he had no experience in policy-making and no understanding of the limits of military power. The assumption that the Arabs would suddenly abandon their long struggle for the recovery of occupied land was not simply naive but also provocative. It created a dangerous tide in the relations between Israel and the Arab world. The programme of his government, and especially the building of new settlements on the West Bank, was widely interpreted in the Arab world as a declaration of war on the peace process.

Netanyahu did not command much respect even inside his own party. Senior members of the Likud regarded him as an intellectual lightweight, as glib and superficial, as little more than a purveyor of sound bites for American television. Netanyahu had been Israel's representative to the UN and deputy foreign minister, but in both posts he was more of a PR man than a policy-maker. He was that very rare thing – a genuine charlatan. As prime minister Netanyahu was not as bad as people thought he would be when he was competing for the top post – he was much, much worse. Within a very short time he succeeded in alienating most of his countrymen and all of Israel's allies abroad. Relations with Jordan became strained soon after his accession to power. At first criticism of the new Israeli prime minister was much more muted in the Jordanian media than in the rest of the Arab world. Hussein counselled his fellow Arabs against pessimism and against pushing Israel into a siege mentality. A flare-up of Israeli–Palestinian violence, he feared, could spill over into the kingdom or even revive the dreaded theory that ‘Jordan is Palestine.' On the other hand, Netanyahu's reluctance to negotiate with Arafat inspired speculation about a Likud-sponsored ‘Jordanian option'. Hussein tried to scotch these speculations by stating plainly that Jordan would ‘never be an alternative for the Palestinian leadership under any conditions'. He wanted consultation and coordination with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to protect
Jordan's interest in the West Bank; he was not interested in negotiating instead of the Palestinians or in assuming responsibility for settling the Palestinian problem.
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Netanyahu tried to play off the Jordanians and the Palestinians against one another until one of his moves seriously backfired. The spark that set off the explosion was the opening, on the night of 25 September 1996, of an ancient tunnel close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. Of no great import in itself, the new gate to the second century BC tunnel constituted a symbolic and psychological affront to the Palestinians and a blatant Israeli violation of the pledge to resolve the dispute over Jerusalem through negotiations, not via the fait accompli.
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By giving the order to blast open a new entrance to the 2,000 year-old tunnel, Netanyahu also blasted away the last faint hopes of a peaceful dialogue with the Palestinians. The action set off a massive outburst of Palestinian anger and ignited the flames of confrontation. There was large-scale protest and rioting that got out of hand and provoked the Palestinian police to turn their guns on the Israeli soldiers. The violence intensified and engulfed the entire West Bank and Gaza. In three days of bloody clashes 14 Israeli solders and 54 Palestinians died. It was the most violent confrontation since the worst days of the intifada. The Israeli public was shocked by the scenes of Palestinian policemen opening fire on their Israeli counterparts. But most outside observers regarded Netanyahu's policy of blocking the peace process as the underlying cause of this costly and bloody conflict.

Hussein was furious. Netanyahu's action contravened Article 9 of the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, which says that ‘in accordance with the Washington Declaration, Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem.' The injury was compounded by the fact that, only a few days before, Dore Gold, a senior aide to Netanyahu, had met with Hussein in Amman but said not a word about the tunnel. As a result of the meeting, rumours spread that Hussein had been privy to the plan and had approved it. Hussein followed the recommendation of his advisers and adopted a very tough line with Netanyahu over this issue.
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Attempts by Netanyahu to renew contact were rebuffed by the king. Efraim Halevy was serving at that time as Israel's ambassador to the European Union in Brussels. At Netanyahu's request, Halevy paid a secret visit to the Jordanian capital and was able to obtain the consent of the king to receive two
envoys of Netanyahu and thus to reactivate the connection between the two principals.
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A summit meeting in Washington was hastily called by President Clinton on 2 October in an effort to calm the situation and to prevent the complete unravelling of the peace process. President Mubarak declined the invitation. Hussein, Arafat and Netanyahu all responded to the call, but the meeting ended without any agreement being reached. All the Arab leaders expressed their disappointment with the Israeli prime minister, but Hussein's disappointment was the most poignant because he was the only Arab who had not joined in the chorus of denunciation following Netanyahu's victory at the polls. There was a personal and a political aspect to the king's disappointment. His relations with Rabin had been based on mutual trust, and he had hoped to develop a similar relationship with Netanyahu. But he discovered the hard way that Netanyahu was devious, dishonest and completely unreliable. Netanyahu posed a serious threat to the king's plan to proceed step by step towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East. The king therefore spoke very sternly to Netanyahu at the White House, as the press reported at the time and as he confirmed later: ‘I spoke of the arrogance of power. I spoke of the need to treat people equally. I spoke of the need to make progress.' Netanyahu said nothing, but, as they were leaving, he went up to Hussein and said: ‘I am determined to surprise you.'
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Hussein's list of Israeli transgressions was leaked to Thomas Friedman at the
New York Times
: the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements; Israeli-imposed curfews on Palestinians that made it nearly impossible for them to work; the lack of a timetable for withdrawing Israeli troops from Hebron and starting negotiations on final status; the travesty of the tunnel; the persistence of Israel's fortress mentality when the only real security could come from mutual respect. ‘I speak for myself, for Itzhak Rabin, a man whom I had the great pride to call my friend, and for all peoples who benefit from peace,' Hussein said to Netanyahu. ‘All this good will is being lost. We are at the edge of the abyss, and regardless of our best efforts, we might be just about to fall into it – all of us.'
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It was heartbreaking for Hussein to watch all that he had built disintegrate so quickly. He was less ready to stick his neck out in defence of normalization with Israel in the aftermath of the bloody clashes in
Jerusalem and the unproductive summit meeting in Washington. In Jordan the middle classes joined the Islamists and the Palestinian radicals in opposition to normalization. Thirty-eight groups, representing a wide range of political parties, professional associations and nongovernmental organizations, signed a statement calling for resistance to ‘all forms of normalization with the Zionist enemy'. Opinion polls reflected the deepening disillusion with the peace treaty at all levels of Jordanian society, and not just because of Netanyahu's actions. In one taken shortly after the Washington Declaration in July 1994, 82 per cent of Jordanians polled believed that the economy would benefit from peace. In another, in January 1996, 47 per cent of those polled felt that the economy had actually deteriorated in the first year of peace.
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Feeling against Israel was running high throughout the Arab world, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. The third Middle East and North Africa Economic Conference, MENA III, was scheduled to open in Cairo in November. For a while it looked as if the conference would not convene at all. President Mubarak threatened to cancel it if Israel continued to renege on its commitments. He relented only under intense US pressure. MENA III opened in Cairo on 13 November in a climate of palpable hostility to the
muharwaluun
. The
muharwaluun
– those who ‘rush' or ‘scurry' – had become a key concept in Arab political discourse. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani coined the term after the handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and Arafat that he interpreted as a humiliating act of surrender by the entire Arab nation. Qabbani poured his anger into a poem that he called
Al-Muharwaluun
:

We stood in columns
like sheep before slaughter
we ran, breathless
We scrambled to kiss
the shoes of the killers.

The rush to normalize relations with the Zionist enemy was now widely derided by those who saw it as a mark of Arab weakness. Business was at the heart of this normalization, as was evident from these annual conferences. The original aim was to forge a regional economic order of which Israel would be an integral part and economic cooperation was expected to consolidate Middle East peace. At the first two MENA conferences, Israel had led the way in fostering Peres's vision of a new
Middle East that incorporated the Jewish state. Hussein repeatedly promised his people that normalization would produce prosperity. Arafat used to say that, given the right economic climate, he would turn Palestine into a new Singapore. Another major argument advanced by the ‘scurriers' was that Arab conciliation would encourage Israel to complete the peace process on the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese fronts. Arab countries not involved directly in the conflict also accepted this logic. Morocco, Tunisia and Qatar decided to open liaison bureaux in Israel. Qatar even agreed to supply Israel with natural gas.

The critics of the ‘scurriers', on the other hand, argued that the Arabs should withhold the economic rewards of normalization as their last remaining means of pressure. Saudi Arabia refused to lift the boycott of Israel until a comprehensive peace had been achieved. Netanyahu's election tilted the balance in favour of the critics. He was held up as the embodiment of just how wrong the ‘scurriers' had been. The critics asked: ‘Why should we take part in an international economic gathering supposedly designed to underpin regional peace and security with economic cooperation when Israel rejects peace?' Jordan and the Palestinian Authority only sent medium-level delegations. Qatar delayed the opening of its liaison office in Tel Aviv and suspended her natural gas deal. Other governments told their delegations to make no deals with the Israelis. The Egyptians made it plain that since Israel was going back on the peace process, the Arabs would go back on the basic objectives of MENA I and II, and turn MENA III into a forum for inter-Arab business alone.
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Bilateral relations between Jordan and Israel fell after the tunnel crisis to their lowest ebb since the treaty was signed. At the popular level, passive scepticism turned into active opposition. At the official level, patience with Israel gave way to a more assertive articulation of Arab and Palestinian positions. Strong American and Arab reaction to ‘the tunnel uprising' compelled Netanyahu to give way on Hebron, the West Bank city where a small community of militant Jewish settlers ensconced themselves in the middle of a large Palestinian population. Hussein played a modest role in bringing the two warring sides to an agreement. He shuttled between Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and Arafat in Gaza until a compromise was reached. The Hebron Protocol was signed on 15 January 1997. It was a significant step in the Middle East peace process, the first agreement signed by the Likud government and the
Palestinians. The protocol divided Hebron into two zones to be governed by different security arrangements. The Palestinian zone covered about 80 per cent of Hebron, while the Jewish zone covered the other 20 per cent. Palestinian critics pointed out that this formula for coexistence gave the 450 Jewish settlers (who constituted 0.3 per cent of the population) the choicest 20 per cent of the town's commercial centre, whereas the 160,000 Palestinians got 80 percent subject to numerous restrictions and limitations. The Hebron Protocol, however, also committed Israel to three further redeployments on the West Bank over the next eighteen months.