With palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei' threatening to unilaterally establish a bi-national state in "including all the lands of historical Palestine," and the Roadmap clearly on its inevitable path to the recycling bin, I thought now might be an interesting time to bring up an old idea I've long supported with the intention of, well, re-examining it in a critical light, shall we say.
The idea: "Jordan is Palestine." The argument: is here, among other places, and has been promoted over the years by a number of right-leaning supporters of Israel, including me. The problem: I've recently discovered that, over fifteen years ago, the idea was convincingly debunked by an unlikely authority -- Daniel Pipes -- in an unlikely place -- Commentary Magazine.
I don't usually relish changing my own positions on matters of such serious consequence. And I'm not saying I'm buying the entire package without a pointed question or two. Or three. But if you haven't seen it before, I'd recommend you give this article, co-authored with Adam Garfinkle, a look. If for no other reason, it's worth a read just to see what Daniel Pipes was thinking and writing fifteen years ago (he has reiterated his support for his position, by the way, as recently as last February).
Context: keep in mind that at that time Saddam Hussein had not yet invaded Kuwait. Yasser Arafat was cooling his jets in Tunis, along with the rest of his PLO cronies. Oslo was just a city in Norway, Yitzhak Rabin was Minister of Defense and Arik Sharon was Minister of Industry and Trade (and a vocal proponent of the "Jordan is Palestine" meme). There was no peace treaty between Israel and Jordan and no one, but no one, was talking seriously about an "independent Palestinian state," least of all King Husayn. In fact, the King had just decided to cut the West Bank loose, renouncing the rights he and his grandfather had asserted for decades to the land across the river from his kingdom. Oh, and the Soviet Union was still a competitor for the allegiance of Middle Eastern countries. It was a different world in so many ways. Osama who?
Back then, here is how Pipes and Garfinkle summarized the "Jordan is Palestine" argument:
Spelled out in more detail, the Jordan-is-Palestine slogan holds that Palestine includes the territory on the far side of the Jordan River and therefore Jordan is the Palestinian state-even if it lacks a Palestinian ruler. Instead of two peoples fighting for one land, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs are portrayed as controlling different territories-Jews in the western portion of Palestine, now called Israel, and Arabs in the eastern part of Palestine, now called Jordan.
The purpose of this change in nomenclature is to undercut any Arab claim to sovereignty over territory Israel now holds. It also makes the Palestinians look greedy; they already have a whole loaf and they want another. It implies that while Palestinians should leave Israel alone, they should feel free to make changes in the Hashemite Kingdom. It also suggests that, because Israel has at least as valid a claim to the east bank as the Palestinians do to the west, the granting of the eastern part of Palestine to Arabs represents a form of Zionist generosity. Finally, it implies that the Israelis may be justified in expelling Arabs to Jordan, their true Palestinian patrimony. In this way, the kindred notions of Jordan-is-Palestine and Greater Israel join the demographic and political issues facing Israel today to create the political agenda of the Israeli right.
Their rebuttal runs along the following lines:
1. Throughout history, the Jordan River has been recognized more often than not as a boundary in both theory and practice, even if at times the boundary was ignored.
There are a lot of interesting historical facts in this part of the article, and they're presented in a way that demonstrates how geography can and has been used to promote political agendas from time immemorial. Notable, however, is one truth that supporters of palestinian "rights" to their alleged "ancestral homeland" would prefer we forget:
Not only did the border to-and-fro during Roman and Muslim rule, but Palestine never constituted a single political unit between the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in 68 C.E. and 1917 - with the one exception of the Crusades. Therefore, it is nonsense to speak of "historic" Palestine as if it were a single long-standing polity.
So this argument cuts two ways.
2. Although the British Mandate did include both sides of the Jordan, it did so for only eight months.
My response to this one was a big "so what?" Britain's mandate included the entire area and if the British chose to lop off three-quarters of it several months later, turn it over to the Hashemites and declare it Judenrein, that hardly obscures the fact that it was part of the Mandate in the first place. This is a weak link, in my opinion, but there's more.
3. The Jordan River may seem like nothing more than a creek in many places today, but before the exploitation of water resources began in earnest upstream, it was a mighty torrent, wild and generally impassable. Even today, it remains unpredictable, subject to sudden changes of course and flooding, rendering its banks inhospitable to settlement.
Again, Pipes and Garfinkle present lots of fascinating detail to back this up. Mostly, it seems to reinforce point number 1 by providing a logistical underpinning to the political recognition of the river as a boundary. Again, though, this argument cuts two ways when we bring it into the present. It would appear to make as least as much sense that such an intimidating force of nature should form the boundary between two entities with irreconcilable differences, but that, of course, is adding the option of a palestinian state on the West Bank into the mix -- an option summarily dismissed in this article.
4. While both palestinians and Jordanians have at times used the "Jordan is Palestine" meme to their own ends, those ends are incompatible with the continuing existence and security of the Jewish State.
In other words, the argument can also be used to support the conclusion that the Kingdom of Jordan should rightfully extend all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Or that the "State of Palestine" should extend from the sea all the way to the borders of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And then there's the danger that a merger of Jordan and "Palestine" would result in a takeover of the relatively moderate and pro-Western Hashemite monarchy by a PLO terrorist regime. Or force Jordan into a rabid anti-Israel and anti-American posture in its own defense. This was a pragmatic argument, and these factors may not loom as large today as they did in 1988, but they're still in play.
Pipes and Garfinkle summarize their conclusions thusly:
The Jordan-is-Palestine idea is not only historically wrong, legally superficial, geographically ignorant, and politically procrustean, but its implementation would be extremely dangerous. Espousal of this idea by people who genuinely care about Israel's security, and who long to make the conflict less intractable by widening the territorial scope for its solution, does not reduce the danger it poses. The true dimensions of the Jordan-is-Palestine folly begin to come into view when one combines the specter of an isolated, internally divided, and weakened Israel with a radical Soviet-supported Filastin on the east bank. This is where the path of Jordan-is-Palestine leads, and it is a direction Israel should not travel.
Strong language. And, as I said, I still have questions. The Soviets are out of the picture, for one thing, and that's no minor distinction. And how exactly is a radical Filastin on the west bank preferable to a radical Filastin on the east bank?
But in the end, I think the overall argument is persuasive. Behind the specific facts and figures lurks a more basic theme, which is that clever arguments may win debate points but will never win over world opinion, nor justify actions with questionable moral and historical bases. Transfer is transfer, however you define the territory from which and to which it occurs. So I'm beginning to suspect some of us who previously found a bit of comfort in the "Jordan is Palestine" mantra whenever the "T" word came up may well have to look elsewhere.
