Shine - King Abdullah fears the Arab Spring

Chaim Shine
Israel Hayom
13 September '11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=481

King Abdullah II of Jordan, addressing recent developments in the region, claimed this week that Israel is worse off in the wake of the Arab Spring. "The futures of Jordan and Palestine are more certain and solid than that of Israel," Abdullah said, adding that Israelis are the ones who are frightened nowadays. I tried really hard to find these frightened Israelis on the street, but could not.

The Talmud says that every man reveals his heart's ruminations when he speaks, and indeed, King Abdullah is scared. He fears the possibility that the small emirate received by his great-grandfather King Abdullah I from the British, in recognition of his cooperation with them against the Turks during World War I, could disappear. A political flood is sweeping the Arab world toward absolute chaos, and no one knows where it will end.

Until 1948, the population of Jordan was composed of half a million Bedouin tribesmen, inhabiting vast swathes of desert. To this day, Bedouin tribesman constitute the anchor of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, serving in its army and security forces. The Bedouin's loyalty is the only thing guaranteeing the royal family's continued rule. But this is a conditional loyalty, similar to that of Saddam Hussein, Mubarak and Gadhafi loyalists.

After the War of Independence, in which the Jordanian army took an active role in the coordinated attack by the Arab states against Israel, the cease-fire lines were established. Those lines gave birth to the area known as the West Bank, which Israelis call Judea and Samaria, which Jordan controlled and annexed in 1950. Only two states officially recognized the annexation: the U.K. and Pakistan. Until the Six Day War, Palestinian residents of Judea and Samaria lived under Jordanian rule. They joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who crossed over into Jordan during the War of Independence, in the hopes of returning to Israel, from which they fled, following promises by their leaders that Israel would soon be destroyed.



Until the Six Day War, Jordan was the state of Palestinians who lived within the kingdom and in the West Bank. The Palestinians held Jordanian passports and participated in Jordan's political processes. They had no other state. If Jordan had been a democratic state, and not one controlled by the royal family with the support of an army of Bedouin loyalists, there is no doubt that the Palestinian majority would have taken power through elections and set up a real Palestinian state - a state with territorial contiguity and access to the sea, and not an artificial "state" squeezed between Israel and Jordan.

King Abdullah is afraid that the Arab Spring will reach his country. He is clever enough to understand that the expected recognition of a Palestinian state at the U.N. this month is just the beginning of a larger maneuver, in which the Palestinians will demand control of Jordan as well. Pressure from the "Palestinian state" on Jordan will be heavy, stirring up significant unrest inside Jordan, which the kingdom will not survive. The fall of the dictatorships in the Arab world cannot pass over Jordan, which is a dictatorship in every sense of the word, even if the king is affable and British-educated, thanks to his mother, the daughter of a British officer.

The lengthy peace between Israel and Jordan has been the result of a clear set of common interests, at the Palestinians' expense. King Abdullah did not want them. He needed to ease the demographic pressure on himself, and Israel agreed to deal with the Palestinians and enable them to live reasonable and normal lives within the restraints of its security needs and a historical connection to Judea and Samaria.

King Abdullah is now stirring up hostility towards Israel, as is commonly done in the Arab world, in the hope that hatred for Israel will create internal unity. He is mistaken. Tightening the rope will cause it to tear, and the Hashemite Kingdom will fall and those who truly deserve it - the Palestinians - will take over. Then it will be possible to reach a real peace between us and the Palestinians. Two states for two peoples: Israel for the Jews and Jordan for the Palestinians.

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