by Avi Shlaim
The very effective support that Hussein received from Israeli officials during his visit to Washington reinforced his determination to move forward swiftly. Rabinovich played a major role in lobbying for Jordanian debt forgiveness by Congress, and Hussein was very appreciative of his efforts. They had a number of extended meetings both in the Four Seasons Hotel and in Hussein’s home on the Potomac outside Washington, DC. Halevy delayed his return home by five days at Hussein’s request in order to assist with the campaign for congressional debt forgiveness. He left Washington aboard the royal aircraft. During the flight Hussein was in high spirits and in a celebratory mood. He was well on the way to having Jordan’s debt written off; his armed forces stood to receive sorely needed spare parts and upgraded equipment, including a first squadron of F-16 fighter aircraft; and his relationship with the American superpower had been repaired. Among the friends Hussein called to thank from his airborne satellite telephone in the presence of Halevy were Rabinovich and Rabin.13
It was Hussein’s nature to act intuitively and sometimes impulsively. Perhaps because of his recent physical ordeals, Queen Noor felt particularly protective of him and worried that he would be let down. They had lived through many failed attempts but they remained cautiously optimistic. Her husband described to her his relationship with Rabin as one between two military men who dealt directly, and often bluntly, with each other. Two weeks after the signing of the Washington Declaration, the royal family went to Aqaba to prepare for the inauguration of the first open crossing point between Jordan and Israel. Christopher flew in for the historic event with several of his officials. Israel sent a large delegation, including Rabin, Peres, army officers and journalists. The telephone lines that the Washington Declaration called for between the two countries had just opened, and Hussein inaugurated them with a conversation with Ezer Weizman, Israel’s President.14
Teams of experts from the two sides got down to work on the sensitive issues of water allocation, border demarcation and mutual security. Most of the meetings took place in the house of Crown Prince Hassan in Aqaba. The Jordanian team included General Ihsan Shurdom, the former head of the air force; Dr Munther Haddadin, a tough-minded water expert; Dr Ahmad Mango, an economist and a senior adviser to Prince Hassan; and Awn Khasawneh, the chief of the royal court and a distinguished jurist who was later appointed to the bench of the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The Jordanians also brought another expert in international law, the Australian-born Professor James Crawford from Cambridge. Crawford had been Khasawneh’s tutor at Cambridge, and he was a leading expert on refugees under international law. Refugees were a particularly complex issue because the great bulk of them were Palestinians, not East Bank Jordanians. Initially, the Israelis wanted no reference whatsoever to the question of refugees. Crawford and Khasawneh sat with Rubinstein, and Khasawneh explained to him that it was impossible for Jordan to enter into a treaty of peace without reference to the question of refugees. Khasawneh spoke for eighteen minutes and when he finished, Crawford said to his former student: ‘Those were the most dramatic eighteen minutes of my whole professional life, including my appearances before the International Court of Justice.’ A compromise was eventually reached, and, though it was not completely satisfactory to the Jordanians, at least it allowed for a reference to the question of refugees in the treaty.15 Discussions on all the issues were intense, and, when the differences had been sufficiently narrowed, the negotiators reported to their principals that the time was ripe for a top-level meeting.16
This took place in Aqaba on 29 September. The most intractable issues were land and water. In the aftermath of 1967 Israel encroached on Jordanian land south of the Dead Sea and built a string of agricultural settlements that specialized in growing flowers. To supply these farms with water, Israel bored wells deep inside Jordanian territory. In total Israel stole more than 380 square kilometres, roughly the area of the Gaza Strip. Jordan demanded the return of all this land and an end to the exploitation of its water resources. At the meeting Rabin proposed to Hussein that Israel would recognize Jordanian sovereignty over the entire area in return for an agreement to lease it back to the agricultural settlements. Hussein did not reject the proposal out of hand and seemed willing to bargain. But the following day Ali Shukri arrived in Jerusalem by helicopter and handed the prime minister an urgent letter from the king with an absolute rejection of his proposal. Hussein stated that unless he received all 380 square kilometres that he demanded of Israel, he would not be able to sign a peace treaty. At first it looked as if all was lost. But Rubinstein and Halevy were dispatched for an intensive round of talks with the king and his brother, and eventually they came up with a saving formula.
The compromise was endorsed by Hussein and Rabin at their meeting in the Hashimiyya Palace west of Amman on 12 October. Rabin assured his host that he did not intend to keep either one inch of Jordanian territory or a drop of Jordan’s water. The two leaders agreed that some minor adjustments could be made to the borders in Wadi Araba by exchanging territory of exactly the same size. Israel would retain Jordanian lands that its farmers had been exploiting in the border zone in return for ceding to Jordan uncultivated land of equal size. The other element of the deal concerned water quotas. Israel offered a package with three components of fifty million cubic metres each. The first fifty would come from what Israel had been using, the second from dams that the two countries were to build jointly, and the third had no specific source.17
The following day Prince Hassan returned to Aqaba and reported to his aides the outcome of the summit. Munther Haddadin was dissatisfied with the water quotas and said so bluntly. The Israelis returned to Aqaba that evening to resume negotiations. No agreement could be reached over the water wells in Wadi Araba. The Israelis wanted to annex them, and, Haddadin, who was more pugnacious than any of the Israeli negotiators, refused to cede Jordanian territory. Negotiations broke up without agreement, and Rabin subsequently complained to Prince Hassan that Dr Haddadin did not appear to want peace.18
Rabin and Hussein had to be called in to resolve outstanding problems one last time. They met again in the Hashimiyya Palace with a large number of aides on the evening of 16 October and worked through the night. Rabin and Hussein went through the agreement paragraph by paragraph, solving problems as they went along. When the border issue came up, they got down on their hands and knees to pore over a huge map laid out on the floor. Together, they worked out the whole line from Eilat and Aqaba in the south to the point of convergence with Syria in the north. They settled with military precision all the border demarcation issues and the land exchanges. They agreed to special regimes for Naharyim in the northern Jordan Valley and for Zofar in Wadi Araba. In other areas Hussein agreed, with characteristic magnanimity, to allow Israeli farmers to continue to use the land they had been cultivating after it reverted to Jordanian sovereignty. As for water, Israel agreed to supply Jordan with fifty million cubic metres a year. This was a net gain for Jordan. It was also agreed that Jordan and Israel would cooperate in finding sources for the supply to Jordan of an additional quantity of fifty million cubic metres of water of drinkable standard. The two countries undertook to alleviate the water shortage by developing new water resources, by preventing contamination and by reducing wastage. In the south, Israel was to retain the use of the wells in the areas that reverted to Jordanian sovereignty. The security article of the treaty was unique in that it did not entail the involvement of the UN or any other third party. There was a mutual commitment not to enter hostile coalitions, to combat terrorism and to strive for regional security in the spirit of the Helsinki agreements in Europe. Israel’s commitment to respect Jordan’s special role in the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem was incorporated into the treaty. Finally, the two parties agreed to work together to alleviate the position of the Palestinian refugees who had found refuge in Jordan.19
Hussein and Rabin worked until 4.00 a.m., then took a rest while the officials tied up the loose ends
and produced the final draft. Khasawneh was the first person the king saw after the initialling of the treaty. He was sitting in the Hashimiyya Palace reading a newspaper, as was his habit in the morning. He invited Khasawneh to come in and sit next to him. Hussein noticed that Khasawneh had been unhappy about the way the meeting went the night before. He said, ‘Please don’t think that I entered into this treaty of peace for my own sake. I am but a transient person. When I came back after the treatment for my illness in America, and I saw how the people of Jordan came out to greet me, I thought it my duty to do everything within my power to bring security to them. This is why I concluded this treaty.’ The king then started thanking Khasawneh and said, ‘I will be for ever indebted to you until the day I die for what you did in negotiating this treaty.’ Khasawneh replied, ‘Your Majesty, I am a civil servant and I only did my duty.’20 In the days after the marathon session Hussein was in an elated and triumphant mood. Everyone who saw him commented on how happy he looked and on the strong sense of satisfaction he radiated at having overcome all the obstacles and accomplished his mission.21
The treaty of peace between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the State of Israel was signed on 26 October 1994 at a border point in Wadi Araba that had been a minefield just a few days before. The treaty was signed by prime ministers Abdul Salam Majali and Itzhak Rabin with President Clinton as a witness. A large number of foreign dignitaries attended the ceremony, including the foreign ministers of America, Russia and Egypt, and representatives from several other Arab countries. The event was telecast to a vast audience around the world. It was the second treaty concluded between Israel and an Arab state in fifteen years and the first to be signed in the region. Itzhak Rabin, who had displayed by his body language so much discomfort when shaking Arafat’s hand in the White House a year earlier, was now in a positively festive mood. He and Hussein seemed to enjoy the carnival-like setting as thousands of balloons were released into the air, and senior Israeli and Jordanian officers exchanged gifts. Rabin said it was time to make the desert bloom, and Hussein promised a warm peace, unlike the cold peace with Egypt. The public ceremony was the culmination of thirty-one years of secret dialogue across the battle lines.
The Jordan–Israel treaty carried the potential for building peace in the full sense of the word. Jordan was the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but in one respect it was the first: no other Arab country preceded it in offering a warm peace. The two countries exchanged ambassadors: Professor Shimon Shamir, an eminent historian of the Middle East from Tel Aviv University, was appointed as Israel’s first ambassador to Amman, while Marwan Muasher, an accomplished and forward-looking diplomat, was appointed as Jordan’s first ambassador to Tel Aviv. Shamir, who had served as Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, emphasized the uniqueness of the Jordanian approach to peace. The peace with Egypt was concluded under the pressure of renewed hostilities, in the teeth of opposition from the other Arab countries and in a world dominated by the cold war. Security arrangements in Sinai were consequently at the centre of this peace treaty, while normalization was merely a bargaining chip for the Egyptians. The peace treaty with Jordan, on the other hand, was concluded after years of quiet dialogue and tacit understandings, with legitimacy provided by Madrid and Oslo, and in a world whose beacons were globalization, interdependence and the free market. Accordingly, the treaty said little about security and a great deal about economic cooperation. The word ‘cooperation’ appeared twenty times in the text. Jordan’s leaders preferred the term peacemaking to normalization because it denoted a joint enterprise for the benefit of both countries.
Hussein saw peace as the crowning achievement of his long reign and hoped to see its fruits in his own lifetime. Whenever it was suggested to him that the pace of progress in peacemaking should be controlled, he replied that, on the contrary, cooperation should be accelerated and expanded in order to consolidate the peace. He realized that the peace treaty took his people by surprise, that many of his Palestinian subjects found it difficult to accept, and that the Islamic and radical opposition would do everything in their power to subvert it. But he also hoped that, in the final analysis, the peace settlement would be judged by its practical results. Hence the importance he attached to turning the peace with Israel into an economic success story whose benefits would reach the ordinary man in the street.22 The cold peace that characterized the relations between Egypt and Israel was alien to his entire way of thinking:
I can’t understand the term cold peace. I don’t understand what it means. You either have war, or a state of no war and no peace, or you have peace. And peace is by its very nature a resolution of all problems. It is the tearing down of barriers between people. It is people coming together, coming to know one another. It is the children of martyrs on both sides embracing. It is soldiers who fought each other coming together and exchanging reminiscences about the impossible conditions they had faced in a totally different atmosphere. It is people getting together and doing business. Real peace is not between governments but between individuals who discover that they have the same worries, the same concerns, that they have suffered in the same way, and that there is something they can both put into creating a relationship that would benefit all of them.23
Progress in peacemaking did not match this great vision. None the less, the peace treaty with Israel yielded a number of immediate benefits for Jordan. First and foremost, Jordan recovered its territory and water resources, and firmly marked its international frontiers. By signing the treaty, Israel formally recognized Jordan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence. Israel also undertook to refrain from the forcible transfer of population from the territory under its control into Jordan, thereby laying to rest the threat implicit in the slogan ‘Jordan is Palestine’ – converting Jordan into an alternative homeland for the Palestinians. The Jordanian negotiators had deliberately inserted a clause prohibiting ‘transfer’ because the treaty constituted a legal barrier against this threat.24 The Israelis understood that ‘transfer’ was a strategic concern about the very survival of the kingdom and were therefore willing to give the necessary commitment.25 Peres explicitly acknowledged this when he stated that ‘Jordan is Jordan, and Palestine is Palestine.’ Significantly, Ariel Sharon, the most prominent advocate of the idea, abstained from voting rather than rejecting the treaty when it was placed before the Knesset. Evidently, he did not regard it as the definitive end of ‘Jordan is Palestine.’ However, after the treaty’s ratification, the idea faded from the mainstream of Israeli political discourse.26 The Knesset endorsed the peace treaty with Jordan by a majority of 105 to 3, with 6 abstentions. In December 1994 Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud, visited Hussein in Amman. Hussein sought and received an assurance that the Likud did not support the ‘Jordan is Palestine’ policy. Netanyahu assured Hussein that the Likud fully endorsed the peace treaty and were committed to the country’s integrity and stability.27
Second, by moving fast to make peace with Israel ahead of progress on the Israeli–Palestinian track, Hussein restored Jordanian–American relations to their pre-Gulf War level. The material benefits, in terms of debt forgiveness and economic and military aid, were considerable. More generally, the peace partnership with Israel upgraded the importance of Jordan in American eyes. Because of its small size and limited resources Jordan was not regarded as a major strategic asset for America in the Middle East. The peace treaty with Israel made Jordan a more valued ally for America and a model for peaceful coexistence and stability.28 Clinton was the first American president to visit Jordan since 1974. Following the signing ceremony in the desert, Clinton appeared before a joint session of the Jordanian parliament in Amman. He made a stirring speech, promising that America would never let Jordan down; that it would meet its military needs; and that it would contribute to the development of the Rift Valley. He also paid homage to the Hashemite dynasty and to its services to the Arab cause.
The peace treaty c
ertainly served Hussein’s dynastic interests. It restored the alliance with a superpower; it revived the strategic understanding with Israel; and it underpinned the centrality of Jordan in regional politics. Hussein had played for big stakes. He signed the peace treaty not simply in order to recover territory and water resources but to protect his kingdom against a takeover bid by his Palestinian opponents and to forestall the emergence of an Israeli–Palestinian axis. At one stroke he turned the tables on his radical Palestinian rivals and reasserted the Hashemite dynasty’s position as Israel’s natural ally in the region. The alliance with Israel could also serve as a deterrent to aggression by Jordan’s Arab neighbours, especially Syria. Most crucially, the peace with Israel went hand in hand with, and indeed made possible, the alliance with the United States. By signing the peace treaty Hussein in effect based the defence of the realm on two pillars, Israel and the United States. It updated and brought into the open the political strategy of Hussein’s grandfather, Abdullah I, and was a dynastic move of momentous importance. There was, however, an internal price to pay for this radical realignment of Jordan’s foreign policy.