King Hussein Has Cut His Losses, but Not Without Risk

For a man who has built a reputation on his Darwinian sense of survival, King Hussein’s declaration renouncing any territorial claims to the West Bank is chock-full of risks and uncertainties.

Almost across the board, analysts agree that Hussein’s statements should not be taken at face value. Rather than a strategic move to divorce himself from the Palestine issue, common wisdom holds that the monarch’s decision to sever “legal and administrative ties” with the occupied territories is a shrewd tactical ploy to outflank the Palestine Liberation Organization.

After years of beseeching Yasser Arafat to join him as junior partner in the peace process, the king now seems to be foisting the PLO into the limelight of Middle East politics, challenging it to deliver liberation for the Palestinians on its own. Though he says that he is prepared to accept a PLO-governed Palestinian state in land he once ruled, few believe that Hussein expects the PLO to succeed.

On the contrary, one envisions the king ruefully waiting for Arafat to fail, at which time Jordan would once again offer its aid to the Palestinian cause. As a leading Amman newspaper editorialized last week, Jordan “will support the PLO as long as it faithfully and honestly serves the Palestine question. But we will not do so if the PLO becomes a burden on the Palestinian people.”

But Hussein’s gambit is not risk-free. On the contrary, by ceding center stage to Arafat, the king has sacrificed the political initiative to other players in the peace process. He is also wagering that none of the three following scenarios come to pass:

--He is gambling that the United States does not open its own dialogue with the PLO. On the surface, Hussein’s recent declarations undermine a longstanding premise of Washington’s Middle East policy, namely that Jordan is the primary Arab partner in the peace process. A new U.S. Administration, eager for visible movement in the peace process but lacking a ready Palestinian partner, will be advised that the only avenue for progress is in talking with Arafat, if only to challenge him to engage in direct talks with Israel.

If Hussein’s long-range plan is to marginalize the PLO, a U.S.-PLO dialogue could be catastrophic. Arafat would probably pocket the gain of U.S. recognition and use it to drive a wedge between Washington and Israel, undermining Jordan’s role in the process.

Most likely Hussein is betting that a new President will not abandon America’s 13-year-old commitment against negotiating with the PLO. But in so doing he may be underestimating every President’s thirst for the peace process while overestimating the historical memory of a new Administration.

--The king has wagered that he can hold his own in a showdown with Israel’s Likud bloc. By renouncing territorial claims to the West Bank less than 100 days before Israel’s parliamentary elections, Hussein effectively torpedoed the Labor Party’s basic peace strategy, the “Jordanian option,” and boosted the already promising electoral prospects of Yitzhak Shamir and other hard-liners.

In snubbing Shimon Peres, his long-time tacit partner in the peace process, Hussein may have thought it wise to signal to Likud that he was not “Labor’s boy.” In that case he would be following the lead of others who have recently made openings to Shamir, including Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who met with the prime minister last June, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who only two weeks ago broached the possibility of a summit meeting with him.

For Jordan, though, playing with Likud may be like playing with fire. Traditionally, Likud has viewed the Hashemites not as part of the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict but as part of the problem. A central theme of Likud ideology holds that Jordan is Palestine and that Hussein is actually the usurper of the Palestinian state. Moreover, some in Likud subscribe to the concept of “transfer”--mass expulsion--as a possible answer to Israel’s short-term intifada headache as well as its long-term demographic problem. By helping Likud’s election chances, Hussein has at least raised the level of tension across the Jordan River.

--The king has wagered that the West Bankers themselves will not “cut a deal” with Israel. Nine months into the intifada , Hussein still disparages the Palestinians’ capacity to take matters into their own hands. Jordan’s tactic is premised on the idea that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will never create their own local leadership but will always look to some outside party, usually either Jordan or the PLO, for political patronage.

Hussein, however, may be overlooking the most important aspect of the Palestinian uprising--that for the first time in 50 years Palestinians are actors, not reactors, in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Once Arafat proves himself incapable of liberating the territories, local Palestinians may not turn back to Jordan but may, over time, opt for the radical notion of coming to terms with Israel. In that case Hussein might be permanently, not just temporarily, on the peace-process margin.

Jordan’s recent maneuvers, therefore, cut the king’s losses in the West Bank and force Arafat to deliver on decades of promises. Indeed, with his West Bank popularity at an all-time low, Hussein has miraculously managed to transform irrelevance into a virtue. But in taking himself out of the peace-process game, if only for a while, Hussein may find it no less dangerous standing on the sidelines.