The Israeli-Hamas ceasefire, signed on June 9, 2008, had long been a porous one. While Hamas, for the most part, until November 2008 did not fire its own rockets at Israel, it permitted other groups, such as the Iranian-supported Islamic Jihad, to do so. These limited rocket attacks, while clear violations of the ceasefire agreement, did not precipitate major Israeli responses, other than periodic limited closures of the border crossings into Gaza, through which Israel supplied food, fuel and other humanitarian aid to Gaza. Whether Israel should have allowed any humanitarian aid into Gaza in the face of the rocket fire is a very open question: Israel was in fact in a state of war with Hamas, an organization pledged to destroy it, and the rockets fired at Israel simply underlined Hamas’ long term objective by demonstrating its “resistance” to the Jewish State. Under these circumstances, a full border closure might have brought home to the people of Gaza, the majority of whom voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, the costs of supporting Hamas.

In any case, fighting between Israel and Hamas intensified in November when Israel found and destroyed a tunnel between Gaza and Israel which the Israeli military thought would be used to kidnap another Israeli soldier, much as Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped in 2006. Ironically, the kidnap attempt was not aimed primarily at Israel, but at the Palestinian rival of Hamas, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The kidnap attempt appeared timed to occur as Hamas and Fatah were jockeying for position before the start of what proved to be abortive Palestinian unity talks in Cairo. Had Hamas been successful in capturing another Israeli soldier, it would have shown that Hamas was demonstrating greater “resistance” against Israel than Fatah, which had been engaged in fruitless peace talks with Israel.

Following the Israeli attack on the tunnel, the number of rockets fired at Israel from Gaza escalated, reaching a new high after Hamas announced it would not extend the ceasefire unless Israel fully opened the border crossings and stopped arresting members of Hamas living on the West Bank—the latter demand not included in the original ceasefire agreement. When Israel refused to agree to the new Hamas demands, Hamas further escalated its firing of rockets, hoping, apparently, to force Israel to accept the new ceasefire terms in return for restoring quiet to southern Israel. Hamas may have also believed that Israel’s ruling Kadima party desperately needed a ceasefire so as to remove the issue of the rocket firing from the ongoing Israeli election campaign. It had been Kadima that had undertaken the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and presumably it did not want to remind the Israeli electorate that the withdrawal had resulted in the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

If this was indeed the thinking of Hamas, it was gravely mistaken. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, as early as November, had called for strong military action against Hamas because of the rocket firing, and she also stated at the time that she was prepared to eliminate the Hamas threat against Israel once and for all. Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, of the Labor party, was taking a more dovish position, resisting the use of force. In initially opposing an attack on Gaza, Barak may have hoped to win votes from the dovish spectrum of the Israeli electorate consisting of the Meretz party and the parties that had broken away from Labor because they were dissatisfied with his leadership. On the other end of the Israeli political spectrum, the right of center Likud party, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, was attacking Barak for his judgement in unilaterally withdrawing from Lebanon in May 2000—a step which had led not to peace, as Barak had hoped, but to rocket fire into Israel from Lebanon, the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, and finally the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 from which Israel did not emerge victorious. In addition, of course, Netanyahu berated the Kadima party for its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which, as in the case of Lebanon, did not bring peace, but rather rocket firing into Israel in its wake.

Given these circumstances, with Netanyahu’s Likud party leading in the pre-election polls, Livni’s calls for more action against Hamas grew more difficult for Kadima’s lame-duck leader, Ehud Olmert, to resist. For his part, Barak saw his Labor party dropping precipitously in the polls, as his dovish position was not resonating among Israeli voters. The end result of the Israeli deliberations—a major air assault against Hamas bases, missile factories, and arms smuggling tunnels in Gaza—was a compromise between those who wanted a full-scale military assault on Gaza and those, most likely including Olmert, who had been badly burned politically by the 2006 war, and who continued to counsel restraint. The Israeli military action was an effort to show Hamas that not only would the Israeli political leadership not be intimidated by the Hamas rocket attacks into weakening its position on the ceasefire terms, but that Israel too could use force—considerably more force than Hamas was using—and that if Hamas had hoped to use rocket fire to get better ceasefire terms, it was badly mistaken. The military action was also a signal to Hamas that if it still wanted a truce—a very big if—then all rocket fire would have to be halted.

Prior to examining the alternatives available to Hamas after the Israeli military operation, I will now turn to an analysis of the possible repercussions of the Israeli military action in the Middle East, because this will affect how Hamas will respond.

Repercussions

In analyzing the possible effects of the Israeli military operation throughout the Middle East, one has to consider several different Arab and Middle Eastern states which are players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. These include: Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization which currently controls the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank; Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel; Syria; Iran; and Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

• Mahmoud Abbas. With Palestinians being killed by the Israeli attacks, Abbas has no choice but to publicly condemn them, although he has also been critical of Hamas for not agreeing to extend the ceasefire. It should also be noted that many members of Abbas’ Fatah organization have bitter memories of their colleagues in Gaza being murdered by Hamas thugs—some tossed off the rooftops of multi-storied buildings in Gaza—during the Hamas seizure of power in Gaza in June 2006. Consequently, many will greet the Israeli drubbing of Hamas in Gaza with great satisfaction. While there are likely to be riots by Hamas sympathizers on the West Bank, the test of Abbas’ newly strengthened security forces will be how successful they are in containing the rioters. Since Abbas has been systematically cracking down on Hamas operatives in the West Bank since June 2007 (as has Israel) it is not clear how much strength Hamas retains in the region, and the ability of Abbas’ forces to quell the rioters will go a long way toward answering this question.

While Abbas has broken off peace talks with Israel in the name of Palestinian solidarity—he has to be concerned about a sympathy vote for Hamas in the forthcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections (if they are held,as tentatively scheduled,in April 2009)—-nonetheless if Hamas is badly weakened politically as well as militarily in Gaza by the Israeli attacks (a very big if), then Abbas will gain politically in what has become a zero-sum-game struggle between Hamas and Fatah for leadership of the Palestinian movement.

• Egypt and Jordan. As the two countries which have signed peace treaties with Israel, both Egypt and Jordan face similar problems in responding to the Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The main opposition force, which is represented in parliament in both countries, is the Moslem Brotherhood (in Jordan it takes the name “The Islamic Action Front”), and Hamas itself is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Thus the Palestinian issue has been used by Muslim Brotherhood organizations in both countries to accuse both Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan of not being tough enough against Israel.

Yet while both Mubarak and King Abdullah II must be sensitive to the public opinion in their countries, which the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to stir up against them, they are also aware that the United States, their main supplier of economic aid ($2.2 billion for Egypt and $500 million for Jordan on an annual basis), has been strongly backing Israel during the crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has gone so far as to say: “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The ceasefire should be restored immediately.” Consequently, assuming the Israeli military operations are concluded in a relatively short amount of time, it is doubtful whether either Egypt or Jordan would break diplomatic relations with Israel or even recall their ambassadors as they did during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Indeed, a defeat for Hamas would politically benefit both Arab leaders.

• Syria. The first response of Syria to the Israeli attack on Gaza was to freeze the current low-level peace talks which Syria has been carrying on with Israel under the mediation of Turkey. As the home of one of the most militant branches of Hamas, led by Khalid Mash’al who has just called for a new Palestinian intifada against Israel, Syria has long championed the organization as Damascus has sought to exercise influence over the Palestinian movement. Yet the Syrians have to be careful how they behave during the crisis if they want to preserve the possibility of a peace process with Israel—and the link to improved relations with the United States which they hope to emerge from it. It should be remembered in this context that the initial post-Madrid conference talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 1996 when Syria not only did not condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that took place in February-March 1996, but Syrian state radio actually justified them. If Syria chooses to support Hamas during the current conflict in a major way, it may well jeopardize peace talks with the next Israeli leader, be it Livni or Netanyahu. While Syrian leader Bashar Assad may assume that neither Livni nor Netanyahu puts peace with Syria high on their priority lists, strong Syrian support for Hamas may also call into question Syria’s relations with the incoming Obama administration.

• Iran. Iran, like Syria, faces a choice in responding to the Israeli airstrikes. It could urge its ally, the Lebanese–based Hezbollah, to fire rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. Such an action might be problematic, however, for three reasons.

1. There is the question as to whether Hezbollah would wish to jeopardize its rapidly improving political position in Lebanon by launching rocket attacks against Israel, since Israel has threatened to retaliate against all of Lebanon if Hezbollah launches rocket attacks, not just the southern part as it did in 2006, because Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese government.
2. Such a call by Iran might hasten an Israeli airstrike against Iran’s nuclear installations, a development which Iranian leaders, despite their bluster, have sought to avoid.
3. An action of this type would make it far more difficult for Iran to have an improved relationship with the incoming Obama administration, assuming, of course, the Iranian leadership wants such a rapprochement. Consequently, Iran may limit itself to spinning the Israeli attack, much as it has done with the Israeli siege on Gaza, by claiming that the Arab world has not done enough to aid the besieged Palestinians because the leaders of the Sunni Arab world are the lackeys of the United States.

• Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. In the minds of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait,The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman), the main threat in their region is not Israel but Iran. Consequently, if Iranian-allied Hamas suffers a military defeat at the hands of Israel, particularly in a brief conflict before the passions of the so-called “Arab street” are fully ignited, the leaders of the GCC states will not be unhappy. Indeed, for similar reasons they gave tacit support to Israel at first in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, turning against Israel only when the war was prolonged and heavy civilian casualties occurred. If the Israeli military action is relatively limited in time, it is unlikely that the Saudis and the other Gulf states will take strong diplomatic action against Israel, such as removing the Arab Peace Plan from the diplomatic negotiating table.

The Future

In looking to the aftermath of the Israeli military action, there are several possibilities and they both depend on how Hamas reacts to the Israeli attacks. First, if Hamas follows through on its threat to restart suicide bombings and continues to launch rocket attacks of Israel, then additional airstrikes against Hamas can be expected, along with additional “targeted assassinations” of Hamas leaders, and possibly a full-scale military invasion as well. If, on the other hand, the Hamas leadership decides that the airstrikes and the real threat of an Israeli ground invasion may jeopardize its hold on Gaza before it has consolidated its power there, then it may agree, if only tacitly, to another ceasefire by stopping its rocket attacks on the expectation that Israel would reciprocate by stopping its attacks, in an agreement possibly mediated by Turkey. Were this to occur, Israel would certainly emerge as the victor in the conflict with Hamas, Iran and Syria the losers.

Consequently, one might expect that Iran, and possibly Syria, will urge Hamas to continue its “resistance” against Israel, much as Hezbollah did in 2006, and wait for pressure from the “Arab street,” Europe, Russia, the United Nations, and possibly (if the fighting last sufficiently long) the United States to salvage the situation. Whether Hamas will be in a position to do so, however, remains to be seen, and its fate may resemble more the PLO which was besieged in Beirut in 1982 and forced into exile, than Hezbollah in 2006.

In looking at the impact of the Israeli military action on the February 10 Israeli elections, there are also several possibilities. Since Livni had openly been calling for strong military action against Hamas, and that action was in fact taken, it is likely that Livni’s Kadima party will have an improved position in the polls and in the election, now little more than a month away. This will be the case especially if Hamas agrees to the tacit truce, as mentioned above. Similarly, if the military action proves successful, Barak may cement his position as the indispensable Defense Minister, no matter who wins the election.

On the other hand, if rockets continue to fly into Israel from Gaza, Livni may be blamed, along with Barak, for their inability to stop the missiles. Under these circumstances, Livni and Barak may well urge a full-scale invasion of Gaza. Assuming that the Israeli Army is now better prepared for ground combat than it was in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, and Hamas does not have the weaponry possessed by Hezbollah in 2006, and the invasion is preceded by heavy artillery barrages as well as continued air strikes, a softened-up Hamas may not be a major threat to the IDF, no matter how many tunnels it may have dug. Once Gaza is recaptured, and any surviving Hamas cadres imprisoned, the Gaza Strip can be turned over to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization, and then genuine peace talks, now covering both the West Bank and Gaza, can take place. Whether such an optimistic scenario will actually take place, however, remains an open question.

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.

Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.

But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

That ideological excess, known as pan-Arabism or Nasserism, rested upon a prior sense of injury, in which 1948 played the major part. In that earlier war, Israel succeeded in defeating or holding off an array of Arab armies, and three quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees ended up in camps. The injury of 1948 was so deep that, over the following twenty years—Kerr’s “good old days”—there was no peace process. The Arabs nursed their wounds and dreamed only of another round.

1948 also had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Arab politics. Three coups took place in Syria in 1949, and often thereafter; Jordan’s King Abdullah was assassinated (by Palestinians) in 1951; Free Officers toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952. Everywhere, the 1948 regimes were faulted for their failure to strangle Israel at birth. Military strongmen seized power in the name of revolution, and promised to do better in the next round. Those “good old days” were in fact very bad days, during which Arab politics became militarized in the certainty and even desirability of another war with Israel.

In 1967, the other war came, and these regimes suffered a far more devastating defeat, delivered in a mere six days. Unlike 1948, when they had lost much of Palestine, in 1967 they lost their own sovereign territory. The shock wave, it is generally assumed, was even greater.

Yet what is telling is that the regimes didn’t fall. Nasser offered his resignation, but the crowds filled the streets and demanded that he stay on—and he did. The defense minister and air force commander of Syria, Hafez Asad, held on and ousted his rival two years later, establishing himself as sole ruler. King Hussein of Jordan, who had lost half his kingdom, also survived, as did the Jordanian monarchy. The only regime that failed to withstand the shock waves of 1967 was Lebanon’s, and Lebanon hadn’t even joined the war. Kerr wrote that 1967 had left the Arab players “crippled for life.” In the three Arab states that lost the war, the regimes survived, the leaders ruled for life, and they are now being succeeded by their sons.

What explains the fact that 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab system as 1948 did? It is true that even before 1967, these regimes had started to harden themselves. The evolution of the Arab state as a “republic of fear” dates from the decade before 1967, and this probably helped regimes weather the storm. Unlike in 1948, there weren’t many refugees either—the Arab states lost territory, but the war was quick, and most of the inhabitants of the lost territory stayed in their homes.

But I believe the reason 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab order is this: Arab regimes and peoples drew together in the fear that Israel could repeat 1967 if it had to, and that it might show up one day on the outskirts of Cairo or Damascus (as it threatened to do in 1973), or come right into an Arab capital (as it did in Beirut in 1982).

The memory of 1967 thus became the basis of an implicit understanding between the regimes and the peoples: the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile. The regimes have upheld their end, by gradually coming to terms with Israel, and by leaving the Palestinians to fight their own fight. Pan-Arabism—which largely meant sacrificing for the Palestinians—faded away because no Arabs were prepared to risk losing a war for them. The skill of rulers in averting war has helped to secure and entrench them.

I call this understanding implicit—it doesn’t have an ideological underpinning. Pragmatism rarely does. But the evidence for it is that no Arab state has entered or stumbled into war with Israel in over thirty years. The memory of the 1967 trauma has been translated into a deep-seated aversion to war, which underpins such peace and stability as the region has enjoyed. 1967 thus marks the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the conflict between Israel and Arabs states, which had produced a major war every decade. 1973 marks the end of the end, in which two Arab states stole back some honor and territory, precisely so they could lean back and leave Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their own differences. This narrower Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a sore, but its costs have been limited compared to a state-to-state war.

It is important to note that pan-Arabism did survive elsewhere in the Arab world, where its illusions continued to exact a very high cost. I refer to Baathist Iraq, which wasn’t defeated in 1967, and where pan-Arabism continued to constitute one of the ideological pillars of the regime, vis-à-vis Iran and the West. There it also led to miscalculation, war, and defeat, on a truly massive scale. The Iraq wars—there have been three in the last three decades—provide a striking contrast to the relative stability in Israel’s corner of the Middle East—a stability which rests, I suggest, on the Arab memory of 1967, which restructured Arab thinking in the states surrounding Israel, away from eager anticipation of war, and toward anxiously averting it.

So in regard to Arab politics, I have offered a possible revision of the usual view of 1967: perhaps its memory, far from making the Arabs angry and volatile, underpins the stability of the Arab order and regional peace. If so, then perhaps we should recall it as a year of net benefit all around—as compared, say, to 1979, the year of Iran’s revolution, or 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The impact of 1967 was to create a new balance, and push ideology to the margins of politics. The impact of 1979 and 2003 has been to unbalance the region and strengthen radical ideologies. 1967 ultimately produced a process that led to the finalizing of borders between states. The combined impact of 1979 and 2003 threatens to erase borders from the map.

The risk today, over forty years later, is not that the consequences of 1967 are still with us. It is that memory of 1967 is starting to fade, and its legacy is being eroded. I am struck by the subtitles of the two leading books on 1967. Michael Oren’s is June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Tom Segev’s goes even further: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. If only it were so. The problem is that the Middle East continues to be remade and transformed by subsequent events, whose legacy is much more damaging than the legacy of 1967.

What then happens when the Arab world is dominated by generations that no longer remember 1967 or, more importantly, no longer think Israel capable of reenacting it? What memories are replacing the memory of 1967? The 2006 summer war in Lebanon? (To rework Kerr’s analogy, that was like Columbia playing Notre Dame to a draw.) Without the memory of that defeat of forty years ago, the ranks of the Islamists could swell with people who imagine victory. Without the fear of war, peoples could turn away from those rulers who have made peace—away from the implicit understanding that underpins order. Will it be possible to build stability and peace on other memories, or other promises?

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Israeli Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Giora Eiland served as head of the Israeli National Security Council from 2004 to 2006. He is the author of a new paper, “Rethinking the Two-State Solution” (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy), in which he argues for exploration of two other alternatives: the “Jordanian option” and a “regional approach.” Regarding the latter, Eiland writes:

Because Israel and the Palestinians have to share a parcel of land that is too small for both of them, neither can make substantive concessions, creating a zero-sum game that could lead to a true dead end. The only real contribution that the Arab countries can offer is exactly what the Israelis and Palestinians need—more land. The regional approach proposed in this paper involves a multilateral swap that would produce net gains for all relevant parties. For example, this solution would triple Gaza’s size—the only way to offer a real prospect for the poor population of that area, and the only way to shift public opinion away from Hamas and toward a plan with real hope.

Eiland’s idea is not new. MESH has already featured a discussion of an even more ambitious regional land swap, and another on a trilateral swap involving Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinians. But until now, land swaps have been championed most vigorously by geographers. Eiland may be the first ex-official to propose them, even providing a map of a three-way scenario. (The map may be enlarged by clicking on it.)

Update: There are comments on this post by Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, and Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, as well as by MESH members.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

From Marwan Muasher

To be a moderate in the Arab world has been described as an act of courage by some, a leap of faith by others, or just plain suicidal by many. And yet, there has never been a time when moderation is more needed in the region than now.

This book is about Arab moderation, its successes and its failures. It attempts to show through a firsthand account—drawn from my experience with the peace process since Madrid—the valiant, proactive efforts of Arab moderates to bring about a peaceful and lasting end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Contrary to western conventional wisdom that Arab moderates do not exist, I show that with regards to the peace process, the Arab moderates put very forthcoming initiatives on the table, namely the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 and the Middle East Road Map of 2003, fought radical positions within the Arab world, and had their arguments prevail.

Arab politicians rarely record their experience in office, and of those who do, few are inclined to do so in English, leaving it to others to document the region’s history from the periphery. This why I have written this book in English, to record my almost twenty years of experience with issues of peace, reform and the fight against terrorism in the region, to discuss linkages between them, and to suggest courses of action.

I have also attempted to show the human side of the conflict, and explain to a western reader the psychological divides both sides have to cross to achieve peace. Again through firsthand anecdotes of my time as Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, or the last six months of King Hussein’s life when I served as Jordan’s ambassador to the United States, the complex issues of the Middle East are explained through a human, not just an analytical, lens.

The book shows why the Arab Center is not holding, and what it takes for that center to regain credibility. It makes the argument that the center needs to focus its attention not only on issues regarding peace, but also expand its moderation to other areas of concern to Arab society—governance, political reform, economic well-being and cultural diversity. It addresses the so-far struggling process of political reform in Arab countries, and suggests a process of opening up political systems in the Arab world and the struggle to push for policies of inclusion as an alternative to the current stalemate that has trapped Arab citizens between the status quo, dominated by ruling elites who have often failed to deliver development, freedom and good governance to their people, and the more radical forms of political Islam, which many believe might curtail political, social and personal freedoms.

This book need not be an account of missed or lost opportunities, but rather a reminder of roads built but not traveled and a needed resolve to end a long journey of bloodshed. It is a call for both Arabs and Israelis to embrace diversity and adopt policies of inclusion. It makes the point that if Israel wants to finally abandon its iron-wall policy and be accepted in the region, it needs to accept, indeed work for, the right of Palestinians to live on their land free of occupation. And if the Arab Center is to triumph, ridding itself of the image its opponents paint of an apologist for the West or a compromiser of Arab rights, it must plant the seeds for a time when the peace process will end and the challenge of a robust, diverse, tolerant, democratic and prosperous Arab society remains.

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“If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does not get control over at least part of the West Bank soon, he will have no authority to sign any draft peace treaty with Israel. He will be totally discredited.

“But Israel cannot cede control over any part of the West Bank without being assured that someone credible is in charge. Rockets from Gaza land on the remote Israeli town of Sderot. Rockets from the West Bank could hit, and close, Israel’s international airport. That is an intolerable risk. Israel has got to start ceding control over at least part of the West Bank but in a way that doesn’t expose the Jewish state to closure of its airport.

“Radical pragmatism would say that the only way to balance the Palestinians’ need for sovereignty now with Israel’s need for a withdrawal now, but without creating a security vacuum, is to enlist a trusted third party—Jordan—to help the Palestinians control whatever West Bank land is ceded to them. Jordan does not want to rule the Palestinians, but it, too, has a vital interest in not seeing the West Bank fall under Hamas rule.

“Without a radically pragmatic new approach—one that gets Israel moving out of the West Bank, gets the Palestinian Authority real control and sovereignty, but one which also addresses the deep mistrust by bringing in Jordan as a Palestinian partner—any draft treaty will be dead on arrival.”

Thomas L. Friedman, “Time for Radical Pragmatism,” New York Times, June 4, 2008.

From Adam Garfinkle

The Jordanian option is an idea whose time never exactly comes.

When I was writing about it—urging it, as it were, as the least bad of alternatives—nearly thirty years ago, the time was not right because, as Asher Susser put it back in April, the Israeli government of the day was not sufficiently foresighted or realistic to understand the likely future of the matter. By the time later Israeli governments did understand, it was too late for the Jordanians. What Tom Friedman has been thinking all these years I can’t say, but in light of what those of us who have been following this for more than thirty years know, his column looks to be a classical example of a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious—but too late for prime time.

About a year or so ago Abdul Salem al-Majali was in Washington, carrying with him a very delicate version of a new Jordanian option. He raised it up the flag pole in a few places around town, and seems not to have noticed many people saluting. The problem with the idea, as was pointed out a few months ago, is that the Jordanians are afraid that instead of them re-containing Palestinian nationalism, the Islamicizing Palestinian national movement will finally toss the Hashemites into the proverbial dustbin of history. Israel would then be back where it was, geostragically speaking, before June 4, 1967, except instead of a Hashemite state in both east and west banks, with which it had a range of tacit understandings and some significant shared interests, it would have to deal with a far less cooperative neighbor.

This leads me more or less to the same conclusion Rob Satloff mooted earlier: It may be possible to bring the Jordanians into a kind of relatively quiet trialogue on issues like trade, water and energy, air space and other aspects of security, medical-technical cooperation and a few other items, but only up to the carrying-capacity of the Jordanian political system which, under the current king, is still not back to where it was under an experienced and shrewd Hussein ibn Talal. If one takes the idea of path dependency seriously, as I do, then this sort of functional mix might lay the ground for a larger Jordanian role in the future, which might still end up being part of the least-bad-of-all policy alternatives for Israel, the United States, and arguably the Palestinians, too. But we’re talking years here, and Israel’s problem in the West Bank, where the collapse of Fatah has indeed created a dangerous vacuum, runs on a different, faster, timetable.

So, as I said, the Jordanian option is a idea whose time seems never to be right—Tom Friedman columns notwithstanding.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

We should reshuffle the cards and try to think about other solutions as well. One of them is a return to the Jordanian option. The Jordanians won’t admit this publicly, yet a Palestinian state in the West Bank is the worst solution for them. They too know that within a short period of time such state would be ruled by Hamas. The moment Jordan—which features a Palestinian majority as well as powerful Muslim Brotherhood opposition— will share a border with a Hamas state, the Hashemite regime will face immediate danger.

We asked Efraim Karsh for his response.

From Efraim Karsh

Giora Eiland rightly assumes that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement is unfeasible in the foreseeable future. This is not because of the weakness of the present Palestinian leadership and its inability to deliver the goods, or the lack of viability of a Palestinian state, as he suggests. It is for the simple reason that there is no fundamental difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the PLO vis-à-vis Israel. Neither accepts the Jewish state’s right to exist and both are committed to its eventual destruction. The only difference between the two groups lies in their preferred strategies for the attainment of this goal. Whereas Hamas concentrates exclusively on “armed struggle,” a convenient euphemism for its murderous terror campaign, the PLO has adopted since the early 1990s a more subtle strategy, combining intricate political and diplomatic maneuvering with sustained terror attacks (mainly under the auspices of Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah, the PLO’s largest constituent group and Arafat’s alma mater).

Eiland is also correct about Jordan’s abhorrence of an independent Palestinian state, though this is by no means their worst possible nightmare, as he tends to believe. That would be the incorporation of a huge “fifth column” of some two to three million Palestinians into their kingdom: an assured prescription for Hashemite demise.

From the early 1920s to this very day, the Palestinian leadership has been antagonistic to Hashemite rule in Transjordan (later Jordan) and committed to the vision of “Greater Palestine” comprising both banks of the Jordan River. In 1951, King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian militant, and while successive attempts on the life of his erstwhile successor, King Hussein, came to naught, as did the September 1970 putsch, the Hashemites have never lost sight of the mortal danger to their throne attending the reincorporation of the West Bank into their kingdom. This was especially so after the Oslo accords transformed the area into a full-fledged terror state. Their best hope, therefore, would seem to lie with Israel’s continued security control of this territory, which would leave them to pay the customary lip service to Palestinians’ rights and to bemoan their “oppression,” without incurring the detrimental consequences of renewed annexation.

As for Israel, one need look no further than David Ben-Gurion’s justification (in December 1948) of his preference for an independent Palestinian state over the annexation of Judea and Samaria (the term West Bank was not born yet) to Transjordan: “An Arab state in western Palestine [i.e., west of the Jordan] is less dangerous than a state that is tied to Transjordan, and tomorrow—probably to Iraq [then ruled by the Hashemites].”

Of course, the international circumstances have changed dramatically since then, but the gist of Ben-Gurion’s rationale remains very much intact, albeit in the opposite direction. That is: a Palestinian-dominated militant entity on both banks of the river would pose a far greater threat to Israel’s national security than a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, or perhaps two smaller states in each of these areas.

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This past week’s news placed Hamas in the spotlight, with press coverage of key Hamas activity in the West Bank, Egypt and Jordan. While Hamas suffered significant setbacks at the hands of Israeli and Jordanian authorities, the group fared much better in Egypt.

First the good news. Coming on the heels of the suicide bombing in Dimona, which was executed by Hamas operatives based in the Hebron area, the Israeli military raided and shut the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS) in Hebron. The ICS was not only a major conduit of funds for Hamas, it also raised funds through businesses it owns, including real estate in Hebron, and it a runs dairy farm. Unlike the majority of the nearly one hundred organizations closed down by Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, almost all of which were small charities of little significance, the ICS is a backbone of the Hamas infrastructure in the southern West Bank.

But beyond their fundraising and money-laundering roles, Hamas charities like the ICS provide day jobs and a veneer of legitimacy to Hamas operatives. For example, Adil Numan Salm al-Junaydi was the head of the ICS until he was arrested for Hamas activity in December 2004. According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, al-Junaydi was arrested along with six others in a sweep of fifteen houses in the Hebron area. Junaydi was deported to Lebanon with other senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in 1992, and served as the assistant administrative director for another Hamas charity, the al-Islah Charitable Society, before joining the ICS in Hebron.

Another former head of the society, Abd al-Khaliq al-Natsheh, also was arrested for his Hamas activities. Natsheh was also among the 1992 deportees, and was imprisoned twice in the 1990s on account of his terrorist activities, once in 1996 and again in 1998. After his release from an Israeli prison in 1998, Natsheh accepted an offer from Hamas political leader Khalid Mishal to assume the position of Hamas spokesman in Hebron. In this capacity, Natsheh would later concede to authorities, he referred several Hamas members interested in carrying out attacks to leaders of Hamas terror cells within the Qassam Brigades. Described as “one of the leading Hamas operatives in the entire West Bank,” and a “Hamas military leader in Hebron,” al-Natsheh oversaw an extensive terrorist infrastructure in Hebron which was responsible for many terrorist attacks carried out within Israel. These include the April 27, 2002, attack targeting Israelis in the community of Adora, which resulted in four deaths, including the death of a five-year old girl, as well as the attack at Karmey Tzur on June 8, 2002, in which two were killed and five wounded.

Meanwhile, across the Jordan Valley, Jordanian officials charged a group of five Hamas activists with “acquiring secret information that could jeopardize the safety of the kingdom.” In a veiled reference to the extensive terrorist training regularly provided in Syria, the men were reportedly received military and security training “in an unidentified neighboring country,” according to accounts of the indictment in the press. The five were accused of receiving training in “information security, tracing, resisting investigations and telecommunications,” and were allegedly tasked by Hamas members in the “neighboring country” to recruit new members in Jordan, monitor military installations along its borders and surveil the Israeli embassy in Amman. The indictment alleged the men already successfully surveilled military sites on Jordan’s borders with Israel and Syria and the Israeli embassy in Amman.

The charges are reminiscent of the Hamas activity that led to the 1999 closure of Hamas offices in Amman, Jordan, where Hamas had until then maintained it’s headquarters. Citing materials seized in Hamas offices, then-prime minister Abdel Rauf al-Rawabdeh noted Hamas appeared to be “threatening the kingdom’s stability. Other officials added that Hamas had been “conducting paramilitary training, raising funds for subversive purposes, using forged Jordanian passports, and recruiting in Jordan’s Palestinian refugee camps and universities.” According to Jordanian counterterrorism officials, “Hamas officials in Jordan were involved in weapons smuggling plots and infiltration efforts through northern Jordan and they were cooperating with Hezbollah to send weapons and recruits to the West Bank from Syria via Jordan.”

But the news has not been all good. In Egypt, Hamas fared better this week. Hamas has been proactively smuggling weapons across the Egyptian border for a long time, and more recently blew a hole in the border wall creating a breach that enabled Hamas operatives and civilian Palestinians alike to swarm into Egypt. Despite this, Egypt released twenty-one Palestinians to Hamas custody this week, including twelve people described as “directly affiliated with Hamas” who had been detained with explosives and weapons inside Egypt. According to press reports, they were believed to be trying to infiltrate back into Israel to carry out attacks.

By all accounts, Hamas control of Gaza is the most significant obstacle to resuming serious Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. So while news of crackdowns on Hamas in the West Bank and Jordan is welcome, the news out of Egypt could prove to be the most significant of these three developments.

At last week’s Herzliya Conference, Tel Aviv University geographer Gideon Biger presented a futuristic plan for land swaps and border alterations among Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Biger, author of The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840-1947, proposes a map based on 1967—that is, each party would end up with the same net territory it possessed prior to the June 1967 Six-Day War. Biger has provided MESH with the map he displayed at the conference, illustrating the proposed swaps.

In Biger’s plan, parts of the West Bank where there are large Jewish settlement blocs, as well as part of the Jordan Valley, would be annexed to Israel. In exchange, the Palestinians would receive Israeli territory along the Green Line, and Egypt would relinquish territory between al-Arish and Rafah to the Palestinians. Israel would compensate Egypt with territory from Israel in the Paran Desert, as well as a corridor across the lower Negev to Jordan (a proposal revisited last week at MESH).

In the north, Biger also envisions a three-way swap. Israel would keep possession of a part of the Golan Heights. It would give Lebanon territory in the northern Galilee associated with the so-called “seven [Shiite] villages” abandoned in 1948. Lebanon, in turn, would relinquish territory to Syria, to compensate Syria for ceding part of the Golan Heights to Israel.

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The Bush administration has been mugged by reality. After vowing to transform the Middle East, the administration is submitting to it, resorting to the sort of process-driven incremental diplomacy that previous administrations had pursued and that this administration had disdained. Five years ago, there was a sense that things couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East and we should push for change whatever the consequences. Now, there is a keen appreciation of how many ways things could actually get much worse, and how much better off we are working with people we know and with whom we share at least some interests.

President Bush is spending several days in Israel and the West Bank, where I expect him to preside over some sort of agreement, whether it’s principally economic (having to do with the movement of people and goods both within the West Bank and between the West Bank and other places) or whether it has to do more with settlements. There is going to be something that will stand as the Bush administration’s agreement on this trip.

But it seems to me that none of what he will achieve is anything like a game changer. He can merely suggest that things are in play, which is really what the parties most want. I’m very skeptical of broader progress on Palestinian-Israeli issues because it seems to me that neither the Israeli side nor the Palestinian side has any consensus on what it’s trying to achieve or how it plans on achieving it, what measure of diplomacy and violence will have to be used in the coming months and years. I understand all of the arguments that it’s leaders who forge consensus through their leadership and so on, but it seems to me that a lot more has to be in place before final-status negotiations begin for them to possibly be successful. There is certainly much to negotiate in the interim, but that’s not really a job for presidents. The fact is, whatever high-water mark President Bush tries to set on this trip, he will only draw attention to how much lower that mark is than when he took office in 2001.

I think it’s interesting that the president isn’t planning on going to Jordan, because the Jordanians have been such important U.S. partners in both Arab-Israeli peacemaking issues as well as Iraq issues. I suspect the king calculated that a trip would hurt more than it would help and this represents shrewd triangulation by the Jordanians rather than a snub by the Americans.

Overall, I expect President Bush to come in for a fair bit of criticism on this trip and to be on the receiving end of a fair number of lectures. Most leaders in the region with whom I’ve spoken seem to consider him both naïve and callous, and they’ll use the home-court advantage to sensitize him to their perceptions of reality.

To sum up, President Bush is no longer trying to transform the Middle East from afar; he’s trying to manage it in incremental ways by arm-twisting and jawboning leaders in intimate, private sessions. There will be small successes along the way, but all of the Middle East’s problems are far too immense, complex, and diverse to be solved on this trip. Analytically, I think the president is in the same place that he’s been for years, and he deeply believes that the Middle East will pose a continual threat to U.S. interests until it is more democratic. On this score, he differs with his father. But President Bush has also come to realize that the pursuit of vital U.S. interests requires a deeper sense of partnership than many allies have found in this administration.

Writing in Foreign Affairs eight years ago, former Bush Vulcan and current World Bank president Robert Zoellick wrote, “effective coalition leadership requires clear-eyed judgments about priorities, an appreciation of others’ interests, constant consultations among partners and a willingness to compromise on some points, but remain focused on core objectives.” That’s what we will see on this trip, and it is a return to Bush administration first principles—not Bush 43, but Bush 41.

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