Israel, Jordan and the United States

                                                                                                            

Diane Alden
April 11, 2002

"And when you see Jerusalem compassed about with an army, then you know that the desolation thereof is at hand." (Jesus of Nazareth: St. Luke)
We could say that Christ's words were prophetic. They certainly stated the case, and it has been the case on and off for thousands of years. From the Assyrians to the British, this land and the holy city that rest in the curve of the Mediterranean have been coveted and fought over.
In modern times the geographical area known as Palestine was administered by the British and before that by the Ottoman Turks for 400 years. In 1917, the British began to negotiate with Zionists from around the world and Jews still living in the area of Palestine as they attempted to pave the way for a Jewish homeland. Out of those negotiations came the Balfour Declaration.

The Declaration states:"His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

In 1923 Britain gave King Abdullah 77 percent of Palestine, the whole East Bank, in order to protect rights to Arab oil, and the British built the Suez Canal. Out of this effort Transjordan was created and in 1946 it became the Kingdom of Jordan.

In this fashion, Jordan became an "independent Palestinian state" as it was carved out of Palestine and Israel.

In 1947 the U.N. then sliced off another 23 percent west of the Jordan River and created yet another Palestinian state, plus it created an internationalized Jerusalem.

Notwithstanding, for nearly 2,000 years Palestine was a geographic area, NOT a state as one understands a modern state. While states in the area have been created, then dismantled, by many civilizations, peace reigns when acceptance and accommodation or defeat and annihilation decide who draws the lines as well as where they are drawn.

In the current history of Israel and Palestine, certain questions arise – questions that are being ignored, overlooked or not asked at all. Questions that may hold the solution to the problems in the Middle East.

Peace, Peace, There Is No Peace
Before the secretive 1993 Oslo "peace accords," the Israelis and Palestinians had been in the process of creating economic bridges and overtures in the area. A fragile peace existed at some level.
But when Israel under Yitsak Rabin handed over land to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the result was not peace but further demands for more territory by Islamic militants and opportunists like Arafat. In no small measure that militant extremism was also promoted by the two-faced rulers and populations in the Arab world at large.
After winning the1967 Six-Day War and then the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was able to maintain an edgy relationship with Egypt and Jordan and, less so, with Syria. Nevertheless, the ghost of the Palestinian problem remained.
Previously, the area had been destabilized with the downfall of the Western-oriented Shah of Iran by Islamic extremists. That gave the green light to other Islamic religious fanatics in the area. When the Shah fell, he got a big push out the door from the Carter administration. Carter was rewarded with the Iranian hostage crisis and a one-term presidency.
A more or less Westernized regime under the Shah was exchanged for a crazed Islamic cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and his band of militant Islamists.
It galls me no end that Jimmy Carter points a finger at the splinter in George W. Bush's eye regarding U.S. problems in the Middle East. Carter would be better off to stick a finger in his own eye. In that fashion he could remove the huge, old-growth beam lodged there.
The replacement for the "oppressive" Shah was an Islamist regime far more oppressive than anything that had come before. What irked the ayatollahs and extremists most was the Westernization of Iran.
Thus, along with a repressive regime in Iran, the Middle East watched as an insane war between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims in Iran and Iraq killed hundreds of thousands. In the process of warmongering, the Iraqis also became a powerhouse in the Middle East.
Islamist militants have been one of the main sources of the failure of peace between the Islamic world and Israel. From the murder of Egypt's Anwar Sadat in 1982 to the present day, Islamic militants have called the shots. They are calling them in Palestine today.
In fact, they direct and destroy any kind of meaningful peace in the Arab world. A few months ago a great number of them were running the world from Afghanistan.
Intelligence sources relate that former al-Qaeda and other militants are in northern Iraq killing Kurdish leaders under orders of Saddam Hussein. It is an open question whether or not the U.S. and the CIA are doing anything about it.
In fact, it is the failure to control militants, the failure of authority in the Arab world, that gives the impetus to Islamic extremists to be suicide bombers and fly planes into tall buildings and kill ethnics that do not fall into line.
Whether the U.S. likes it or not, what is happening in Israel is part and parcel of what has been happening to the United States and its interests around the world. They are not disconnected events and one would have to live in virtual reality to think they are.
It is unfortunate, but militant Islam is at war with the West, especially against the United States and Israel. Other Western countries like France have such large Muslim populations that they can riot in the streets seemingly at will and direct the policy of France against Israel and the U.S..
Unfortunately, neither Arafat nor any other Arab leader seems willing to cut off funds to terrorists or to defuse the hatred which they have been responsible for creating. But currently, even Yasser Arafat is learning the hard way that living by the sword is dying by the sword. In other words, what goes around comes around.
His professed hatred of Israel has created a monster that he can't rein in because it is out of his control. Nevertheless, he promotes violence against Israel and encourages it. Otherwise he would lose his grip on power as well as the monies his so-called leadership of the Palestinians receives from oil-rich Arab countries and the United States.
Arafat and most of the Arab and Islamic world have contrived and nurtured hatred for the West and Israel. That has sown the dragon's teeth of despair and destruction for the Palestinians and Muslims of all nations.
Additionally, the Saudis must bear a huge part of the blame for the present situation. They are the money bags for terrorism – along with Iraq, they provide the funds for continued death and destruction. In fact, the prelude to WWIII is being paid for with oil money and used by crazed loons who take it from the Saudis and Iraqis.
Because of oil and business interests in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the Saudis have been given validation by government and business leaders in the United States to speak out of both sides of their mouths. On one hand they can "help" the U.S. destroy terrorism by making a few gestures, while on the other hand not really cutting off funding to the terrorists.
The dependence we have on Middle Eastern oil creates a security nightmare for the U.S. and a paralysis leading to a failure to act. The United States has been worried that the fools in Riyadh would be replaced by the same kind of fools found in Tehran. American foreign policy continues to operate on the basis of fear of what might happen. That is the surest way to guarantee that the worst does indeed take place.
Youthful Architects and Handmaidens of Terror
I suspect that there are Palestinians desperate for peace. Recently, 10 Palestinians were murdered and dragged through the streets of a West Bank city because it was believed they wanted peace with Israel. Militancy hiding behind religion will never allow peace in that part of the world.
The problem for the U.S. in the Middle East and elsewhere is that terrorism is not only religious but also demographic and nationalist in nature.
It is sad that the architects of terror have mesmerized the West into believing they speak for the "oppressed," whether they be Palestinians or the people of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, in the case of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Jihad and the PLO, terrorism is also a perverted demand for attention.
Most of the recent scourge of militancy is coming from a bunch of disaffected angry young people, schizoid mullahs, ayatollahs, and aging Israel- and America-haters who have joined common cause in a great war against the West.
In modern times, demographics play a significant part in the problems in the Middle East. A huge majority of the Muslim world is under 25. These angry bombers and rich young men who fly planes into American buildings reveal their immaturity, hostility and confusion in the same way that America's young men between 16 and 25 display theirs by committing crimes.
Young Muslims are acting out, and it is more about the failure of their own culture to provide for all their needs for affirmation, tradition, the good life and Allah too. Like many young people, they blame their problems, hatreds and confusion on others.
What they see is a prosperous Israel that exists right next to Arab poverty. In the same way that the prosperity of West Berlin was in-your-face success compared with the depression and spiritual, cultural and economic deprivation of communist East Berlin. Jealousy, hormones and coming to terms with reality, in addition to conflicting ideologies and religions, are THE big problems for the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, we in the West are forced to endure gang warfare and jihad from Islamic young hoodlums from abroad because the authority in the Arab world has broken down. Militant Islam is telling the young what they want to hear, and no secular authority is willing to challenge it, deprive it of funds, punish it, or lock it up and throw away the key. The Arab world fears its own children because it has done the job of fostering hatred in them all too well.
At our peril, the U.S. seems to ignore the religious, demographic breakdown in the Arab world. It is pleasant to point to "terrorism" but not define what in fact makes up that terrorism. That failure is at the very heart of our problems in the Middle East.
The U.S. is not the only one blind to certain realities. Europe and the pope are as well. Recently, the pope blamed Israel for humiliating the Palestinians. He might have been better off to blame the Arab and Muslim culture for not helping to create freedom, prosperity, peace and hope for the young people of Islam.
It is easy to blame a more successful neighbor for problems than it is to take responsibility to make a better life on your own, using your own resources. Being humiliated is often the result of one's actions, failure to act or not choosing wisely.
The Beginning of a Separate Peace in the Middle East
According to Middle East expert Daniel Elazar:
"Since 1967, Israeli policy has been to enable Palestinian Arabs to work freely in Israel. Before the intifada, these Arab workers accounted for 36 percent of those employed in construction, 15 percent in agriculture, 5 percent in industry. The highest percentages are employed in tourism and household services. At the same time, Arab labor in Israel has substantially increased the standard of living in the territories. In 1972, for example, 6.5 percent of the families in the Gaza District owned a gas or electrical appliance for cooking; in 1987, 87.1 did. Comparable figures for refrigerators were 8.7 to 78 percent. The increase in private automobiles has not been nearly as spectacular but has been significant enough, from 3.2 percent in 1972 to 14.5 percent in 1988. The economic development of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District from 1967 until it was halted by the intifada attests to the benefits derived by the Palestinians in the territories from contact with Israel."
Economic growth was in fact building bridges between the two cultures. In the same way that Yugoslavia's Christians and Muslims got along before the IMF stepped in and helped pull the struggling economies of Yugoslavia down into the pits by imposing economic "shock therapies." At that point ethnic and religious rivalries erupted.
Nowadays, nearly 200,000 Jews live in what the Palestinians and others refer to as the West Bank. Of that number about 60 percent live in the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem built across the Green Line since 1967. Most of the remaining 40 percent live along the western border of Samaria and the Judean and Samarian highlands.
If the Jews in the territories are kicked out and a high wall is built around Israel, what does that mean for the Palestinian economy and any future political or economic growth? It is in fact the economic interaction which has developed between Israel and the territories before intifada which saw an interdependent sort of common market developing. Rather like a region in the U.S. forming a cohesive economic connective by building infrastructure in order to get the apples and oranges from one place to another on mutually maintained roads.
Economic benefit and easy relations result from cooperation. There was every indication that cooperation was successful. Building Jewish settlements didn't just benefit the Israelis, it was also creating an independent Palestinian middle class.
Furthermore, Elazar maintians:
"This common market also incorporates industrial growth and agricultural development ... reflecting a steep rise in the disposable income of the Palestinians and a shift in their occupational structure toward that of a more developed economy. Furthermore, the provision of public service systems – roads, electricity, water sources, and communications lines – have also been integrated. For example, the Jerusalem metropolitan area provides public services to the hinterland comprising Bethlehem, Ramallah/El-Bireh, and Jericho. Any drastic transformation in the present network of economic relationships and public service systems would inflict grave costs on the population of those territories. Under any future political arrangement, Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District should, for their own benefit, maintain close economic relations with both Israel and Jordan."
Jordan May Hold the Key
Jordan extended citizenship to Palestinians in 1949 – Palestinians constituted about two-thirds of the country's population. In the Gaza Strip, administered by Egypt from 1948–67, poverty and unemployment were high, and most of the Palestinians lived in refugee camps.
After 1967 a kind of shared rule evolved in the areas of Judea and Samaria. Israel and Jordan provided the physical infrastructure while Jordan helped shape the relationships between Judea and Samaria.
Daniel Elazar relates that a growing arrangement between Israel and Jordan to establish an authority in the areas was laid waste by Palestinian extremists and the PLO. Jordan and Israel were on the verge of making it a formal arrangement. It was the indigenous Palestinians who paid the price when outside extremists tore the arrangement to shreds:
"In 1986, Israel and Jordan again came close to establishing a more formal shared rule arrangement, actually agreeing to a de facto condominium which was launched at the end of August 1986. It was disrupted by Shimon Peres' premature efforts to bring about an international peace conference which was scheduled for the end of a period of consolidation of this arrangement."
Walter Reich is professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University. Reich maintains that the upcoming nightmare of Jordan's King Abdullah may be that, "unable to topple Israel, West Bank Palestinians would try to enlarge their boundaries to the east with the help of Jordan's own Palestinians, who make up about 70 percent of that country's population."
Jordan has a strong and disciplined army and a Western-oriented king. He would be more able to control the fractious Palestinian wildcats if he chose and received help from the West to accomplish that. As Reich states, if the West Bank were incorporated into Jordan itself, "Jordan could again – but this time temporarily – take it over, together with Gaza, in a coordinated arrangement with Israel.
"Furthermore, he can make a deal with the Israelis that would enable them to safely move out of nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. With these territories thus controlled and pacified, he could put in place military, social and educational structures for a Palestinian state with borders limited to the West Bank and Gaza. And he could then get out of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving a Palestinian state that, instead of expanding east or west, could seek to realize its destiny within its own national space."
In other words, Jordan might be the only one who can protect Israel from the Palestinians and the Palestinians from each other. Since Israel and Jordan have worked together in the past, if EXTREMISTS – and that includes Arafat – could be factored out, peace in the Middle East might actually have a chance of success.
Surely Jordan's King Abdullah recognizes in his heart of hearts that Yasser Arafat is not representative of the Palestinian people but one of those President Bush has described as an "evildoer."
Arafat is just the last terrorist standing and the Middle East's most successful despotic terrorist. He and his cohorts inside and outside Palestine should be anathema to civilized people in the Arab and Muslim world.
The United States must convince King Abdullah to lend a hand. In fact, he may be the only Muslim leader who has the decency and concern for people to take on the crazies of Islam and break the pattern.
Is America the Responsible Adult?
But the sad fact is there are many in the Arab world who don't want peace to develop between Israel and the Palestinians. It suits their purposes to keep the pot stirred up. These states are the same ones that fund Arafat and the suicide bombers as well as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Jihad. They are evildoers in the sense that they provide funds to groups that are more than willing to send their young people to blow themselves and hundreds of others to kingdom come.
War means income for the Muslim world. The major Arab states don't have much of anything to offer their young people except militant Islam. That young Muslims have chosen that route is not America's or Israel's fault. It is the failure of a people and a religion that will not decry evildoing in the name of Allah.
While Israel took the land of its ancestors and literally made the desert bloom and instituted a modern economy, no similar events have taken place in the Muslim world. That is one reason millions leave their countries. They don't seem to have the will to change their own societies. It is easier to leave than to fight their own Muslim system.
The evil pot-stirrers are located in the monied class in Saudi Arabia with its cultic Wahhabism and crushing oppression of human beings. Along with the other oil sheikdoms, plus Iraq and Iran, the Arab world speaks with forked tongue.
Egypt is included in the equation because Egypt is weak. By and large, it has failed to prevent the spread of hatred against Israel and America in its institutions, schools and media and among its young. Many of the 9/11 bombers were Egyptian fanatics, the same kind that murdered Sadat.
The failure of responsibility and authority by Egyptian leaders resonates in the Arab world. Meanwhile, other Arab states continue to this day to foment hatred of America and Israel in their schools, in the press, and in the mosques themselves.
As far as peace in the region is concerned, religious leaders in the Islamic world have been the worst Pharisees since Jesus Christ called them by name – blind guides and whitened sepulchers hiding corruption, deceit and murder. To paraphrase Cardinal Bertini's words, they are deaf men who think that Christianity and the West have nothing to teach them.
If the mullahs and ayatollahs acted like true men of God, there would not be suicide bombing in the name of Allah. These disaffected young might do it in the name of terrorists like Arafat or Osama bin Laden, but they might have the decency to leave the Almighty out of it.
If the Arab world won't do what is right in changing the minds of extremists, then that mindset must somehow be broken by the West. That particular discipline in the name of humanity and peace will fall specifically to the United States. Sooner or later it will come to that. If the U.S. does not act the responsible adult, the violent children of Islam will set in motion World War III.
 

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