Hussein's Middle East Gambit

In international affairs, no less than interpersonal ones, you're known by the company you keep. Therefore, it is revealing to note that in the Arab world almost all of America's closest friends are hereditary monarchs of a distinctly medieval cast.

Take Jordan's King Hussein--please. Of the bad lot of Mideastern monarchs, Hussein is by far one of the more insubstantial. But he is also one of the most strategically placed, and thus his geopolitical meanderings and manipulations, such as his recent abdication of Jordan's claim to the Palestinian West Bank, bear special scrutiny.

Since 1948, Jordan has served as a repository for much of the inconvenient Arab population of present-day Israel. At least half of Jordan's current residents are Palestinian refugees. From 1948 to 1967, Jordan ruled the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, a state of affairs which pumped up the king's prestige and his strategic significance. And post-Watergate investigations of the CIA in the mid-1970s discovered that, for years, Hussein was actually on the agency payroll.

Since 1967, Jordan has continued to claim sovereignty over the West Bank. This claim has given Israel and America a convenient surrogate for the growing inconvenience of Palestinian national aspirations and national institutions. In Israel this surrogate role is sometimes expressed in the statement that Jordan is Palestine, meaning that Jordan, with its historic association with Arab Palestine and its large Palestinian population, is (or could be, or should be) the Palestinian state.

This claim is central to U.S. Middle East policy as well. The United States has long assumed that, despite noisy and cathartic nationalistic sloganeering, the Palestinians would eventually acquiesce in a return to Hussein's quiet, undisruptive tutelage. That was the intention of the much-bally-hooed U.N. Resolution 242 and of the Camp David accords. The Reagan initiative of 1982 and the Shultz plan of this spring also depended upon "the Jordanian option."

But even a docile mascot such as Hussein can prove capable of acting on his own interests occasionally. And U.S. leaders seem genuinely surprised by his apparent abdication of the West Bank to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and have yet to fashion a response. Israeli leaders, especially the Labor Party moderates who want to cut a deal with Hussein, seem unable to admit that his change of policy happened at all.

This is not entirely surprising. The United States and Israel have long nurtured the myth of the Jordanian option against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In 1976 a Labor-led government in Israel allowed the free election of municipal governments in the occupied West Bank under the assumption that the election would produce a new class of "moderate" pro-Jordanian leadership with which it could deal. Instead, West Bank Palestinians overwhelmingly elected mayors and town councils allied with the PLO.

A few years later, President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David treaty, which envisioned Palestinian "autonomy" in the occupied territories under a Jordanian umbrella. West Bank Palestinians swiftly organized themselves to voice their rejection of any such half-measures and to reaffirm their demand for an independent state and their support for the PLO.

THE UPRISING IN the West Bank and Gaza which began last December has apparently convinced King Hussein of the futility of his claim to the occupied territory. But it has yet to dent the consciousness of the United States and Israel. That is because, without the Jordanian option, American and Israeli policy-makers are left with no alternative to Palestinian independence.

And independence is clearly where the uprising is headed. In nine short months, the uprising has moved from a spontaneous eruption to a social reality. Palestinians in the occupied territories are about the business of consolidating alternative centers of power; creating counterinstitutions for health, welfare, and economic survival; and establishing a de facto counter government. The occupied Palestinians are showing all the characteristics of a people determined to be free, regardless of the cost.

Instead of seeking desperately to circumvent and short-circuit the Palestinian struggle, Americans should embrace it and try to help create conditions in which it might succeed without bloodshed. The first of these conditions should, of course, be U.S. support for Palestinian self-determination.

But for now, U.S. political and military power is firmly on the side of the Israeli occupiers. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that continued occupation is not really good for our Israeli allies either. Exercising colonial authority over an unwilling indigenous population is sapping Israel's human and financial resources and its will to deal with long-standing internal problems.

The occupation is also exerting a terrible drain on the self-confidence and idealism which have historically fueled the best in the Israeli experiment. If the PLO is able to come forward with a clear and definitive program for a two-state solution, they could be surprised at the acceptance it may find among many war-weary and fearful Israelis.