Despite peace treaty, Jordanians still wary of Israel

By Abdul Jalil Mustafa May 30, 2007, 5:08 GMT

Amman - Forty years after losing the West Bank to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, Jordanians still have deep concerns over ambitions by Israeli rightist parties in the West Bank despite a peace treaty signed by the two sides in 1994, analysts said Monday.

'The stumbling of the peace process due to Israel's refusal to start negotiations with the Palestinians on the final status issues indicate Jordan's old fears are still existent despite the peace pact concluded with Israel,' Taher Adwan, chief editor of the daily al- Arab al-Yawm, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

He referred to the slogan of the 'alternative homeland' which some Israeli politicians raised after the 1967 war to suggest that the Palestinians' homeland should be Jordan and not the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel captured East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from Jordan after Amman decided to join Egypt and Syria in a war that began on June 5, 1967 with an Israeli aerial attack knocking out 90 per cent of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground.

A large number of Jordanians of Palestinian origin deserted their homes in the West Bank during and after the hostilities. Many of them were barred from returning to their homes.

The exodus aggravated the situation in Jordan which was already struggling to cope with the wave of refugees who had moved there after Israel was founded in 1948.

About two million Palestinians refugees live in Jordan today, according to estimates by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Jordanians of Palestinian origin are believed to form more than 55 per cent of the country's population.

'The peace treaty with Israel was supposed to put an end to the alternative homeland doctrine, but the Israeli practices on the ground, including the continuation of settlements, the buffer wall and economic sanctions, will only mean forcing more Palestinians to leave their homes for neighbouring countries particularly Jordan,' Adwan told dpa.

'This will extend the conflict for decades, and over time the Israeli governments will be inclined to say the solution lies in Amman and not in Jerusalem,' he added.

With these fears in the background, Jordan's King Abdullah II has been leading a relentless effort to relaunch peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians over the past few months.

Addressing the US Congress in March in a speech that became widely known across the Middle East, the king warned that 'all of us are at risk' if the peace process falters.

He emphasized that the Palestinian question represented the 'core of the Arab-Israeli conflict' and that its solution should be given priority by the US and other world powers because a settlement in the Middle East would provide a 'clue for resolving other hot issues.'

At the Riyadh summit at the end of March, Abdullah and other Arab leaders relaunched the Arab peace plan, which had originally been presented at the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut.

The blueprint offers to extend recognition to Israel by all Arab states provided it quits all the Arab areas it occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem. In addition, the plan demands an 'acceptable' solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes upon Israel's foundation in 1948.

The UN General Assembly resolution 194 of 1948 entitles Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel or to receive compensation if they choose not to return.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rejected the Arab peace plan, but offered to meet with Arab leaders to discuss the document, a move that was rejected by the Arab League.

The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the influential Muslim Brotherhood movement, protested that Israeli politicians still considered Jordan as an 'alternative homeland' for the Palestinians, and teamed up with other opposition parties and trade unions to form the National Committee for Derailing Normalization with Israel.

According to opinion polls and observers, the majority of the Jordanian people remains opposed to the peace treaty with Israel.

A top Jordanian expert on Israeli affairs, Ghazi al-Saadi, told dpa that the defunct Likud party of ailing former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon stopped considering Jordan as a substitute homeland for the Palestinians as of 1992.

'The alternative homeland theory no longer exists, but the new danger lies in Israeli measures - the settlement activity, the separation wall, starvation tactics - which force Palestinians to leave their homes and go to Jordan,' said al-Saadi, who runs a Palestinian research centre in Amman.

Abdullah insisted earlier this week that a confederation or any other entity that binds Jordan and the Palestinians 'will not be discussed before the creation of an independent and viable Palestinian state' which would live in peace with Israel.

Adwan and al-Saadi believed the creation of a confederation would provide Israel with a 'demographic' excuse to reject the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.