June 11, 2008	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 06, 1429

AMMAN: Jordanian officials fear the kingdom may pay the price for lack of progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as proposals resurface for a controversial merger with a truncated West Bank.

Israel and the Palestinians vowed to strike a peace deal by the time US President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009, but the negotiations so far have shown no visible progress.

Despite assurances from the United States that a deal on the outlines of a Palestinian state can still be agreed, Jordan is under no illusion of the likelihood of success as the clock ticks down to the end of Bush’s term.

With little progress made, all manner of scenarios are flourishing, including a revival of proposals for a truncated West Bank to merge with Jordan, while Israel retains the main settlement blocs that it has established in the occupied territory.

“Jordan does not want to be linked to 30 or 50 per cent of a territory which it owned from 1950 to 1967. To get half or less of the West Bank with all the Palestinian population would be suicide,” a senior Jordanian official said.

A significant proportion of Jordan’s 5.8 million inhabitants are already of Palestinian origin and officials worry that the addition of the West Bank’s 2.4 million Palestinians would fundamentally alter the population balance.

Those fears are made all the more acute by a history of deadly tensions between the two communities since Israel seized the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.

In 1970, Palestinian guerrillas attempted to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy in the so-called Black September clashes. Some 3,000 people were killed according to Jordanian sources, 10,000 according to the Palestinians.

“We would prefer to be at war with Israel rather than accept such a situation, which would be a security nightmare and which would in the long term cause Jordan to lose its identity,” the Jordanian official said.

“The only acceptable scenario for us is the merger of Jordan and all the West Bank,” he added.

Western diplomats who have met Jordan’s King Abdullah II in recent weeks have heard a similar story.“Jordan strongly opposes all American or Israeli attempts to merge it with a part of the West Bank,” the official said, adding that such a move would allow the Palestinians control of Jordanian politics and the powers of the king.

International politics professor Radwan Abdullah said the kingdom had to tread cautiously on any merger.

“We have to be careful how to go about it,” he said. “It is very important that these arrangements don’t lead to future Jordan-Palestinian rivalry and mutual recriminations.” Other Jordanians believe a merger with whatever is left of the West Bank after the main Israeli settlement blocs have been excised might be acceptable if Palestinians gave the deal the green light.

“If a credible Palestinian state is created, the Palestinians are not interested in such a link. But if a mutilated Palestinian state is the only option, then Palestinians prefer that the territory be linked to Jordan,” political analyst Labib Kamhawi said.

“The king is not opposed to this link if the Palestinians say they accept a mutilated state.” Kamhawi played down concerns about the loss of Jordan’s identity in such a scenario recalling that the kingdom had only formally given up its claim to the West Bank in 1988 and that the late king Hussein had called in 1972 for a United Arab Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank.

“Efforts are clearly moving in the direction of merger with Jordan, since Israel defines itself as the Jewish state and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are focussed only on parts of the West Bank,” political analyst Nahed Hatter said.

“For the United States and Israel, there is no other logical solution apart from dumping on Jordan the burden of the Palestinian population,” he added.

Even many veteran nationalist politicians in Israel have concluded that in order to remain a Jewish and democratic state, Israel must give up ambitions of retaining control over all of historic Palestine and divest itself of the main Palestinian population centres.—AFP