At a meeting Sept. 2 in Ramallah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas surprised his guests from the Meretz Party and Peace Now movement on two separate occasions. The first surprise came when he told them that the members of US President Donald Trump’s peace negotiations team raised the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. The second surprise was when he told them his response: He would only be willing to enter such a confederation if Israel is a part of it.
The American proposal proves that the team spent quite a bit of time poring over documents in the dusty archives. Late King Hussein of Jordan first raised the idea of a confederation 35 years ago, and the Palestinian National Council adopted it in 1983. The council even granted PLO leader Yasser Arafat a mandate to enter into negotiations with the king over the details of such a confederation. But nothing came out of these negotiations.
I spoke with King Hussein about this during the negotiations between the parties, and then with President Arafat years later. Arafat told me that the king insisted on being head of the new political framework, whereas Arafat demanded rotation. According to Arafat, King Hussein responded that kings "don’t do rotations.” Nor did Hussein agree to his request that a Palestinian state be established first, and only then unite with Jordan in a confederation.
The king said that his original proposal, which dated back to 1972, was to establish a federation based on an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of an autonomous Palestinian entity, under a Jordanian flag, in the territory occupied in 1967. Both the PLO and Israel rejected this proposal. At a conference that took place in the Moroccan capital of Rabat two years later (1974), the Arab League issued a resolution that took away Jordan’s right to represent the Palestinians and handed it over to the PLO, much to King Hussein’s dismay (but with his formal support. Everyone else voted for it, so he was forced to raise his hand in support of it too, even though he disagreed).
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