AMMAN, 2 July 2007 — Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday flatly rejected a confederation with the Palestinians, calling any such proposal at the current time a “conspiracy” against his kingdom and the Palestinians, a local newspaper reported.
Despite government assertions to the contrary, speculation has mounted in recent weeks that Jordan may want to assume a protectorate role in the West Bank by forming a confederation with the Palestinians.
In newspaper remarks published yesterday, Abdallah said he was “fed up talking about this issue.” “We reject the formula of confederation and federation and we believe that proposing this issue at this specific period is a conspiracy against both Palestine and Jordan,” Abdallah told the independent Al-Ghad newspaper.
Jordan fears that any confederation before a final settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could give credence to Israeli hard-liners, who have urged making Jordan a home for the West Bank’s Arabs.
Under a 1950 deal, Jordan administered the West Bank and East Jerusalem until Israel captured them in the 1967 war. Abdallah’s father, the late King Hussein, severed administrative links with the West Bank in 1988, handing responsibility to the Palestine Liberation Organization under its late leader, Yasser Arafat.
Hussein said a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation was possible once the Palestinians had an independent state.
In May, the Israeli Maariv daily said that Jordan was pressing hard for a confederation with the Palestinians. But Abdallah echoed his father’s position yesterday, saying it was “premature to talk about the shape of future relations with Palestine and we will not tackle this issue until an independent Palestinian state on Palestinian soil is established.” When asked if there was Israeli or US pressure on Jordan to accept a confederation with the Palestinians, he said: “We will not accept such solutions no matter what the pressures are.”
The king harshly rebuked Israel in the interview, underlining his frustration with its peace policies.
Despite cordial relations with his neighbor under a 1994 peace treaty, Abdallah described Israel as a “solid enemy” of the Palestinians, saying the Jewish state “will not achieve the security it desires, unless Palestinian political rights are addressed.”
Abdallah also rebuked the militant Palestinian Hamas movement for its military takeover of the Gaza Strip last month. He warned that Hamas’ conquest of the coastal strip would “undermine Palestinian hopes for ending the Israeli occupation and setting up an independent Palestinians state.” The king said he had hoped for a “better outcome” for the Palestinians from last month’s Middle East summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.
In a separate development, Jordan’s military prosecutor charged a former lawmaker yesterday with heading an illicit organization and distributing leaflets illegally, a lawyer and judicial official said.
Ahmad Oweidi Al-Abbadi, head of a small right-wing party called the Jordanian National Movement, had already been charged with harming the state’s dignity, slandering officials and violating laws governing e-mail practices.
The government detained Al-Abbadi on May 3, and district attorney Sabri Al-Rawashdeh interrogated him over the past two months to find out if his actions violated Jordan’s national interests. Al-Rawashdeh decided Thursday that he had no jurisdiction over the case and referred Al-Abbadi to the military prosecutor for a fresh round of questioning.
