A dead body buried in a cave has come to life again. The “Jordanian option” gave up its ghost almost 20 years ago. Even before that, it never was very healthy. But in 1988, some time after the outbreak of the first intifada, it was officially buried by none other than King Hussein himself. He announced that he had given up any claim to the West Bank.

And now, suddenly, it seems to have sprung to life again.

The Israeli love story with the Hashemite dynasty started three generations ago. In World War II, Iraq rebelled against the Hashemite king, who was imposed on them by the British at the time they installed another branch of the family in Transjordan. The Iraqi king and his entourage fled to Palestine. Here he was warmly received by the Zionist leadership, which provided him with a secret radio station on Mount Carmel. I heard this from one of the people directly involved, Minister Eliyahu Sassoon.

The British Army returned the Hashemites to power in Baghdad. But, as Sassoon added in sorrow, they repaid good with bad: Immediately after their restoration they adopted an extreme anti-Zionist line. By the way, the Irgun underground organization was cooperating with the British at the time, and its commander, David Raziel, was killed in Iraq in the course of the operation.

Issam Sartawi, one of the PLO leaders, a refugee from Acre who grew up in Iraq, later claimed that when the Hashemites returned to Baghdad, the British organized a massacre of the Jews in order to gain them nationalist popularity.

But the relations with the Hashemites continued. On the eve of the 1948 war, the Zionist leadership kept in close contact with King Abdallah of Transjordan. Between the king and Golda Meir, several secret plans were hatched, but when the time came, the king did not dare to break Arab solidarity, and so he also invaded Palestine. It has been claimed this was done in close coordination with David Ben-Gurion. And indeed, the new Israeli Army avoided attacking the Jordanian forces (except in the Latrun area, in an attempt to open the way to besieged West Jerusalem.)

The cooperation between Abdallah and Ben-Gurion bore the hoped-for fruit: The territory that was allotted by the UN to the putative Palestinian Arab state was partitioned between Israel and the renamed Kingdom of Jordan (the Gaza Strip was given to Egypt). The Palestinian state did not come into being, and Israeli-Jordanian cooperation flourished. It continued after King Abdallah was assassinated at the holy shrines of Jerusalem.

At that time, the tide of pan-Arab nationalism was running high, and Gamal Abd-el-Nasser, its proponent, was the idol of the Arab world. The Palestinian people saw its salvation in an all-Arab entity. There was a danger that the Jordan’s King Hussein might be toppled any minute, but Israel announced that if this happened, the Israeli Army would enter Jordan at once. The king continued to sit on his throne supported by Israeli bayonets.

Things reached a climax during Black September (1970), when Hussein crushed the PLO forces in blood and fire. The Syrians rushed to their defense and started to cross the border. In coordination with Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir issued an ultimatum: If the Syrians did not retreat at once, the Israeli Army would enter. The Syrians gave up, the king was saved. The PLO forces went to Lebanon.

At the height of the crisis, I called upon the Israeli government in the Knesset to adopt the opposite course: To enable the Palestinians in the West Bank to set up a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Years later, Ariel Sharon asked me to arrange a meeting between him and Yasser Arafat to discuss this plan: To topple the regime in Jordan and turn the country into a Palestinian state, instead of the West Bank. Arafat refused to meet him and disclosed the proposal to the king.

The Jordanian option was more than a political concept — it was a love story. For decades, almost all Israeli leaders were enamored of it — from Chaim Weizmann to David Ben-Gurion, from Golda to Peres.

What did the Hashemite family have that enchanted the Zionist and Israeli establishment? The one decisive virtue of the Hashemite Dynasty, in the Israeli eyes, was — and is — quite simple: They are not Palestinians.

From its first day, the Zionist movement has lived in total denial of the Palestinian issue. Zionism strove for the creation of a Jewish National Home in a land in which another people was living. Since Zionism was an idealistic movement imbued with profound moral values, it could not bear the thought that it was committing a historical injustice to another people. It was necessary to suppress and deny the feeling of guilt engendered by this fact.

The unconscious guilt feelings were deepened by the 1948 war, in which more than half the Palestinian people were separated from their lands. The idea of turning the West Bank over to the Hashemite kingdom was built on the illusion that there is no Palestinian people, so it could suffer no injustice.

The Jordanian option is a euphemism. Its real name is “Anti-Palestinian Option”. That’s why those who preached it from every hilltop, did not lift a finger to bring it about. On the contrary, they did everything possible to prevent its realization.

During Yitzhak Rabin’s first term as prime minister, after the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger suggested the return of Jericho to King Hussein. Thus the Hashemite flag would wave over West Bank territory.

When Foreign Minister Yigal Allon brought the proposal to Rabin, he was met with an adamant refusal. The same happened when Shimon Peres reached a secret agreement with King Hussein and brought the finished product to the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir threw the agreement into the waste bin.

One of the interesting aspects of this long love story was that not one of the Israeli lovers ever took the trouble to look at the problem from the other side. In the depths of their heart, they despised the Jordanians as they despised all Arabs.

In the middle of the 1980s, while in Jordan on an official invitation, a senior government official invited me to dinner in a posh restaurant. On a paper napkin he drew the map of Jordan and explained to me the whole problem in a nutshell:

“We are surrounded by countries which are very different from each other. Here is the Zionist Israel, and here the nationalist Syria. In the West Bank, radical tendencies flourish, and in close-by Lebanon there is a conservative sectarian regime.

“Here is the secular Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and here the devout Saudi Arabia. From all these directions, ideas and people flow into Jordan. We absorb all of them.

“But we cannot quarrel with any of our neighbors. When we move a bit toward Syria, on the following day we have to make a gesture toward Saudi Arabia. When we come closer to Israel, we must appease Iraq quickly.”

The obvious conclusion: The Jordanian option was a folly right from the beginning. But nobody in the Israeli leadership grasped that.

True, the first intifada pushed aside the Jordanian option and the leaders of Israel flirted with the Palestinian option. But their heart was not in the new love, and they acted as if driven by a demon. That explains why no serious effort was made to fulfill the Oslo agreement and to bring the process to its logical conclusion: A Palestinian state next to Israel.