Palestine: Jordan - part of the problem - part of the solution

That same morning, Israel had sent a message to Jordan’s leader King Hussein via the US State Department, the UN and the British Foreign Office, saying that, despite the outbreak of war, it would not attack the West Bank if Jordan maintained quiet on that front.

Jordan ignored Israel’s appeal to avoid any such conflict - and launched the following attacks on Israel before Israel acted militarily against Jordan or moved into the West Bank

1. Civilian suburbs of Tel-Aviv were shelled by artillery;
2. Israel’s largest military airfield, Ramat David, was shelled;
3. Jordanian warplanes attacked the central Israeli towns of Netanya and Kfar Sava;
4. Thousands of mortar shells rained down on West Jerusalem hitting civilian locations indiscriminately, including the Hadassah Hospital and the Mount Zion Church;
5. Israel’s parliament building (the Knesset) and the Prime Minister’s office, each in Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, were targeted;
6. 20 Israelis died in these attacks; 1000 were wounded. 900 buildings in West Jerusalem were damaged.
7. “Jerusalem is totally engulfed in war…” reported the British Consul-General that morning.

At that fateful moment in time:

1. Jordan had continuously occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem from 1948 - 1967.
2. Not one Jew had lived in the West Bank or East Jerusalem for those 19 years
3. The West Bank and East Jerusalem had been incorporated as part of Transjordan following a conference of hand picked Palestinian Arab leaders held on 1 December 1948 in Jericho.
4. Transjordan had officially changed its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on 25 April 1949
5. On 24 April 1950 the Jordan House of Deputies and House of Notables, in a joint session, adopted a resolution declaring "complete unity between the two sides of the Jordan and their union in one state...at whose head reigns King Abdullah Ibn al Hussain, on a basis of constitutional representative government and equality of the rights and duties of all citizens."
6. West Bank Arabs had become Jordanian citizens and held Jordanian passports
7. Not one call to establish an independent Palestinian Arab state in every square centimetre of the West Bank with its capitol in Jerusalem had been made during those 19 years.
8. The Palestine Liberation Organization had only been in existence for three years but article 24 of its constitution clearly stated that the organization:

does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the Western Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan …

Jordan must now be pressured to fill the Arab void following the burial of Oslo, the Roadmap and the Palestinian Authority with it - because Jordan’s decision in 1967 to join the Six Day War against Israel and its consequent loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel created the problem that still persists unresolved to this day.

Jordan cannot be allowed to simply bow out of resolving a problem which it helped create by either

1. refusing point blank to come to the negotiating table with Israel or
2. by claiming to have washed its hands of the problem in 1988 when foregoing any territorial claims in areas it had ruled for 19 years between 1948-1967.

There is a beautifully expressive Yiddish word - tachless - which the Everyday Yiddish-English-Yiddish dictionary defines as:

substance, worth, basics, ’brass tacks’

It is time to talk less with Jordan and let it know in no uncertain terms that it is part of the problem in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - and must now be part of the solution.