Quarreling Over the West Bank

"King Hussein could announce that the sun was coming up tomorrow," a merchant in the Jordanian capital of Amman commented last week, "and Cairo Radio would be on the air ten minutes later denouncing the idea as a Zionist imperialist plot." Cairo Radio and almost every other Arab station in the Middle East were on the air last week criticizing Hussein for a different sort of announcement. The attacks were focused on his proposal (TIME, March 27) to divide his country into two autonomous regions--Palestine and Jordan--and to rename the combination the United Arab Kingdom.

One complaint was that the King had acted unilaterally to solve what Arabs consider their common problem. His proposal, the Kuwaiti Cabinet declared, "does not have the approval of the Arab nation." Arabs also thought that the King would sell out to Israel by making an easy peace in order to retrieve territory he lost in the 1967 war. Hussein called another press conference to stress that the United Arab Kingdom would not be created until Israel returned to Jordan the West Bank and the Arab sector of Jerusalem. Meanwhile Israeli officials, after displaying initial public scorn for Hussein's plan, were beginning to admit that it was a basis for bargaining. At a lunch for foreign correspondents in Jerusalem, Premier Golda Meir--who at week's end temporarily canceled all appointments on doctor's orders because she was suffering from fatigue--allowed indirectly that the federation plan was the best basis for bargaining.

Bitter Battle. Hussein had timed the announcement of his federation plan to influence municipal elections being held this week in ten West Bank towns. He thereby intruded into a bitter election battle between Palestinian guerrillas and Israeli occupation forces. The fedayeen, who detest Hussein and want a free Palestine, were determined to prevent, by terrorism if necessary, the elections that Israel is sponsoring as part of its program to "normalize" life on the West Bank. From Baghdad, Guerrilla Leader Yasser Arafat warned that "collaborators with Hussein in the new plan will be assassinated." Six frightened candidates from Nablus withdrew, including the leading contender for mayor, Hamdi Kanaan. He had had second thoughts after a nighttime visit from the fedayeen.

A bruising counter campaign on behalf of peaceful elections was mounted by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who frequently visits Arab communities in Israel and the occupied territories to hear complaints and settle problems. Dayan imperiously summoned the incumbent mayor of Nablus,

Haj Mazuz Masri, 70, to Jerusalem by helicopter, threatened retribution if the elections did not take place, and ordered in additional troops to underline his warning and stifle the fedayeen. He also arrested the mayor's cousin--Hikmet Masri, a former speaker of the Jordanian Parliament--for suspected contacts with the guerrillas. At Dayan's order, Israeli soldiers refused to allow commercial traffic from Nablus to cross the Damiya Bridge over the Jordan River. That was a stunning blow to many merchants, who, despite the occupation, have been able to maintain prosperous traditional markets under the open-bridges policy of Israel and Jordan. Dayan later rescinded his traffic ban and released Masri. The town of Nablus got his message. Five candidates for the town council who had threatened to pull out changed their minds, and eight new candidates decided to run.

The next move in any peace negotiations between Israel and Jordan will probably occur this week, when Hussein is expected to visit Washington to detail his plan. He will soon be followed by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, the author of an Israeli plan for the West Bank that also calls for Jordan's recovering most of the occupied territory. Washington worried that both sides would like the U.S. to act as middleman, and is wary; mediation would not only infuriate other Arabs, but could also complicate U.S. relations with Israel. The U.S. will instead try to persuade both sides to keep working bilaterally, once Arab outbursts diminish, toward what Eban last week described as the "progress in stages" that might be a more likely outcome of Hussein's proposal than any "dramatic jump to a full peace settlement."

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