Israel and the Question of Palestinian Statehood
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
During the first four and a half decades of Israel’s existence, the vast majority of Israelis
held to the view that no need existed for a Palestinian state because the Palestinians
already had a state of their own—Jordan. Israeli leaders from David Ben-Gurion
onward argued that the land formerly known as Palestine had been divided by the
forces of history into the states of Israel and Jordan. According to their logic, because
the majority of Jordan’s citizens were of Palestinian origin, and because the majority
of Palestinians were (until 1988) Jordanian citizens, Jordan was thestate for Palestin-
ian Arabs who were not citizens of Israel. One consideration ignored by this argument
was that Jordan’s Hashemite rulers were not Palestinians.
One of the clearest expressions of official Israeli government policy on this matter
appears in a speech delivered by Prime Minister Golda Meir to a conference of her rul-
ing Labor Party on April 12, 1973. Meir, one of Israel’s founding leaders, served as prime
minister from May 1969 until April 1974, and she routinely took a tough, uncompro-
mising line toward the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. In the speech,
Meir stated that “there is room for two states only”—Israel and Jordan—between the
Mediterranean Sea and the desert to the east. If the Palestinian Arabs need a state, she
said, they have “every opportunity for national self-expression” in Jordan. “They need
Jordan—just as Jordan cannot exist without them,” she said. Meir suggested that the
more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs then in the West Bank could simply move to Jor-
dan if they wanted to live in a Palestinian state: “There are in Jordan wide spaces with
a development potential in which the Palestinians can be rehabilitated.”
Meir also reiterated what was then standard Israeli policy: Israel would negotiate
peace with its Arab neighbors, including Jordan, but would not negotiate with the Pales-
tine Liberation Organization (PLO) or other Palestinian groups. She described them as
“organizations of murderers” and accused their leaders of seeking “to destroy the State
of Israel and to establish instead a Palestinian state on the ‘plundered earth.’ ”
In the late 1980s, official Israeli policy on Jordan’s sovereignty over the Palestini-
ans shifted as a result of events, including the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising,
beginning in 1987. In large part because of the intifada, King Hussein in July 1988
renounced any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, which Jordan had controlled from
1948 until Israel captured it in the June 1967 War. Thus, in one stroke, Hussein elim-
inated the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinians living on the West Bank and under-
cut Israeli assertions that Jordan was the Palestinians’ state. Hussein’s action also rein-
forced his and other Arab leaders’ acknowledgment that the PLO, not Jordan, was the
sole representative of the Palestinian people (King Hussein on Relinquishing the West
Bank, p. 201).
The Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1989 offered
a “peace initiative,” calling for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation to elect
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 175