Hussein took significant action in 1988, when, in response to the first Palestinian
intifada, he renounced Jordan’s claim to the West Bank, which Israel had captured
from the kingdom in the 1967 war. Among other things, Hussein’s action undercut
Israel’s policy that it would discuss the future of the Palestinians only with Jordan—
not with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—because Jordan officially rep-
resented them.
A series of events—the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, the intifada, the
Persian Gulf War, the 1991 Madrid conference and peace process, and Israeli elections
that brought the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin to office as prime minister—set the stage
for peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians (moderated by Norway) in 1993.
Those talks resulted in the signing of a tentative peace agreement, the Declaration of
Principles, by Rabin and PLO chairman Yasir Arafat on September 13, 1993. The next
day, Israeli and Jordanian officials completed work on a long-pending “common
agenda” to pave the way for a permanent peace deal between their countries.
In May 1994, Hussein and Rabin met secretly in London and pushed ahead with
negotiations to complete a formal agreement. President Bill Clinton offered Hussein
tangible inducements for peace, including a pledge to ask Congress to waive about
$700 million in debts Jordan owed the United States.
On July 25, 1994, Hussein held his first official, public meeting with an Israeli leader,
Rabin, at the White House. The two men signed the Washington Declaration, a docu-
ment one step short of a formal peace treaty. The declaration expressed the two leaders’
determination to finalize a treaty and proclaimed that “the state of belligerency between
Jordan and Israel has been terminated.” One of its notable features was Israel’s recogni-
tion of Jordan’s “special role” in administering the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem and
promise to “give high priority to the Jordanian historic role” at those sites when the time
came for negotiating a final agreement with the Palestinians. This provision was bound
to annoy the PLO, which did not accept Hussein’s supposed status—claimed through
the Hashemite dynasty of which he was a part—as the official Islamic caretaker of those
sites. The Hashemite’s claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad.
Because so much groundwork had been laid in previous negotiations, Israeli and
Jordanian diplomats quickly reached agreement on a formal peace treaty. On October
26, 1994, Rabin signed the document for Israel and Prime Minister Abdul Salam
Majali signed it for Jordan at the Arava/Araba border crossing between the two coun-
tries. King Hussein, President Clinton, and Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrov
acted as official witnesses.
The treaty contained expressions of mutual respect, noting for example that the
countries “recognize and will respect each other’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and
political independence,” as well as “each other’s right to live in peace within secure
and recognized boundaries.” Each country pledged not to allow third parties to use its
territory to attack the other; this provision applied primarily to Jordan, which before
1970 had been the launching pad for numerous Palestinian operations against Israel.
The treaty also settled several specific long-standing disputes between the two coun-
tries, including conflicting claims over water resources, and Israel agreed to return to
Jordan a sliver of land in the border area south of the Dead Sea that had been cap-
tured in 1967. The treaty, however, was silent on the status of the West Bank, the
much larger territory that Israel had seized from Jordan in 1967 and over which King
Hussein had unilaterally relinquished sovereignty in 1988.
ARABS AND ISRAELIS 143