cooperation flourished. It continued after King Abdullah was assassinated at the holy shrines of Jerusalem, and his grandson, the boy Hussein, took his place.
At that time, the tide of pan-Arab nationalism was running high, and Gamal Abd-el-Nasser, its prophet, was the idol of the Arab world. The Palestinian people, who had been deprived of a political identity, also saw its salvation in an all-Arab entity. There was a danger that the Jordanian king 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 told me that he had proposed the same during the secret deliberations of the army general staff. (Later, Sharon asked me to arrange a meeting between him and Yassir 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?
In the course of the years I have heard many rational-sounding arguments. But I am convinced that at root it was not rational at all. The one decisive virtue of the Hashemite Dynasty 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. As long as possible, it denied the very existence of the Palestinian people. Since this has become ridiculous, it denies the existence of a Palestinian partner for peace. In any case, it denies the possibility of a viable Palestinian state next to Israel.
This denial has deep roots in the unconscious of the Zionist Movement and the Israeli leadership. Zionism strove for the creation of a Jewish national home in a land in which another people was living.