A senior government official invited me to dinner in a posh restaurant. On a paper napkin he drew the map of Jordan and explained to me the whole problem in a nutshell:
We are surrounded by countries which are very different from each other. Here is the Zionist Israel, and here the nationalist Syria. In the West Bank, radical tendencies flourish, and in close-by Lebanon there is a conservative sectarian regime. Here is the secular Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and here the devout Saudi Arabia. From all these directions, ideas and people flow into Jordan. We absorb all of them. But we cannot quarrel with any of our neighbors. When we move a bit towards Syria, on the following day we have to make a gesture towards Saudi Arabia. When we come closer to Israel, we must appease Iraq quickly.
The obvious conclusion: the Jordanian Option was a folly right from the beginning. But nobody in the Israeli leadership grasped that. As the wise Boutros Boutros-Ghali once told me: "You have in Israel the greatest experts on Arab affairs. They have read every book and every article. They know everything, and understand nothing-because they have never lived for one day in an Arab country."
Old loves do not die. True, the First Intifada pushed aside the Jordanian Option and the leaders of Israel flirted with the Palestinian Option. But their heart was not in the new love, and they acted as if driven by a demon. That explains why no serious effort was made to fulfill the Oslo agreement and to bring the process to its logical conclusion: a Palestinian state next to Israel.
Now, suddenly, people are once more talking about Jordan.
Perhaps one could ask King Abdullah II to send his army into the West Bank to fight Hamas. Perhaps we could bury the "two-state solution" in a Jordanian-Palestinian federation that would allow the Jordanians to take over the West Bank again.
The King was appalled. That is just what he needs! To incorporate the turbulent and divided Palestinian population in his kingdom! To open the border to a new flood of refugees and immigrants! He hastened to deny any part in the scheme.
Federation? That is quite possible, he said-but only after a free Palestinian state has come into being, not before, and certainly not instead. Then the citizens may decide freely.
A famous book by the Israeli author Yehoshua Kenaz is called Returning Lost Loves. But it seems that this old love is gone forever.