Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [1]
Why would a head of state want to write a book? There are countless reasons why doing so may be ill-advised. Running a country, after all, even a small one, is a full-time job. Added to that is the requirement of getting along with neighbors—many of whom could easily be offended by an honest presentation of the facts as viewed from another nation’s perspective. And then there are those who will want their actions either to go unmentioned or to be praised beyond their worth.
I have decided to put aside these arguments and write this book because the Middle East, the very tough neighborhood in which I live, is facing a moment of real crisis. I believe we still have one last chance to achieve peace. But the window is rapidly closing. If we do not seize the opportunity presented by the now almost unanimous international consensus on the solution, I am certain we will see another war in our region—most likely worse than those that have gone before and with more disastrous consequences.
People around here have long memories. They readily remember previous failed attempts to bring together the parties to the conflict. Many of the same players are still on the stage, and likely will remain so for years to come. This could be seen as a compelling reason not to speak publicly about sensitive issues, but I believe the world must know the risks of doing nothing.
My father’s generation reeled from the blast of war about once a decade. Following the war triggered by the creation of Israel in 1948, there was Suez in 1956, the disastrous 1967 war, when Israel seized the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights, and the war of 1973, when Egypt and Syria tried and failed to win back the territory they had lost in 1967. These were followed by the Iran-Iraq War and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, and the Gulf War in 1991. The periods in between could be called “peace” only in the loosest of senses. In the eleven years since I became King of Jordan, I have seen five conflicts: the Al Aqsa intifada in 2000, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-9. Every two or three years, it seems, another conflict besets our troubled region. As I look forward, my greatest fear is that we will soon see another war between Israel and its neighbors, triggered by a yet unknown flashpoint, that will escalate in terrifying ways.
The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians goes back to the early years of the twentieth century, but the impact of their struggle is felt very much in the present. Since the breakdown of the peace process in 2000, about a thousand Israelis and over sixty-five hundred Palestinians have been killed, and many thousands more injured. Today the whole Middle East faces the critical challenge of resolving a conflict that has almost defined the modern history of the region. If we succeed, I believe we will strike at one of the main roots of violence and instability in the Middle East.
Many in the West, when they look at our region, view it as a series of separate challenges: Iranian expansionism, radical terrorism, sectarian tensions in Iraq and Lebanon, and a long-festering conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. But the truth is that all of these are interconnected. The thread that links them is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For Muslims, the Arab-Israeli conflict is qualitatively different from any other in which they are involved. Contrary to what some like to say, it is not a religious struggle. It is a political conflict over rights and land. In 1900 there were around 60,000 Jews and 510,000 Arabs in the land of historic Palestine. Following a century of mass immigration, there are now over 6 million Jews and only 5 million Arabs. Many Jewish immigrants came during the persecution by the Nazi