Jordan's ailing King Hussein took leave from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to attend the Wye Plantation Middle East summit because he had no choice but to offer his services as mediator, writes Michael Jansen Without his intervention in January 1997 in negotiations over Israel's redeployment from most of the West Bank town of Hebron, the peace process would have come to an end 22 months ago.
King Hussein cannot afford to allow the peace process to collapse now. In October 1994 he signed a separate peace treaty with Israel. He justified this deal by claiming that it was an extension of the Oslo accord signed by the Palestinians and Israel a year earlier.
But when implementation of the Palestinian-Israeli accords bogged down, the king came under attack for making peace with the Jewish state. Domestic opposition to Jordan's programme of normalising relations with Israel rose dramatically in 1996, once it became clear that the new Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, was trying to rewrite the Oslo accords.
King Hussein sent the Israeli leader a sharply critical letter, accusing him of destroying the peace process. And when Israeli intelligence agents attempted to kill a Hamas activist, Mr Khaled Mish'al, in Amman in September 1997, the king boycotted contacts with Israel until Mr Netanyahu apologised. To make matters worse, Israel has failed to implement the economic provisions of its treaty with Jordan, blocked Jordanian access to Palestinian markets in the West Bank and Gaza and supplied Jordanians with polluted water from the Sea of Galilee. During the recent vote of confidence in the new Jordanian government, 53 out of 80 deputies voted to freeze normalisation with Israel.
This amounts to outright rejection of his policy at a crucial time for the 62-year-old king, who suffers from lymphoma.
For the past two years he has been grooming his younger brother, Crown Prince Hassan, to succeed to the Hashemite throne. But the prince is unpopular with both Jordan's urban dwellers and the tribesmen who have loyally served in the army for the past 77 years. Prince Hassan would risk the throne if he were to continue rapprochement with Israel, particularly if the peace process collapses on the Palestinian track. This is why the king had no choice but to do his best to rescue the Wye Plantation talks.