Adnan Abu Odeh, a former chief of the Jordanian royal court who was close to the late King Hussein during a period of tension with the Palestinians, died in Amman on Wednesday.
Official state media reported his death. He was 89.
Abu Odeh was born in the Palestinian city of Nablus. He belonged to the Islamic Hezb Al Tahrir party and became a communist before working for the Jordanian intelligence services in the 1960s.
A large proportion of Jordan’s 10.7 million population is of Palestinian origin.
Educated in Damascus, Abu Odeh was minister of information in a military government formed by the monarchy in the late 1970s, right after the Jordanian civil war.
During the conflict, the Palestine Liberation Organisation clashed with government forces, an episode known as Black September.
It ended with the PLO’s defeat and relocation to Lebanon, where it played a major role in igniting another civil war, which would consume Lebanon for 15 years.
Abu Odeh wrote about his experience in a 2017 memoir, where he revealed he was a proponent of the king’s decision in 1988 to cede nominal control of the occupied West Bank, which solidified the position of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.
The administration of the West Bank was overseen by the Jordanian government, and its civil servants received salaries from Jordan.
Abu Odeh said the decision was necessary to affirm Jordan’s status as a separate entity from Palestine and undercut any Israeli rationale to regard Jordan as an alternative Palestinian state, and potentially expel Palestinians to Jordan.
"Jordan is not Palestine,” King Hussein said in a speech in August 1988 announcing the disengagement as the country suffered a severe economic downturn.
By the end of the year, the Jordanian dinar collapsed, eventually losing half its value.
Officials at the time said it was the price Jordan paid for the disengagement, but the dinar had long been considered overvalued and the economy mismanaged.
