by Avi Shlaim
A not insignificant number of Syrians retained their monarchist sentiments, and after Faisal’s death in 1933 pinned their hopes on his aspiring older brother. But as long as the French remained in Syria and Lebanon, Abdullah had little chance of success, for the French regarded the Greater Syria movement as an unwitting stalking horse, and Abdullah as a direct instrument of sinister British plots to undermine their own position in the area. In actual fact the British had never encouraged Abdullah to pursue his claims to Greater Syria; after the departure of the French in 1946, when Abdullah’s expansionist plans were directed perforce against his Arab neighbours, they actively tried to discourage him. In March 1946, under the terms of a new treaty, Britain granted Transjordan formal independence; Abdullah assumed the title of ‘king’, and the name of the country was changed from the Amirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Formal independence, however, was not matched by real independence.
Caught up in Great Power rivalries and in the cut and thrust of inter-Arab politics, the Greater Syria scheme ran for decades as a leitmotif in the affairs of the Middle East, provoking suspicion, antagonism and outright hostility towards Abdullah. Attack on it came from every corner of the Arab world. The Lebanese emphatically refused to become absorbed in a unitary Muslim state. The republicans in Syria, who had struggled for so long to achieve independence from the Ottomans and the French, were not about to surrender their hard-won gains by turning their country over to Hashemite rule. They also felt that if there were to be a Greater Syria, they were better equipped to lead it than the upstart from the Hijaz, and that its core and political centre of gravity should be Syria itself rather than backward Transjordan. Syria, after all, believed itself to be the beating heart of Arab nationalism. The Hashemites of Iraq and the nationalist politicians around them thought that their country was the natural leader of the Arab world; they devised their own plans for a federation under their leadership and gave Abdullah little support. The Saudis naturally opposed any plan that might strengthen the Hashemites and were determined not to let Abdullah extend his power outside Transjordan, lest he be tempted to try to reconquer the Hijaz. The Egyptians added their opposition to the concept of a Greater Syria, seeing the Hashemite bloc as the principal rival for their own hegemony in the Arab world. By trying to impose himself as the champion of Arab unity, Abdullah thus ended up antagonizing the majority of Arab nationalists both inside and outside the boundaries of Greater Syria. The nationalists came to see him as the lackey and tool of British imperialism in the Middle East; they perceived his expansionist plans as a threat to the independence of the other Arab states in the region; and they were critical of his accommodating attitude towards Zionism and the Jews in Palestine.
Without abandoning his larger goal, from the late 1930s onwards Abdullah gradually began to turn his thoughts and energy to Palestine. Palestine was only one of the four parts into which ‘natural Syria’ had been divided, and a small one at that. But for Abdullah it had importance out of all proportion to its small size. To want to rule over Palestine was not for him a vacuous ambition, nor was it an accident that at the very first meeting with Churchill he asked to be entrusted with its administration. Transjordan and Palestine were bound together by a complex network of political and family ties, trade relations and routes of communication stretching back to the very distant past. Transjordan needed the capital, the markets, the trained manpower and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea that only Palestine could provide.
This unity was severed by the British decision in 1922 to exclude Transjordan from the area available to the Jewish national home. Imperial self-interest, rather than respect for the rights of the local communities, lay behind this decision. Geopolitics and grand strategy were the controlling considerations in separating Transjordan from western Palestine. Transjordan was needed as a buffer in the south between Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Egypt and Palestine on the other; it could also serve as a buffer to contain France in the north. Both Ottoman and Faisali Syria had extended down to Transjordan. Now a sharper line was drawn between the British and the French spheres of interest in the Levant.
The internal division of the Palestine mandate met with both strong Zionist opposition and resentment from Abdullah. True, Abdullah had formally recognized the British mandate over the whole of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration – something his father had resisted to the bitter end – but he felt that he had had no real choice in the matter. To Abdullah’s way of thinking, gaining control over Palestine thus represented both an important end in itself and a possible means to a still larger long-term objective. The British attitude, here as always, was an important factor in Abdullah’s calculations. He believed that the British would not look with the same disfavour on his plans for Palestine as they had always displayed towards his Greater Syria scheme. The other two elements that had to be taken into consideration were the Palestine Arabs and the Jews. Accordingly, Abdullah’s policy for furthering his design on Palestine operated in three distinct but overlapping circles: the British; the Palestine Arabs; and the Jews. In all three, he used the same method – personal diplomacy.
Of all the political friendships cultivated by Abdullah, the most controversial, the least well understood by fellow Arabs and the most damaging to his reputation was his friendship with the Zionists. No other aspect of his policy provoked such intense suspicion, stirred such strong passions or brought him so much opprobrium. Abdullah’s motives for seeking such an understanding were indeed complex, but they can be reduced to two basic and seemingly inconsistent factors: his fear of Zionism and his perception of the opportunity it offered him to realize his own goals in Palestine.
Abdullah may not have fully understood the ideas that propelled the Zionists to strive so relentlessly for a state of their own, but he recognized a going concern when he saw one. A newcomer though he was to the affairs of Palestine, he read the situation of the Jews there, and the politics of his Arab kinsmen, with remarkable clarity. Whereas the latter indulged in facile optimism and hopes of an easy victory until overtaken by the disaster of 1948, he never underestimated the power, skill and commitment that activated Jewish nationalism in Palestine. Realizing that Zionism could not be destroyed or ignored, his strategy was attuned to circumventing it and preventing a head-on collision. But he was also shrewd enough to see at an early stage that Zionism’s force, if rightly channelled, could turn out to be not a barrier but a help in fulfilling his ambition of a Greater Transjordan: Jewish enmity could only weaken his chances of being accepted by the world as the ruler of Palestine, but Jewish acquiescence, especially if it could be purchased at the price of autonomy under his rule, might pave the way to a Greater Transjordan, incorporating part, or possibly all, of the Holy Land.
In his personal dealings with the Zionists, Abdullah was not hampered by any racist prejudice. Hatred of the Jews did not burn in his heart, and he stood above the fanatic anti-Jewish prejudices harboured by some Arabs. His unbiased and pragmatic attitude towards the Jews, while not unique, did stand in marked contrast to the anti-Semitism of the majority of Arabs. Respect for the Jews, the People of the Book, was in fact for the Hashemites a family tradition, consistent with the teachings of the Koran. Abdullah’s father refused to condone the Balfour Declaration not out of blind anti-Zionism but because it did not safeguard the civil and religious rights of the Arabs, and disregarded what he perceived as their inalienable political and economic rights in Palestine. He was not opposed to letting the Jews live in peace beside Muslims in the Holy Land on the clear understanding that all the legitimate rights of the Muslims would be respected.
Abdullah was not the first member of his family to hold exploratory talks with Zionist leaders. In January 1919 his brother Faisal initialled an agreement with the moderate Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, one he was unable to ratify because of the strength of Arab opposition. Soon afte he got his principality, Abdullah embarked on a tangled relationship with the Zionists that was to last u
ntil the end of his life. To his early contacts with the Zionists Abdullah brought the self-confidence and flexibility in dealing with minorities that he had acquired under the Ottoman regime. His view of the Jews as fabulously wealthy and skilled in the ways of the modern world also went back to his time in Istanbul, where he had first met Jewish physicians, merchants and financiers. The Zionist leaders for their part could not fail to be impressed by the moderation and pragmatism of their new neighbour to the east, and their policy in consequence acquired a pro-Hashemite orientation at a very early stage.
The first meeting between Abdullah and Weizmann took place in London in 1922. Abdullah offered to support the Balfour Declaration if the Zionists accepted him as the ruler of Palestine and used their influence with the British authorities to procure this appointment for him. The offer was politely brushed aside, but the traffic between the Zionists and the amir had begun. The basic solution, which Abdullah advanced at different times and in ever-changing forms, was a ‘Semitic kingdom’ embracing both Palestine and Transjordan, in which Arabs and Jews could live as of right and as equals, with himself as their hereditary monarch. It is worth noting that none of these forms allowed for Jews living abroad to have an automatic right to come to Palestine: immigration controls of some sort were to be imposed to ensure Arab preponderance and to keep the Jews to a minority status in this ‘Semitic kingdom’.
There was never any chance of Abdullah’s offer of autonomy within a larger kingdom being acceptable to the official leadership of the Yishuv, the pre-independence Jewish community in Palestine. The official leaders of the Zionist movement aspired to an independent Jewish state, and the offer of a limited autonomy under Arab rule fell far short of their expectations and was indeed incompatible with the basic goal of their movement. They wanted good relations with Abdullah, but they had no wish to be his subjects. This was the view of the Labour Zionists who dominated the political institutions of the Yishuv; further to the right were Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, who not only spurned any idea of subservience to an Arab ruler but were never reconciled to the partition of mandatory Palestine and continued to include the East Bank of the Jordan in their ambitious blueprint for a Jewish state.
Abdullah’s contacts with the mainstream Zionists continued almost without a break until his death in July 1951.21 They assumed particular importance during the critical phase in the struggle for Palestine following Britain’s announcement, in February 1947, of its decision to relinquish the mandate. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to replace the British mandate in Palestine with two states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jewish Agency accepted the UN partition plan because it endorsed the Jewish claim to independence and statehood. The Arab League and the Palestinian leaders rejected it as immoral, illegal and impractical, and they went to war to nullify it. The passage of the partition resolution by the UN was thus both an international charter of legitimacy for the establishment of a Jewish state and the signal for the outbreak of a vicious war in Palestine.
The First Arab–Israeli War is usually treated as one war. Israelis call it the War of Indpendence, whereas Arabs call it Al-Nakbah, or ‘The Catastrophe’. In fact, it could be considered two wars in that it had two distinct phases, each with a different character and, on the Arab side, each with different participants. The first phase lasted from 29 November 1947, when the UN passed the partition resolution, until 14 May 1948, when the British mandate expired and the State of Israel was proclaimed. The second phase lasted from the invasion of Palestine by the regular armies of the Arab states on 15 May 1948 until the termination of hostilities on 7 January 1949. The first and unofficial phase of the war was between the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, and it ended in triumph for the Jews and tragedy for the Palestinians. The second and official phase of the war involved the regular armies of the neighbouring Arab states, and it ended with an Israeli victory and a comprehensive Arab defeat.
Most of the literature on the First Arab–Israeli War relates to the official, or inter-state, phase that began with the invasion of Palestine by the armies of seven Arab states upon expiry of the British mandate. In many respects, however, the unofficial phase of the war was more important, and more fateful, in its consequences. The first phase was, essentially, a civil war between the local communities. It was during this phase that the irregular Palestinian military forces were defeated, Palestinian society was pulverized and the largest wave of refugees was set in motion. It was only after the collapse of Palestinian resistance that the neighbouring Arab states committed their own regular forces to the battle.
King Abdullah’s hope was to effect a peaceful partition of Palestine between himself and the Jewish Agency, and to isolate his great rival, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement. The political agendas of the two rivals were incompatible. The Mufti rejected categorically any idea of Jewish statehood and staked a claim to a unitary Arab state over the whole of Palestine. Abdullah was prepared to accommodate a Jewish state, provided it allowed him to make himself master of the Arab part of Palestine. The British secretly backed Abdullah’s bid to incorporate the Arab part of Palestine into his kingdom because he was their client, whereas the Mufti was a renegade who had supported Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In British eyes a Palestinian state was synonymous with a Mufti state. They therefore colluded with Abdullah in aborting the birth of a Palestinian state but at the same time urged him not to cross the borders of the Jewish state as defined by the UN and to avoid a direct collision with the Jewish forces.
Abdullah had a secret meeting with Golda Meyerson (later Meir) of the Jewish Agency in Naharayim, by the Jordan River, on 17 November 1947. Here they reached a preliminary agreement to coordinate their diplomatic and military strategies, to forestall the Mufti and to endeavour to prevent the other Arab states from intervening directly in Palestine.22 Twelve days later, on 29 November, the United Nations pronounced its verdict in favour of dividing the area of the British mandate into two states. This made it possible to solidify the tentative understanding reached at Naharayim. In return for Abdullah’s promise not to enter the area assigned by the UN to the Jewish state, the Jewish Agency agreed to the annexation by Transjordan of most of the area earmarked for the Arab state. Precise borders were not drawn, and Jerusalem was not even discussed, as under the UN plan it was to remain a corpus separatum under international control.
Abdullah’s hope of a peaceful partition was dashed by the escalation of fighting in Palestine. The collapse of Palestinian society and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem generated intense popular pressure on the Arab governments, and especially that of Transjordan, to send their armies to Palestine to check the Jewish military offensive. Abdullah was unable to withstand this pressure. The flood of refugees reaching Transjordan pushed the Arab Legion towards greater participation in the affairs of Palestine. The tacit agreement that Abdullah had reached with the Jewish Agency enabled him to pose as the protector of the Arabs in Palestine, while keeping his army out of the areas that the UN had earmarked for the Jewish state. This balancing act, however, became increasingly difficult to maintain. Suspecting Abdullah of collaboration with the Zionists, the anti-Hashemite states in the Arab League began to lean towards intervention with regular armies in Palestine, if only to curb Abdullah’s territorial ambition and stall his bid for hegemony in the region. On 30 April 1948 the Political Committee of the Arab League decided that all the Arab states must prepare their armies for the invasion of Palestine on 15 May, the day after the expiry of the British mandate. Under pressure from Transjordan and Iraq, Abdullah was appointed as commander-in-chief of the invading forces.23
To the Jewish leaders it looked as if Abdullah was about to throw in his lot with the rest of the Arab world. So Golda Meir was sent on 10 May on a secret mission to Amman to warn the king against doing so. Abdullah looked depressed and nervous. Meir flatly rejected his offer of autonomy for the Jewish territories under
his crown and insisted that they adhere to their original plan for an independent Jewish state and the annexation of the Arab part to Transjordan. Abdullah did not deny that this was what had been agreed, but the situation in Palestine had changed radically, he explained, and now that he was one of five he had no choice but to join with the other Arab states in the invasion of Palestine. Meir was adamant: if Abdullah was going back on their agreement and if he wanted war, then they would meet after the war and after the Jewish state had been established. The meeting ended on a frosty note, but Abdullah’s parting words to Ezra Danin, who accompanied and translated for Meir, were a plea not to break off contact, come what may.24
In Zionist historiography the meeting of 10 May is usually presented as proof of the unreliability of Israel’s only friend among the Arabs and as confirmation that Israel stood alone against an all-out offensive by a united Arab world. Meir herself helped to propagate the view that Abdullah broke his word to her; that the meeting ended in total disagreement; and that they parted as enemies.25 The king’s explanation of the constraints that forced him to intervene was seized upon as evidence of treachery and betrayal on his part. In essence, the Zionist charge against Abdullah is that when the moment of truth arrived, he revoked his pledge not to attack the Jewish state and threw in his lot with the rest of the Arab world.26 This helped to sustain the legend that the outbreak of war was a carefully orchestrated all-Arab invasion plan directed at strangling the Jewish state at birth.