by Avi Shlaim
‘I want you to make me a promise.’ I said, ‘Of course sir, what is it?’ He said, ‘I have lived in this nation, I have loved it all my life, and I have worked for its greatness. I love these people. I hope you realize that some day you will have to assume responsibility. I don’t know what the future will bring but please promise me that you will never despair and that you will never let my work go unfinished. I look to you to see that my work is not lost.’ Without understanding what I was saying, I said, ‘Of course I do, sir,’ and that Friday he was gone. It was that promise, probably more than anything else, that kept me going through all the years that have followed. As a Hashemite and as his descendant, I personally promised him, without knowing much of what I was saying, to do my best.12
The significance of this private exchange was publicly acknowledged by Hussein forty years later, after his first brush with cancer. In a televised address to his countrymen on his return to Amman in November 1992, after cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, he explained that he would be making regular visits to the clinic for check-ups to confirm that he had been cured. Hussein went on to say that the ‘life of an enlightened people and a vibrant nation cannot be measured by the life of an individual’. He was ever mindful, he continued,
of the legacy of my grandfather, the founder of this Kingdom, who had said to me that he perceived his life as a link in a continuous chain of those who served our [Arab] nation and that he expected me to be a new and strong link in that same chain. He had singled me out as a young member of his family and a youth from Amman and Jordan. In passing on his legacy, he – God rest his soul – changed this young man’s life. Even now I recall the moment when I vowed to God and to myself that I would follow in his footsteps and in those of his fathers and grandfathers for the good of our beloved people and the future of our great [Arab] nation.13
On the day of the murder, at Abdullah’s insistence, Hussein wore his brand-new uniform, with its Jordanian Star First Class, his reward for winning the school fencing prize, proudly fastened over his heart. The atmosphere on the way to the Al-Aqsa Mosque was highly charged. Walking behind his grandfather, Hussein saw the assailant emerge from behind the door and fire the shot that killed Abdullah instantly. Hussein lunged towards the man, saw him point his squat black gun at him, heard the shot and reeled as he felt the shock on his chest. The assassin continued to fire right and left, until he was killed by the royal bodyguard. Later Hussein discovered that the bullet had hit the medal on his chest and ricocheted off. He had no doubt that his grandfather’s insistence that he wear the uniform saved his life.
Though Abdullah’s influence on Hussein’s life was profound, it was his death that taught him the ultimate lesson. The murder was the first time that violence had touched Hussein personally, and on that terrible day, by his own account, he learned much, even if he did not immediately realize it. He learned the unimportance of death: that when you have to die, you die, for it is God’s judgment, and only by not fearing death do you find inner peace. Belief in fate encouraged him to give of his utmost in the brief span allotted to him on earth. It also encouraged him to live with courage and to abide by his principles, regardless of the difficulties he faced, so that when the time came for him to lose his life, he would at least have done his best. ‘These beliefs’, he said, summing up, ‘have helped me greatly to bear the loss of my grandfather, and later have served me well in moments of crisis and danger. Without doubt, it was the death of my grandfather that made me clarify my philosophy of life for the first time.’14
The death of his grandfather also taught Hussein to distrust and even despise politicians and to put his faith in simple soldiers. In the midst of the mayhem, he noticed that most of his grandfather’s so-called friends were fleeing in every direction: ‘I can see now, these men of dignity and high estate, doubled up, cloaked figures scattering like bent old terrified women. That picture, far more than the face of the assassin, has remained with me ever since as a constant reminder of the frailty of political devotion.’15 Only the soldiers stood their ground, protected him and gave him sincere sympathy and support. This went for British soldiers as well. General Glubb reacted swiftly the moment he heard the news by sending a separate aircraft to whisk Hussein back to safety in Amman. On the tarmac at the airport on the outskirts of Jerusalem, a man in air force uniform approached the sedated, shell-shocked boy. Very shyly he said in a thick Scottish accent, ‘Come with me, sir. I’ll look after you.’ The man led the boy to a twin-engine plane, a Dove, and invited him to squeeze into the co-pilot’s seat next to him. He then revved up the motors, and they flew back to Amman. The man was Wing-Commander Jock Dalgleish of the Royal Air Force. Two years later Dalgleish would teach Hussein to fly. The next day Hussein carried a gun for the first time in his life.16
One question that has continued to puzzle observers is: why did Abdullah disregard all the warnings and keep to his plan of Friday prayers in Jerusalem? One possible answer, which was long to remain a closely guarded secret, is that Abdullah had arranged to meet two Israeli officials in Jerusalem the next day, Saturday, 21 July 1951. The two officials were Reuven Shiloah and Moshe Sasson, who was continuing the negotiations for a peace treaty that his father, Elias, had begun. At one of their first meetings, Moshe Sasson asked Abdullah, ‘Why do you want to make peace with Israel?’ The king replied, ‘I want to make peace with Israel not because I have become a Zionist or care for Israel’s welfare but because it is in the interest of my people. I am convinced that if we do not make peace with you, there will be another war, and another war, and another war, and another war, and we shall lose all these wars. Hence it is the supreme interest of the Arab nation to make peace with you.’17 The secret meeting fixed for the day after the Friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was thus only one link in a long chain, part of a sustained effort to reach a peaceful settlement. It also shows that Abdullah maintained his contact with the Zionists almost without a break, and in the face of all the opposition and hazards involved, from the creation of the Amirate of Transjordan in 1921 almost until his dying day.
In official Israeli circles the reaction to Abdullah’s assassination was one of profound shock and concern for the future. He was seen as the closest thing to a friend that Israel possessed among the Arab leaders. No one felt the blow more acutely than Elias Sasson, the diplomat of Lebanese extraction who knew how to offer and elicit sympathy, and with whom he had held countless meetings. Sasson described Abdullah’s disappearance from the political scene as a grave loss to Jordan, to the Arab world, to the Western world and to Israel. As he wrote to his superiors,
King Abdullah was the only Arab statesman who showed an understanding for our national renewal, a sincere desire to come to a settlement with us, and a realistic attitude to most of our demands and arguments… King Abdullah, despite being an Arab nationalist and a Muslim zealot, knew how to look with an open and penetrating eye on events… He also served as the trumpet announcing these changes to the members of his nation and religion wherever they might be, in a pleasant, moderate, and logical tone. We as well as some of the Arabs and foreigners are going to feel for a long time to come his absence, and to regret more than a little his removal from our midst.18
The Zionist leaders were acutely aware that in their relations with their neighbour to the east they depended almost entirely on one individual, and they regretted that it proved impossible to develop normal state-to-state relations even after both countries had attained formal independence. But for the most part they accepted this exclusive link with the royal court as an unfortunate fact of life. Abdullah, for all his limitations, was a sincere friend and a genuine man of peace. David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister, emphasized Abdullah’s uniqueness among Arab rulers in a consultation on Arab policy held after the Egyptian Free Officers’ Revolution of July 1952. ‘We did have one man,’ recalled Ben-Gurion, ‘about whom we knew that he wanted peace with Israel, and we tri
ed to negotiate with him, but the British interfered, until a bullet came and put an end to business. With the removal of the Abdullah factor, the whole matter was finished.’19
While giving credit where credit was due, Ben-Gurion misrepresented Israel’s position in the aftermath of the 1948 war. In the first place, Abdullah was not the only Arab ruler who wanted peace with Israel. Husni Za’im, following his military coup in Syria in March 1949, openly stated his ambition to be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel and called for high-level talks, but Ben-Gurion refused to meet him.20 Ben-Gurion also declined all of Abdullah’s requests for a face-to-face meeting. So the claim that there was no one to talk to on the Arab side is simply not true. Moreover, one of the reasons for the failure of the negotiations with both Za’im and Abdullah was Ben-Gurion’s insistence that peace be based on the status quo, with only minor territorial adjustments and no return of Palestinian refugees. None the less, the death of Abdullah did mark a turning point in Ben-Gurion’s thinking: he finally gave up any hope of a voluntary agreement with the Arabs and reverted to the old and seriously flawed premise that force is the only language that the Arabs understand.
Unlike Ben-Gurion, Mendel Cohen had a great deal of direct contact with King Abdullah and was able to observe him and the politics of the royal court at close quarters. Cohen was a first-rate Jewish carpenter who was employed by the royal court in Amman for ten years; his job was to refurbish and furnish the houses of the amir, his wives, his children and his aides. In 1980 Cohen published in Hebrew a book of memoirs entitled At the Court of King Abdullah. The book gives a fascinating account of the king, his two sons and the crisis for the succession following the murder at the mosque. One point that emerges clearly from the book is Abdullah’s genuine respect and admiration for the Jews. There is also an account of the deep estrangement between Abdullah and his eldest son, Talal, the result, in part, of very different attitudes towards the Jews. Talal objected to the employment of Jews at the royal court and supported the Arab League’s economic boycott of the State of Israel. On one occasion, Talal expounded to Cohen the reasons for his view that there could be no accommodation between the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East. ‘The Jews’, said Talal ‘are rich, shrewd, educated, and they have culture and unlimited capability. The Arabs, by contrast, are poor, simple, and lacking in education. Any contact between Jews and Arabs is therefore bound, in the end, to be for the benefit of the strong and to the detriment of the weak.’21
According to Cohen, Abdullah thought his second son, Naif, was also an unsuitable successor, but when he went abroad he usually appointed Naif as regent. Naif, however, never played an independent role. He was a puppet in the hands of the prime minister and the British representatives. The two brothers struck Cohen as totally different: whereas Talal held firm views and expressed them forcefully, Naif was weak, flabby, uneducated, phlegmatic and susceptible to external influences. Abdullah regarded him as the better son because he did not criticize, challenge or defy him. Whereas Talal was openly hostile to the British, Naif was not. Similarly, Naif had a more positive attitude to the Jews than his elder brother. Naif struck up a friendship with Cohen and made frequent visits to his home and his workshop in Jerusalem. Cohen was not surprised that so many politicians preferred Naif to Talal following the murder of their father. These supporters, according to the well-informed Jewish carpenter, expected Naif to be a mere puppet, while real power remained in the hands of the government.22
In Jordan, the death of the founder provoked a frenetic spate of political intrigues, dynastic rivalries and jockeying for power. A large number of Abdullah’s top officials were of Palestinian extraction. Samir Rifa’i, a Palestinian from Safed, resigned as prime minister a few days after the trial and execution of the murderers, to be replaced by Tawfiq Abul Huda, a Palestinian from Acre. The politicians were deeply divided among themselves as to what course they should follow, and this exacerbated the power vacuum at the centre. The real authority behind the scenes, however, was Alec Kirkbride. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the British continued to exercise control over the country even after the grant of formal independence in 1946. Kirkbride and Glubb Pasha together played a critical part in resolving the crisis of the succession in favour of Prince Talal and ultimately his son Hussein.
At the time of Abdullah’s death, Talal, the 41-year-old crown prince, was receiving treatment for mental illness in Switzerland. The Jordanian constitution of 7 December 1946, in its English version, unambiguously designated Talal, the first-born son of the founder of the dynasty, as successor. But an error in the Arabic translation made it possible to argue that if Talal did not succeed to the throne, his half-brother Naif would be next in line of succession. Mohammed Shureiki, the current chief of the royal court, seized on this discrepancy to argue that since Talal would never be mentally fit for the job, Naif should be proclaimed king without further ado.23 There was no shortage of opportunists to follow Shureiki’s lead. In fact, the majority of Jordanian politicians initially inclined towards Naif. It is not too cynical to suggest that some of the politicians who flocked to Naif’s banner did so in the knowledge that he was feeble and docile, and therefore easy to manipulate; what they were after was a puppet king. In any case, as his half-brother was out of the country, Naif was appointed regent in July and remained in that post until 5 September 1951. The regency council consisted of Ibrahim Hashem, Suleiman Toukan and Abdul Rahman Rusheidat, with the Amira Zain as chairman.
Naif’s credentials for kingship were far from compelling. In the first place, his mother was the great-granddaughter of the Ottoman sultan Abdel Aziz, and he himself had had a period of service with the Turkish Army. More importantly, he was poorly educated, ill informed, inept and incompetent. He did not seem to have inherited any of his father’s quick intelligence, political capacity or zest for life. Naif was generally considered to be a nonentity. One British observer described him as ‘a very dull and ineffective creature’. Kirkbride too had a very low opinion of him. In 1948 he reported to the Foreign Office that Naif was involved in smuggling, black-marketeering and other forms of corruption; he dismissed him as a ‘bonehead’ who did not ‘appear to possess sufficient intelligence to play any political role, either good or bad’.24
In 1951 most Jordanians assumed that Kirkbride favoured Naif on account of Talal’s well-advertised anti-British sentiments. Indeed, many believed that there was nothing wrong with Talal and that the wily British fabricated the story about his madness in order to get him out of the way. In fact, in 1951 Kirkbride was not in favour of Naif’s becoming king, not only because of his doubts about his capabilities but also because his accession would have been attributed by many Arabs to a Machiavellian plot on the part of the British government to exclude their enemy Talal.25
The solution worked out between Kirkbride, Abul Huda and some of the elder statesmen was to bring Talal back from Switzerland to Amman and to put him on the throne but in the clear expectation that he would not be able to reign for long. It was also hoped that once Talal became king, there would be no further doubt about Hussein’s right to succeed his father.26 In short, Talal’s role was to keep the throne warm for his son. Hussein’s mother, the Amira Zain, fully supported this plan and worked to the best of her considerable ability to realize it. Zain was a strong-minded and determined woman with a full share of the Hashemite sense of realism. She knew that her husband was mentally unstable and erratic, and that he could not reign for very long, but she hoped to sustain him in power just long enough to enable their son to succeed. In other words, for her too Talal was just a stopgap.
Despite this secret consensus in favour of Talal, his path to the throne was far from smooth. Settling the succession was not a purely Jordanian affair; it was complicated by Arab intrigues and by a particularly clumsy intervention by the Iraqi branch of the Hashemite dynasty. Despair of his two sons had apparently driven Abdullah to begin secret discussions about a Jordanian–Ira
qi federation, though no concrete decision had emerged from these talks. Abdullah’s sudden demise provided the Iraqis with an opportunity to try to revive this dormant plan. A high-level Iraqi delegation arrived in Amman for the funeral, headed by the regent, Abd al-Ilah, Prime Minister Nuri as-Said and Foreign Minister Saleh Jaber. Nuri launched his bid for union between the two countries under the Iraqi crown even before the king’s body had been laid to rest. He also interfered in the internal power struggle in Jordan, backing the claims of Naif against those of Talal. But, having found no senior Jordanian figures willing to take up the idea of a federation, Nuri and his compatriots were forced to drop it.27
When news of the plan to bring back Talal reached Naif and his supporters, they stepped up their efforts to capture the throne. The air in Amman was thick with rumours of plots and conspiracies. In his memoirs Kirkbride mentioned reports circulated from various quarters of plans to murder the young Amir Hussein. Even though these were not taken too seriously, he and his mother were given a guard of Bedouin troops as a precaution.28 Naif sent soldiers to surround the house of Zain and Hussein, placing them under ‘protective custody’. Kirkbride’s wife, who was genuinely fond of Talal and Zain, came to the rescue. She sent Zain a note smuggled inside a bouquet of flowers, urging her to come to the British Embassy. The problem was how to get there. The resourceful Zain grabbed the washer-woman, locked her in the wood shed in the garden and borrowed her clothes. Zain then left the house from the servants’ quarter with her face covered. She made her way to the British Embassy, met the Kirkbrides and confirmed them in their view that her husband was the right choice.29
The political crisis was compounded by divisions within the army. The 10th Infantry Regiment, a quasi-Praetorian Guard, was commanded by Habis Majali, who threw in his lot with Naif. The 10th enjoyed such a high degree of autonomy that Glubb could not be sure its officers would obey his orders in the event of a showdown with the pretender to the throne. It also possessed six-pounder anti-tank guns and some armoured cars – a serious deterrent to an assault on the palace. Glubb decided to put the officers to the test by ordering the guns and the armour to be transferred to Mafraq, about forty miles north-east of the capital, ostensibly for training purposes. In the event, Glubb’s order was meekly obeyed and the plot, if it was a plot, quickly collapsed. Naif moved with his family to Beirut, Mohammed Shureiki left his post at the royal court and the 10th Infantry Regiment was disbanded.30