Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  The British ambassador, Michael Hadow, made similar representations. For the rest of the day the press agencies reported that Hussein was ready to start negotiations with Israel for a ceasefire. Moshe Dayan, Israel’s minister of defence, rejected this request with some vehemence: ‘We have been offering the King an opportunity to cut his losses ever since Monday morning. Now we have 500 dead and wounded in Jerusalem. So, tell him that from now on, I’ll talk to him only with the gunsights of our tanks!’39

  London put pressure on Israel to stop shooting and to start talking to Hussein across the conference table. Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the Israeli ambassador that Israel’s refusal to respond to Hussein’s offer of a ceasefire cast doubt on its claims that its war aims were defensive and not territorial. Sir Julian Amery, a prominent Conservative politician who was both a supporter of Israel and a close personal friend of Hussein, tried hard to reconcile the warring sides. Amery met Prince Hassan, Hussein’s younger brother, who was studying Oriental Languages at Christ Church, Oxford, when the war broke out. Hassan told Amery that he spoke to his brother on the telephone and that there was a reasonable prospect for signing a peace agreement. A ceasefire could be made conditional on the immediate start of negotiations for a peace treaty and a comprehensive settlement between the two countries. Amery relayed this report to his Israeli friends and pressed them to act on it.40

  Another meeting in London involved Amery, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Erik Bennett, who had been an air adviser to Hussein in the early 1960s, the Israeli ambassador, Aharon Remez and the Mossad representative, Nahum Admoni. The British stated, on the basis of their discussion with Prince Hassan, that there was a reasonable prospect of persuading Hussein to agree to a separate peace treaty with Israel. It was likely that Bennett, who was also a friend of Hussein, would go to Amman the following day with the approval of the British government. Bennett planned to recommend to Hussein the option of a separate peace on a fair basis. He therefore asked the Israelis to indicate to Hussein the kind of terms on which this could be concluded. Bennett realized that the Israelis would need to hold detailed and direct negotiations before entering into a final commitment, but he suggested that it might be decisive to let the king know as soon as possible the kind of terms he might expect to obtain.41 Bennett’s suggestion was not taken up.

  Hussein also used a direct British intelligence channel to try to arrest the Israeli assault on his army. Jock Smith, the MI6 representative in Tel Aviv, met his opposite number, Naftali Kenan, at 5.30 p.m. on 7 June at Kenan’s house. Smith reported that Hussein saw a very bleak situation: he could either withdraw his army from the West Bank and the result would be his fall from power, or he could throw his army into battle with the IDF, in which case his army would be defeated and the result for himself would be the same – the collapse of his regime. Either course would create a situation that would permit the entry of Syrian troops into Jordan. Hussein estimated that the Syrians had eleven brigades that so far had not been committed to the battlefield. Smith asked his colleague to believe that the long-term interests of both their countries could best be served by ‘reducing fighting immediately to the level of skirmishes; this would enable the Jordanians to hold their positions until the Egyptians are seen to be defeated and a ceasefire arranged by somebody. The internal situation could then be controlled. If this is not done the King believes his regime will fall and you will be faced with a Syrian-type regime in Jordan.’ Kenan wanted to know whether this was a service-to-service or a government-to-government approach. Smith replied that it was a service-to-service approach that had the support of the British government. He added that they took into account Hussein’s provocative actions during the crisis and after the outbreak of hostilities and his stupid statement about the participation of British airplanes in the fighting alongside Israel, but they still wanted to help him. Kenan asked whether the initiative for this appeal came from Hussein or from the British side. Smith replied that Hussein turned to their representative in Amman and that the assessment and the conclusions that he presented came from Hussein himself. The British government shared Hussein’s assessment of the situation and his conclusions, and they supported the course of action that he proposed. Indeed, the British government considered this to be the only way to save Hussein’s regime.42

  These behind-the-scenes manoeuvres did not have any visible effect on Israel’s conduct of the war, but they are very revealing of Hussein’s state of mind and of his feeling that he and his dynasty might have reached their end. They also reveal the depth of his disenchantment with his Arab allies, and especially with the Syrians. Let down by the Arabs and threatened by the Israelis, he was fighting for political survival. For him the Six-Day War lasted less than three days. In the early hours of Thursday, 8 June, Jordan accepted unconditionally the Security Council call for a ceasefire. Exhausted, his voice cracking with emotion, Hussein addressed his people in a radio broadcast. First, he paid tribute to the heroism with which Jordan’s soldiers had fought against overwhelming odds. He went on to express his deep grief over the loss of all their fallen soldiers. ‘My brothers,’ he intoned, ‘I seem to belong to a family which, according to the will of Allah, must suffer and make sacrifices for its country without end. Our calamity is greater than any one could have imagined. But, whatever its size, we must not let it weaken our resolve to regain what we have lost.’43

  The reference to Hussein’s family may seem odd in this context but it was not accidental. He was the proud heir to a Hashemite heritage that went back to Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, and the Great Arab Revolt. Throughout his own career, Hussein had to walk a tightrope between Arab nationalism on the one hand and coexistence with Israel on the other. In the mid 1960s he began to lean towards accommodation with Israel. The tacit alliance with Israel was grounded in a common interest in keeping a quiet border, in a common enemy in the shape of radical Arab and Palestinian nationalism and in a common allegiance with the West in the global cold war. Israel’s attack on Samu’ suddenly destroyed the trust on which this evolving alliance was based. It pushed Hussein into the arms of the radical Arab nationalists. This process culminated in his dramatic reconciliation with Nasser and in the signature of a mutual defence pact with Egypt. From this point on Hussein was locked into the inter-Arab dynamic of escalation that ended in a full-scale war with Israel. Hussein went to war not because he was threatened by Israel but because he feared that he would be denounced as a traitor to the Arab cause if he did not. By this time, in any case, he had relinquished control over his armed forces to an Egyptian general. It was the Egyptians who committed his country to war against the enemy, and it was they who made all the strategic decisions that led to the crushing defeat of his army and to the loss of the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank of his kingdom. Hussein was the only Arab ruler who faithfully discharged all his duties to Arab unity during the first few days of the much vaunted battle of destiny. But Arab unity was a snare and a delusion. Hussein made his choice and he paid the price. Within sixty hours of launching his forces in support of Egypt, Hussein lost much of his army, the whole of his air force and half of his territory. Under his leadership, Jordan’s part in the June War was brief, ineffective and inglorious.

  12

  Picking up the Pieces

  The June War opened a new chapter in the life of Hussein. It faced him with the most serious test to date of his ability to survive. His main preoccupation in the weeks that followed the war was with picking up the pieces. In Arabic the defeat of June 1967 was referred to as Al-Naqsah, meaning ‘The Setback’ or temporary reversal. This was in contrast to the Al-Nakbah, or ‘The Catastrophe’, of 1948. For Jordan, however, 1948 was less than a catastrophe, while 1967 was more than a setback. For the Hashemite dynasty the defeat suffered in 1967 was much worse than that suffered in 1948. In 1948 King Abdullah managed to salvage East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the dismal wreckage of Arab Palestine. In June 1967 King Hussein lost what his grandfather had gain
ed on the battlefield and later incorporated into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. A heavy, almost crushing sense of personal responsibility for the loss lay on Hussein’s shoulders. The result was an emotionally disturbed state and mood swings that alternated between bouts of resignation and fatalism and sober realism in dealing with the bitter consequences of defeat. Hussein was bitter towards Israel, the West, the Soviet Union, Nasser and the other Arab leaders but above all he was bitter towards himself.

  The losses sustained by Jordan in the course of the June War were extremely heavy, and the regime’s prospects of survival were correspondingly poor. The government was bewildered and impotent. The army was defeated and dispirited. Seven hundred Jordanian soldiers had died in the war and over 6,000 were wounded or missing. Jordan lost its entire air force, 80 per cent of its armour and a great deal of other equipment. At the end of the war only four out of the army’s eleven brigades remained operational.1 The Iraqi troops in Jordan were a destabilizing force. Having arrived too late to take much of a part in battle,

  they now struck a heroic posture, defying the call for a ceasefire and spoiling for a fight. Hussein wrote to President Arif politely to say that since a military solution to Jordan’s difficulties with Israel was not practicable, the Iraqi troops could be withdrawn from Jordan. Syria posed a much more serious threat. The Syrian Army emerged relatively unscathed from the war compared with the Jordanian Army. Jordan was defenceless against Syria, particularly without an air force. Hussein also heard indirectly that the Syrians were well aware that he alone held Jordan together and that they had plans prepared that they would not hesitate to put into effect should Jordan step out of line. He interpreted this to mean that if he embarked on any action that the Syrians considered improper, they would attempt to assassinate him and take over parts of his country.2

  The economic consequences of the war were also crippling. The Old City of Jerusalem was not just a prize possession but a major source of revenue from tourism, as were some of the West Bank towns like Bethlehem. The West Bank comprised roughly half of the kingdom’s inhabited territory, half of its industrial capacity, a quarter of its arable land. It contained valuable water resources and it contributed nearly 40 per cent of Jordan’s Gross Domestic Product.3 Israel’s occupation of the West Bank resulted in the creation of a new wave of refugees. The influx from the West Bank to the East Bank was estimated at 175,000 by Israel, 250,000 by Jordan and around 200,000 by independent agencies. Many of these were second-time refugees, having first been displaced from their homes in 1948. Israel made it easy for them to cross to the East Bank of the Jordan River but refused to allow them to go back to their homes after the dust had settled. The total number of refugees in Jordan’s care increased as a result from about half a million to nearly three quarters of a million. Quite apart from the human suffering involved and the burning sense of injustice, it was a heavy material burden for the truncated and impoverished kingdom to bear.

  Hussein’s primary aim in the aftermath of the war was to recover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He knew that this could not be achieved by military means and that diplomacy offered the only hope. His strategy for recovering the West Bank rested on two pillars: Nasser and the United States. The war transformed Nasser from Hussein’s worst enemy to his closest ally in the Arab world. Mahmoud Riad, Egypt’s foreign minister at the time, has described how impressed Nasser was that Hussein stood shoulder to shoulder with him during the war. On 22 June, Nasser wrote to Hussein, paying tribute to his heroic struggle and offering ‘to put all we have in the service of the common destiny of our two peoples’. He later received Hussein in Cairo and told him that Egypt was ready to share everything it had with Jordan, even if it meant sharing the last loaf of bread between them. ‘We have entered this war together, lost it together and we must win it together,’ said Nasser. Nasser also felt that the United States might be more inclined to accommodate Hussein because he was an old friend of theirs, and so he urged him to negotiate with the Americans in any way he wanted to and for as long as he wanted to for a peaceful settlement in the West Bank as long as he refrained from signing a separate peace treaty with Israel.4

  The importance for Hussein of the new alliance with Nasser cannot be overestimated. Together the two leaders built up an axis of moderation in the Arab world that others were encouraged to join. After their defeat the Arabs faced a fork in the road: one way led to another appeal to arms; the other involved a fundamental change in the Arab policy towards Israel, an official end to the state of belligerency and an attempt to recover the occupied territories by peaceful means. By himself Hussein had no chance of persuading his fellow Arab rulers to follow him down the moderate path; with Nasser’s support there was at least a chance. Nasser’s support provided Hussein with political cover for working with the Americans, for negotiating with the Israelis, for standing up to the Syrians and for countering the PLO’s call for renewing the armed struggle against Israel. It was also crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the Hashemite regime inside Jordan following the defeat on the battlefield.

  The second pillar of Hussein’s post-war foreign policy was the alliance with the United States. Hussein’s relations with the US were characterized by many ups and downs. After the 1967 war, however, Hussein believed that Jordan could remain a viable state, and the Hashemites could remain at the head of Jordan, only in the context of a close relationship with the Americans. Moreover, the US was the only country with the capacity to lean on Israel to relinquish the West Bank. These two considerations led Hussein to put all his eggs in the American basket. The Americans for their part had a clear if not vital interest in preserving Jordan as a viable state with the Hashemite dynasty at its head. America’s credibility was tied to the continuation of the moderate and stable regime that it had helped to sustain in Jordan over the previous decade. America was just as committed to the territorial integrity of Jordan as it was to that of Israel. After the war America supported a peace settlement between Jordan and Israel based on a return to the previous borders with only minor modifications. But it gradually drifted away from this principled position, leaving Hussein in the lurch. Hussein’s two-pronged strategy ultimately proved unequal to the task of recovering the West Bank. Nasser gave Hussein solid and unswerving support until his death in 1970. By contrast, the Americans turned out to be the most inconstant and unreliable of allies.

  Israel’s resounding military victory in the war transformed the national mood from deep anxiety to unrestrained triumphalism. It also unleashed a powerful current of opinion in favour of retaining the West Bank, the core of the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. This convergence of religious and secular nationalism constrained the government’s room for manoeuvre. The national unity government headed by Levi Eshkol consisted of seven parties and a wide range of ideological positions. It included the right-wing Gahal Party, headed by Menahem Begin, which regarded the West Bank as an integral part of the Land of Israel. The ruling Labour Party was split down the middle. At the dovish end was Abba Eban, the eloquent but politically impotent foreign minister, who wanted to negotiate peace agreements with all of Israel’s neighbours based on the pre-war borders with only modest territorial modifications. At the other end was Moshe Dayan, the hardline defence minister, who wanted to keep most of the occupied territories for either security or ideological reasons or a mixture of the two. Levi Eshkol did not like to make irrevocable choices. He was a man of consensus and compromise. His preference for compromise is illustrated by the anecdote of the waiter who asked Eshkol whether he wanted coffee or tea. ‘Half and half,’ was the reply. At interminable internal party discussions on the future of the West Bank, Eshkol often taunted his colleagues by pointing out that they liked the dowry but not the bride, meaning that they coveted the land but were less keen on the Arabs who lived there.

  Control of the West Bank gave the Israeli government two main alternatives: one was to reach an agreement with Hussein; the other was to give the in
habitants of the West Bank political autonomy under overall Israeli control. The former was called the Jordanian option; the latter the Palestinian option. The conventional view of Israel’s post-war policy is that it was based on the Jordanian option, on solving the Palestinian problem by restoring to Hussein most of the territory of the West Bank. According to this view, Israel’s leaders were so wedded to the Jordanian option that they failed to consider the alternative. Reuven Pedatzur has challenged this view, arguing that the Palestinian option was the first choice of the Israeli policy-makers and that they only adopted the Jordanian option after attempts to realize the Palestinian option had failed.5 The truth of the matter is that divisions within the government made it impossible to pursue any clear or consistent policy. It was like a see-saw, veering back and forth between the king and the West Bank notables.6

  The Israelis no longer regarded Hussein as a reliably moderate figure after he joined the Arab radicals in the run-up to the June War. In the mid 1960s Israel had settled on a policy of cooperating with the king to contain the challenge posed to both of them by the Palestinian national movement. After the war the Israeli policy-makers were indifferent to Hussein and willing to discuss plans for Palestinian self-rule on the West Bank, provided Israel controlled both the western and the eastern borders of the Palestinian entity. This meant that Israel’s security border, and possibly also its de jure border, would lie along the Jordan River. It also meant that Hussein was no longer necessarily the preferred ruler of the West Bank. For some ministers he was, while for others he was not, and this became evident immediately after the war. On 15 June, Eban reported to a ministerial committee that the British prime minister Harold Wilson had sent a suggestion through an intermediary for direct contact between Israel and Hussein. Eban and Eshkol were in favour but Dayan was against. Dayan argued that since they wanted the Jordan River to be their eastern border, there was no point in entering into negotiations with the king, because he could not possibly accede to their demands. Eshkol’s characteristically opaque summing up was that they would agree to negotiate but on condition that the river would be the border.7 Like his choice of a hot drink, it was half and half.