by Avi Shlaim
In the eyes of Prince Zaid bin Hussein, the ruler of Jordan passed the test of Hashemite kingship with flying colours. Zaid was the youngest son of Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, and the only one who did not become a king in the aftermath of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. In early June 1970 Prince Zaid, who was seventy-two years old and lived in Baghdad, paid a visit to his royal relative in Amman. Hussein greeted Zaid at the airport and hosted him in the Nadwa Palace. The following day fighting broke out between the army and the fedayeen, and the house guest had to stay indoors for about ten days. During this period Zaid had ample opportunity to watch the king in action, dealing with the government and the army, and trying to arrange a ceasefire with the PLO. The elderly and taciturn guest was greatly impressed with the way in which the young king coped with all the problems, pressures and challenges that the country faced at a time when the odds were stacked up against the monarchy. Before leaving Amman, Zaid told his son Raad that he considered Hussein to be the most genuine, able and courageous Hashemite he had ever met, as well as the greatest leader among all the Hashemite kings. This was high praise from a man who had known all the Hashemite kings of his time and had nothing but admiration for his brother Faisal I of Iraq.25
Neither Hussein nor Arafat wanted to fight a pitched battle to settle the question of who ruled Jordan. Both were moderates who sought ground rules for coexistence, but neither was entirely master in his own house. Both men strove to avoid polarization, but the extremists on the Palestinian side bolstered up the extremists on the Jordanian, eroding the middle ground in the process. On 10 July, Hussein and Arafat signed another ceasefire agreement. This one recognized the central committee of the Palestinian resistance and legalized the presence of the fedayeen in Jordan. The government undertook to repeal the emergency measures it had adopted during the crisis, and the PLO entered into commitments restraining the behaviour of its members. A joint committee was set up to implement the agreement.
But the dispute between the two sides was rekindled by the announcement of a new American diplomatic initiative to bring about peace between the Arab states and Israel. The second Rogers Plan called for a ceasefire, a standstill along the Suez Canal and a renewed effort by Dr Gunnar Jarring to bring the parties to a settlement on the basis of Security Council Resolution 242. Hussein was in favour of the Rogers Plan, but he needed to keep in step with Nasser, whose support was crucial in the fight that was brewing up at home with the fedayeen. On 24 July the Egyptian government accepted the new American initiative and two days later Jordan’s government followed suit. ‘What you accept, we accept, and what you reject, we reject’ ran the cable Hussein sent to Nasser on the 26th.26 Arafat rejected the American proposals but refrained from personal attacks on Nasser and Hussein. The central committee of the PLO condemned the proposals as a plot to liquidate the Palestinian resistance. The PFLP and the PDFLP attacked Nasser and Hussein directly in the strongest language and organized peaceful demonstrations against the plan. The Israeli government accepted the second Rogers Plan but only after Menachem Begin and his colleagues in the right-wing Gahal Party walked out in protest at what they saw as a plot to force Israel out of the West Bank. The ceasefire on the Egyptian front went into effect on 7 August, ending the War of Attrition. On the same day Egypt violated the terms of the standstill by moving missiles to the edge of the Suez Canal. Israel protested about the Egyptian violations and suspended its participation in the Jarring talks. The second Rogers Plan thus ended the War of Attrition but failed to move the parties forward towards a peaceful settlement.
Feeling betrayed by Nasser but unable to do anything about it, the fedayeen turned their wrath against his friend in Jordan. On 15 August, Arafat was reported as saying, ‘We have decided to convert Jordan into a cemetery for all conspirators – Amman shall be the Hanoi of the revolution.’27 This was mild stuff by comparison with the Maoist revolutionary rhetoric of Dr Habash and Mr Hawatmeh. The PFLP was a Marxist organization that was receiving limited quantities of arms and advisers from China. It spawned an even more extreme offshoot that called itself PFLP–General Command and was headed by a former Syrian Army officer named Ahmad Jibril. The challenge posed by these groups to the regime in Jordan became increasingly blatant. Their leaders began to call more and more openly for the overthrow of the reactionary Hashemite monarchy as a prelude to the launching of a popular war for the liberation of Palestine. Fighting flared up again between the army and the fedayeen towards the end of August. The stage was set for a civil war.
Like all civil wars, the one in Jordan was a complex, multi-layered and murky affair. The Jordanian Army enjoyed a clear superiority in numbers and armament over its opponents. It had 65,000 well-trained and well-equipped troops facing around 15,000 hastily trained and very lightly armed militiamen.28 But since the army included a large number of Palestinians, there was the ever-present danger that it would fracture along Jordanian–Palestinian lines and that some Palestinian commanders might desert if ordered to shoot fellow Palestinians. On the other side was a collection of separate and divided guerrilla groups, supported by rival Arab countries. Nor was it a straightforward contest between the army and the fedayeen. It was more like an inter-Arab civil war in which Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Libya supported the fedayeen against the monarchy, with Egypt occupying an uncertain middle ground. Hussein knew that he had the military power at his disposal to crush the fedayeen. The outcome of a contest in which they received external support was more difficult to predict. With the odds against him rising, there was the risk that he would lose unless he too received external support. In his case such support could come from only two sources: America or Israel.
In the event, it was the radical fedayeen that precipitated the showdown. On 1 September, Hussein’s motor cavalcade came under heavy fire on its way to the airport. This was the second attempt on his life in three months, and it immediately triggered fighting between loyalist troops and the fedayeen in various parts of Amman. The Iraqi government sent a note to Jordan to say that if the Jordanian shelling did not stop, ‘it would not be able to stop individuals from the Iraqi forces from intervening in favour of the fedayeen.’ As there were 17,000 Iraqi troops stationed in eastern Jordan, this was no idle threat. These troops had been in Jordan since the June War of 1967, and they had long outstayed their welcome. (At the Khartoum summit in late August 1967, President Arif had agreed to withdraw the Iraqi troops from Jordan. But, for reasons connected with internal politics, the Iraqi government preferred to have them stay in Jordan rather than return home.) Later in the day Zaid Rifa’i, the chief of the royal court, informed the US Embassy of the Iraqi ultimatum and expressed the hope that they could count on American support. He also asked whether the Americans knew what Israel would do if Iraq moved. Rifa’i had been a student of Dr Henry Kissinger at Harvard, and he shared his view that international relations are about power and state interests rather than about sentiments or morality. Both men were extremely clever, deeply conservative and well versed in the theory as well as the practice of Machiavellian power-politics.
The Americans had difficulty in answering Rifa’i’s questions because of serious differences of opinion between the State Department on the one hand and the CIA and the White House on the other. The State Department view was that the monarchy was doomed, that the fedayeen were likely to emerge on top, that the best policy was to hedge one’s bets and that in the meantime it was prudent to open lines of communications with the opposition. At any rate, this was the view of the ambassador Harry Symmes, whose sympathy lay with the Palestinians. By bugging his phone the security services discovered that he was in contact with some of the fedayeen leaders; he was declared a persona non grata; and he was recalled home. It took several months to replace him, and during the interval reporting from the embassy was limited and uninformed. The key person during that period was Jack O’Connell, the experienced and staunchly pro-royalist CIA station chief in Amman. O’Connell knew a
lot of people in the army, and from the beginning he predicted that the army would win because it was strong, tough and determined to restore order. His reports said that the king could control the situation and that with a little bit of help from his friends he would unquestionably come out on top. Kissinger and Nixon rejected the State Department’s recommendations and adopted O’Connell’s.29
Kissinger assumed that Israel was unlikely to remain inactive if the Iraqi forces moved closer to its borders or if the Palestinian guerrillas occupied the Jordan Valley. But he also realized that for Hussein to be joined by Israeli forces in his conflict was no trivial matter: ‘In defending his political independence he had no incentive to destroy his moral position in the Arab world.’ According to Kissinger, the State Department adopted its not uncommon practice of procrastination. The American chargé in Amman responded to renewed Jordanian queries about Israeli intentions by saying that he could not imagine Jordan’s accepting help from its enemy Israel against a fellow Arab country. ‘The king’, noted Kissinger, ‘was, of course, much too subtle to put the issue this way and much too intelligent to require lectures by American officials about the implications of his own query.’30
While waiting for an answer from his allies, Hussein’s authority at home came under serious challenge. On 6 September the PFLP hijacked four Western-owned airliners with several hundred passengers and forced them to land in Dawson’s Field, an abandoned airfield near Zarqa, which was renamed ‘Revolution Airstrip’. The hijackers offered to release the hostages, except for those holding Israeli or dual Israeli-American citizenship, in return for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held in Swiss, German or British jails. A spokesman for the Popular Front said in Beirut that the airliners were hijacked in order to ‘teach the Americans a lesson for their support for Israel over the years’. Arafat was opposed to hijacking but felt compelled to associate himself with the demands of the hijackers to avoid becoming marginalized. On 12 September the hijackers blew up the airliners in front of the world media and released all but fifty-four of the passengers. Two days later a Fatah newspaper called for a general strike and the establishment of a national authority in Jordan that would remove ‘malevolent elements and agents from the State, army and public security machines’. The PLO central committee resolved to make ‘a decisive stand’ in defence of the Palestinian revolution. Revolutionary rhetoric was matched by revolutionary deeds. On 15 September the fedayeen took over Irbid and declared it a liberated area under a people’s government. The international community began to doubt Hussein’s ability to govern his own kingdom. So did a growing number of his loyal Bedouin troops. Armoured units started flying brassieres from their tank antennas. The message they conveyed was: ‘If we are forced to act like women, we might as well dress like women!’
For Hussein the hijacking of the airliners was the last straw. Since the beginning of the hijack crisis he had been subjected to mounting pressure from the army, his close advisers and his brothers Muhammad and Hassan to reassert his authority. The army, where the hardliners were taking over, was on the point of mutiny, and could not be restrained for much longer. In the midst of the crisis, on 9 September, Manshoor Haditha, the conciliatory and pro-Palestinian army chief of staff, resigned. He was replaced by the loyalist Field Marshal Habis Majali, who was recalled from retirement. Natheer Rasheed, who had been appointed the director of Military Intelligence the previous month, has claimed that Arafat paid Haditha 200,000 dinars to get him to defect. (Rasheed was the Palestinian officer who had plotted against the king in April 1957, fled into exile in Syria and was later forgiven and rehabilitated.) Rasheed had first-class intelligence on the fedayeen through phone-tapping and knew without a shadow of a doubt that their aim was to overthrow the royalist regime. At the height of the hijack crisis he told the king in the presence of Sharif Zaid bin Shaker that he could not stay in his post if the king did not fight back.31 Shaker, who had been reinstated in the army the previous month and promoted to deputy chief of staff for operations, also believed that the showdown with the fedayeen could not be put off any longer.
Some observers thought that Hussein lost his nerve during the crisis. A more likely explanation was that, realizing a showdown was inescapable, he was simply biding his time and giving the fedayeen enough rope to hang themselves. He refrained from drastic action because he did not wish to compromise his position as king of the whole Jordanian nation. Three stages can be discerned in his policy towards the PLO in 1970: conciliation, containment and confrontation. Hussein was extremely patient by nature and knew the importance of timing. He wanted to leave his people in no doubt that he had done everything in his power to avoid the shedding of blood. The hijacking of planes and the holding of hostages finally tipped public opinion at home and abroad against the fedayeen. The time for action had come. On the evening of 15 September, Hussein summoned his closest advisers to an emergency meeting at his house in Al-Hummar on the outskirts of Amman. Among those present were Wasfi Tall, Zaid Rifa’i, Sharif Zaid bin Shaker and Habis Majali. All of these men had been urging him to crack down on the fedayeen for some time. The military men estimated that it would take the army two to three days to clear the fedayeen out of the major cities.
Before ordering the army to move, Hussein decided to dismiss the civilian government and appoint a military government headed by Brigadier Muhammad Daoud. Daoud was in fact a Palestinian, but he was loyal to the king and favoured firm action in defence of the regime. Hussein preferred to see the coming conflict not as a war between Jordanians and Palestinians but as a contest between the forces of law and order and the forces of anarchy. Most of the members of this government were military men though not all of them were high ranking. Adnan Abu-Odeh, an obscure major in the General Intelligence Department (Mukhabarat), was appointed minister of information. Earlier that year he had been sent to the UK to attend a psychological warfare course. Abu-Odeh came from humble Palestinian origins and had been a schoolteacher and member of the Jordanian Communist Party before joining the Mukhabarat. Hussein knew all this, but he greatly respected the sharpness of his analysis and his eloquence. Abu-Odeh’s task was to explain the government’s policy and to conduct psychological warfare in the middle of the military operation. His selection for the post reflected Hussein’s desire to have Palestinians among his ministers and his keen awareness of the importance of public relations. He was later to become one of Hussein’s closest political advisers. One day Abu-Odeh asked the king what was the most difficult decision he ever made. The king replied, ‘The decision to recapture my capital.’32
Early in the morning of 17 September the civil war began. The 60th Armoured Brigade entered Amman from different directions and started bombarding the Wahadat and Husseini refugee camps, where the fedayeen had their headquarters. The fedayeen were well prepared and offered very stiff resistance. The army pounded with tanks, artillery and mortars not only the fedayeen strongholds but also the Palestinian population centres in and around Amman. Heavy fighting continued without a break for the next ten days. At the same time the army surrounded and bombarded other cities controlled by the fedayeen – Irbid, Jerash, Salt and Zarqa – but refrained from entering them. Here there was no house-to-house and street-to-street fighting, as in the capital, but many buildings and blocks of apartments were reduced to rubble, and there were heavy casualties. According to PLO figures, the death toll in the first ten days of fighting was as high as 3,400. The initial estimate that it would take two to three days to dislodge the fedayeen from the cities turned out to be wide of the mark. As the days went by, Arab leaders stepped up the pressure on Hussein to put an end to the fighting and to reach a compromise with the fedayeen.
Jordanian fears of external intervention in the conflict were soon realized. On the morning of 18 September a small Syrian armoured force crossed the border near Rathma and headed for Irbid, which was under the control of the fedayeen. The 40th Armoured Brigade engaged the invading force in fierce combat, knocked out so
me of its tanks and managed to block its advance. Later in the day there was a second incursion across the border but on a larger scale. This time two armoured brigades with nearly 300 tanks and a mechanized infantry brigade were dispatched towards Irbid. The Syrian tanks had PLA markings, but the PLA had no tanks and it was obvious that the invaders were regular army units. The motives behind the Syrian invasion remained obscure, and no statement was issued to clarify them. It is the received wisdom that the Syrian leadership’s aim was to help the guerrillas overthrow Hussein. But, if this was indeed the aim, it is not clear why the Syrian intervention was so cautious and circumscribed. A more likely explanation is that the Syrian leaders wanted to protect the Palestinians from a massacre by helping them to create a safe haven in northern Jordan from which they could negotiate terms with the king.33
That evening Hussein convened an emergency meeting of his three-day-old cabinet. The purpose of the meeting was to get the cabinet’s permission to call for outside help if it became absolutely necessary. Most of the ministers were soldiers and the king was their commander-in-chief, so they were rather surprised that the king chose to consult them rather than to issue orders. What the king said to the cabinet went as follows: ‘The Syrians have entered the country and are approaching Irbid. Our troops are fighting back but the Syrians are still progressing. As a precaution we might need the help of friends, and I want you to give me the mandate to ask for such help if I have to do so.’ Some ministers did not like what they heard, but only vague comments were made in response. Their faces revealed their displeasure. Noticing their