by Avi Shlaim
A tug of war was taking place between the Israeli foreign minister and prime minister for the attention of the US secretary of state. It was as if the two men were pulling the stocky American by the arms in opposite directions. On 24 April, Moshe Arens, the hawkish minister of defence, turned up at Shultz’s office, sent by Shamir without the knowledge of his foreign minister. Arens said bluntly that the prime minister and their party were opposed to the holding of an international conference on the Middle East and that if Shultz visited Israel to present the Peres–Hussein agreement, he would find himself embroiled in an internal Israeli political debate. Shultz described to Arens in great detail exactly how a conference could work and be kept under control, but Arens refused to budge. Nothing could go forward, Arens concluded, until Shamir and King Hussein met face to face. The conversation ended on this sour note but with what amounted to a request for help in arranging such an encounter.7
All the Likud ministers shared Shamir’s hostility to the London Agreement. Ariel Sharon did not want any peace negotiations with the House of Hashem, with or without an international conference. His solution to the Palestinian problem was still to topple the monarchy in Amman and to replace it with a Palestinian regime that would be dependent on Israel. On 6 May, Peres presented to the inner cabinet a detailed proposal based on the London Agreement and met with unanimous opposition from the Likud ministers. He could have put the matter to a vote, but decided not to do so, as the outcome was certain to be a five–five split.8 After the meeting Peres continued to lobby for an international conference at home and abroad, arguing that there was no cabinet decision against it. Shamir said that his coalition partner was exceeding his powers, since there was no cabinet decision in favour of it either. He went further and described his foreign minister’s plan as a ‘perverse and criminal idea’ that must be ‘wiped off’ the cabinet table.9 Peres considered resigning, but this would have entailed stating his reasons in public and thus violating the pledge of secrecy he had given Hussein at their meeting in London.10
So the progress promised by the London Agreement ground to a halt. Hussein was bitterly disappointed and tended to think, in retrospect, that Peres had underestimated the strength of the domestic opposition he would face and overestimated his capacity to mobilize American support for the plan:
The London Agreement foundered on two levels. Shimon Peres came as foreign minister and we reached an agreement in London and initialled it. He said he would go back and he would send it immediately to George Shultz and within forty-eight hours it would come as an American addendum to the Reagan Plan. Peres also said that the agreement would be accepted by Israel and I promised it would be accepted by Jordan. So he left. Two weeks later nothing had happened. And then a letter was sent by Shultz to the Israeli prime minister at the time, Itzhak Shamir, telling him that this was the agreement that Peres and I had reached and asking him for his views. And of course Shamir took a negative stand against it and the whole thing fell apart. I cannot say what happened in Israel but Peres, as far as I was concerned, was the Israeli interlocutor. I talked with him. I agreed with him on something and he couldn’t deliver.11
The London Agreement was another missed opportunity of great importance. Ali Shukri, the director of Hussein’s private office, emphasized that this time it was not the Arabs but the Israelis who blocked the path to progress:
Why did Shamir reject the plan? Our belief is that Peres did not have a complete mandate from Shamir to go and make an agreement. Even when Peres was discussing this agreement in London, he did not consult with Shamir. So Shamir was faced with an agreement that he did not approve about to be announced to the world as an American plan. The Americans did not force the issue on the Israeli government. So the plan was not taken any further. It died. The Americans did not even announce it. It was a beautifully crafted plan but Shamir buried it. Hussein believed that it was the inner fighting within the Israel government that shut it down. Whether it was the rivalry between Likud and Labour, or Shamir and Peres, it was shut down. It was also a clear message for the Americans that the Israelis were not ready to discuss peace. We were ready but the Israelis shut it down. The collapse of the London Agreement left Hussein completely in the cold. He said about Peres: ‘The man agreed but couldn’t deliver. This is really serious!’ Hussein always asked himself: ‘What was Peres doing in London?’ This agreement could have been a real milestone in the Middle East. The question kept turning in Hussein’s mind: what is happening in Israel? Do they really want peace or not? Hussein just couldn’t answer this question until Itzhak Rabin became prime minister five years later.12
Peres, the leading proponent of the Jordanian option, consequently lost credibility in Jordan. Hussein took a dim view of his failure to bring down the government following Shamir’s rejection of their agreement. He had no confidence in Peres, and he did not meet with him again until after the Oslo Accord was concluded with the PLO in 1993.13
Shamir was nothing if not consistent. His foreign policy was dictated by the ideology of Greater Israel and he rigidly adhered to it. After scuttling the London Agreement, he sought to arrange a meeting with Hussein. It was far from clear what the purpose of such a meeting would be, since the king’s overriding aim was to recover the territory he had lost in June 1967, whereas Shamir was adamant that this territory belonged to Israel and he was determined to hang on to it in perpetuity. The last sentence in Shamir’s autobiography is highly revealing in this respect. ‘If history remembers me at all, in any way,’ he writes, ‘I hope it will be as a man who loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in every way he could, all his life.’14 In any case, Shamir did succeed, with discreet American help, in arranging a meeting with Hussein. It took place at Castlewood House, Hussein’s home bordering on Windsor Great Park in Surrey. (This was the smaller of Hussein’s two country homes in England, the larger being Buckhurst Park in Ascot.) The meeting took place on 18 July 1987. Shamir was accompanied by Elyakim Rubinstein, a senior-aide, Brigadier Azriel Nevo, the prime minister’s military secretary, and Efraim Halevy, the deputy-director of the Mossad. Shamir’s aim was to persuade Hussein to abandon the idea of an international conference, the centrepiece of the London Agreement. Halevy thought that Shamir and Hussein had similar interests: neither wanted a quick solution to the Palestinian problem, and neither trusted Arafat. The king, according to Halevy, never forgot that Arafat had tried to overthrow the Hashemite regime in the summer of 1970 and to assassinate him. Consequently, neither was in a hurry to change the status quo.15 Halevy’s view however, is a more accurate guide to Shamir’s thinking than to Hussein’s.
Shamir knew that the Jordanians were worried that the extremists within the Likud wanted to expel Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank in line with the slogan ‘Jordan is Palestine.’ He therefore tried to reassure Hussein that this was not the policy of his party or of the government he headed. Shamir opened the meeting by telling Hussein that the survival and stability of Jordan was a high priority for himself and his colleagues, and that they would not do anything to disturb his country.16 The London Agreement was not even mentioned. What Shamir did do was to present to Hussein the reasons for his rejection of the conference idea: ‘I opposed the convening of an international conference first and foremost because of the participation of the Soviet Union, which was very hostile to Israel and supported the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state… The Soviet Union also opposes Jordan ideologically and, therefore, the best chance for peace is through direct negotiations between us and Jordan, without mediators.’17 Shamir also presented a series of proposals for cooperation between Israel and Jordan in matters of common concern such as water, ecology, tourism and the development of the Eilat–Aqaba region.
Hussein went into the meeting to see if he could make any headway with the right-wing Israeli prime minister. He found that he could not. Queen Noor was told by her husband that the meeting was inconclusive and that the atmosphere at Castlewood House h
ad been very tense: ‘Shamir’s staff were so suspicious that they wanted to search Hussein’s secretary’s bags and to examine the food. The Israelis would not even use the house phone. They went into the nearby village to make their phone calls from a public phone booth.’18 To his aides Hussein said after the meeting with the diminutive Israeli prime minister: ‘From this midget nothing came out.’ The remark was serious and humorous at the same time because Hussein was not much taller than Shamir.19 At an interview many years later Hussein elaborated: ‘I found that he [Itzhak Shamir] was very blunt, there was not very much room for putting any of the ideas, or hopes, or aspirations, that I had in mind into reality. He had the philosophy that the whole of Palestine was a part of Israel. At best the Palestinians could have some possibility of ruling themselves, and looking after their own affairs. So there wasn’t much that we could really talk about or agree about. However, it was the first contact to see… where we stood, and I explained where we stood, and that was the end of that.’20 Hussein’s son Abdullah was in charge of security for the meeting. He was standing by a car outside when Shamir came out of the house, and he shook hands with him. Abdullah too recalled his father’s remark that nothing came out of the midget.21
The Israeli prime minister and the Jordanian monarch each gave George Shultz a rather different assessment of the meeting. Shamir’s report was conveyed by a senior Israeli aide, Dan Meridor. Meridor described the event to Shultz as a turning point because it was the first time in history that a Likud prime minister had met with the king of Jordan.22 The meeting went on for five hours, beginning formally, ending warmly. According to Meridor, Shamir put forward a long list of cooperative steps that could be taken jointly by Israel and Jordan, and went over the interim arrangements for Palestinian self-rule that had been launched at Camp David. This was the way to proceed, said Shamir, not by way of international conference. Shultz tentatively raised the possibility of a cosmetic international conference that would set the stage for direct negotiations and then disperse. ‘We are against an international conference,’ Meridor said. It was obvious that Shamir wanted to focus on his own private contacts with the king. The two had agreed, Meridor said, that Shamir would send an emissary to Amman soon. Was there a chance here, Shultz wondered, that Shamir had caught a mild case of peace fever? Might he want to compete with Peres as peacemaker but do it in his own way – secretly with King Hussein and without the backdrop of an international conference?
The contrasting report from Amman gave no grounds for such optimism. In effect, Hussein was saying that Shamir was hopeless and that he could not work with him. This stood in sharp opposition to Shamir’s claim that he could work directly with Hussein and did not need any help from outside. Each insisted that Shultz should not reveal his assessment of the encounter to the other. Shultz specifically asked Hussein for permission to reveal to Shamir that he had received his report of the session. The answer was no. Both parties seemed to Shultz to disparage and discount the importance of the United States in all this.23
Since the sides had made no headway on their own, Shultz came up with the idea of linking Middle East peace talks to the Reagan–Gorbachev summit that was due to take place in Washington at the end of the year. His idea was that Reagan and Gorbachev, as an adjunct to their summit, would invite Hussein and Shamir, as well as representatives from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, to meet in the US under US–Soviet auspices and with the secretary-general of the United Nations in attendance. The gathering would call on the parties to engage in direct negotiations, and the Jordanian delegation would include Palestinians acceptable to Israel. Reagan, who was growing weary of the Middle East and the incessant manoeuvring of its leaders, gave the go-ahead. ‘But the first guy who vetoes it kills it,’ he said. In mid October, Shultz flew to Israel to put the idea to Shamir. Shamir asked dozens of questions, all implying that, on reflection, he could not say yes. ‘Okay,’ said Shultz, ‘I don’t want to waste your time. Just say no.’ Shamir wanted time to think and to consult. Their next session was brief. ‘Well, Mr Secretary,’ Shamir concluded, ‘you know our dreams and you know our nightmares. We trust you. Go ahead.’24
From Tel Aviv, Shultz flew to London, and on 19 October in the evening he and Richard Murphy paid a visit to Hussein at his residence on Palace Green. Shultz presented the idea of an adjunct to the superpower summit to Hussein, Taher al-Masri and Marwan Kasim. He went over the proposal in great detail and invited the Jordanians to ask questions and to reflect on it overnight. Hussein was taken aback by the new US proposal, which completely ignored his agreement with Shimon Peres and was consistent, virtually word for word, with the Likud position: ‘Forget any international conference and negotiate directly with Shamir without the PLO or the permanent members of the UN Security Council.’ The king said he could not oblige.25 He was about to host an Arab summit in Amman and would have been laughed out of court if instead of the much coveted international conference he presented the idea of a conversation with Itzhak Shamir at the tail-end of a superpower summit. After Shultz departed, the Jordanians found his briefing folder behind a cushion on the couch. It was a 32-page file marked ‘Secret/Sensitive’. The Jordanians promptly made a photocopy and put the folder back in its place; when an American diplomat came to look for it, they pretended they had not noticed it. The king was upset by the content of the file.26 It was riddled with ambiguities and evasions on the critical issues, and it was full of double-speak. It smacked of craven appeasement to Shamir and displayed indifference towards Arab sensitivities. Hussein could call the meeting an ‘international conference’, Shamir could deny that it was, and the Americans could simply say that it was ‘an historic event’. The file included an Israeli ‘non-paper’ with a list of conditions for participating in this historic event and another long list of assurances that America was to give Israel with Jordan’s knowledge. The section ‘Tactics for Dealing with Hussein’ began with the subheading ‘His Likely Mood’. It said: ‘Hussein is fearful that renewed peace process diplomacy could complicate his Arab summit. Substantively, he is wary of any effort to push him into a Shamir-designed negotiation, with little international cover, a non-existent or weak link between final status negotiations and transitional arrangements.’27 These were indeed Hussein’s concerns. There was nothing he could do if after reaching an interim agreement, Shamir refused to proceed to final status negotiations. By the time Shultz went to Palace Green the next day, 20 October, Hussein had made up his mind: his answer was no. He gave two reasons. His nerves were raw at the very mention of Shamir. ‘I can’t be alone with that man,’ he said in an aside to Richard Murphy. Hussein did not believe that Shamir would ever permit negotiations to go beyond the issue of ‘transitional’ arrangements for those living in the West Bank and Gaza. And he also did not believe Shamir would ever give up an inch of territory or work on a ‘final status’ agreement for the territories. A third reason was implied but not stated. The king knew that President Asad of Syria would reject the proposal and that the Soviet Union would side with Syria. So no, and that was that, said the king.28
Once the American proposal was dismissed Hussein turned his attention to the Arab League summit that he had taken the lead in organizing. The summit opened in Amman on 8 November 1987 and lasted three days. It was a high point of Arab unity and cooperation, and one of the king’s finest hours. Hussein was the only Arab leader on good terms with all the rival blocs, and he took great pleasure in playing the part of peacemaker. His two main achievements were in mobilizing general Arab support behind Iraq in the war against Iran and behind Jordan’s leadership in the Middle East peace process. His earlier effort to reconcile Asad with Saddam Hussein, though not entirely successful, contributed to harmony at the summit. The two arch enemies did not become allies but nor did they allow their differences to disrupt the display of Arab unity. Another long-term effort that bore fruit at the summit was to bring Egypt back into the Arab fold. Libya, Syria and the PLO were opposed to the readmission of Egypt
into the Arab League, but Hussein’s proposal to do so was adopted, leaving it to each member state to decide whether to re-establish diplomatic relations with Egypt. The collective Arab boycott of Egypt was lifted. Hussein exploited his dominant position in the councils of the Arab mighty to weaken and marginalize the PLO. He deliberately snubbed Arafat by not going to the airport to meet him, a pronounced omission, as he usually went to meet all heads of state. Instead, he sent Zaid Rifa’i, Arafat’s nemesis.29 In his opening speech Hussein made only a passing reference to the PLO and again called for an international conference on the basis of UN resolutions 242 and 338, which the PLO had not yet accepted.30 The summit greatly enhanced Hussein’s prestige and legitimacy in the Arab world. He himself described it as one of the best and brightest moments in his life.31