by Avi Shlaim
Just as things looked as if they could not get any worse, they did. On Thursday, 25 September 1997, two Mossad agents, carrying forged Canadian passports, tried to assassinate a Jordanian citizen in broad daylight on the streets of the Jordanian capital. The target of the operation was Khalid Mishal, political bureau chief of Hamas in Amman. Prior to the operation, Hamas claimed responsibility for two consecutive suicide bombs in Jerusalem. It was decided to assassinate Hamas leaders in retaliation, and Mishal was chosen as the first target. The high-tech method chosen was to inject a slow-acting poison into his ear as he entered his office in Amman. The drug used was a synthetic opiate called Fentanyl that leaves no traces in the blood stream. The plan went disastrously wrong. Mishal was injected but not killed, and his bodyguard captured the two Mossad agents. The IDF chief of staff and its director of military intelligence claimed they were unaware of the mission until they heard reports that two Mossad agents had been apprehended by the police and the Mossad station chief in Amman had apparently opposed the mission for fear of damaging relations between Israel and Jordan. But the prime minister gave the go-ahead for this egregious act of political folly regardless. A hit-team of no fewer than eight people had been sent to Amman: two were apprehended by the Jordanian authorities; four others took refuge in the Israeli Embassy after their mission was aborted; a woman doctor and another Mossad agent checked into the Inter-Continental Hotel as a married couple, which they were not.
Hussein, Israel’s best friend in the Arab world, said after the failed assassination bid that he felt as if somebody ‘had spat in his face’. His sense of betrayal was all the more acute because three days before the attempt Israeli and Jordanian officials had considered together the problem of Islamic terror. The meeting took place in Amman within the framework of regular security cooperation between the two sides. At the meeting the Jordanian representatives reiterated their commitment to work closely with Mossad in the fight against terror. The king intervened in the dialogue personally to report an offer of a truce from Hamas. The offer was for a thirty-year truce between Israel and the Palestinians that included Hamas. He requested that this offer should be conveyed directly to the prime minister. He was thus all the more surprised and angry when he learned about the bizarre operation in Jordan’s capital.
Netanyahu called Hussein as soon as he heard of the failure of the mission. He had apparently not taken into account the possibility that something could go wrong. Netanyahu asked Hussein to receive General Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, as soon as possible. He did not indicate the reason for the meeting, and Hussein assumed that it was connected with the Hamas truce proposal. By the time Yatom arrived, Hussein had been fully briefed about the incident. Yatom went by himself in a private aircraft and received a very frosty reception. General Ali Shukri and General Samih Batikhi, the head of the General Intelligence Department, were also there. Yatom and his family had spent the weekend before the operation on holiday in Aqaba and had been entertained by the king in person. How someone he treated as a friend could be involved in such a dastardly act was beyond the king’s comprehension. Yatom explained that the two men in police custody were in fact Mossad agents and that their unit was called ‘Caesaria’. Hussein told him that this kind of behaviour could not be tolerated and walked out of the meeting. Batikhi proceeded to lambaste Yatom for betraying their trust. Yatom replied that Mishal was in charge of the terrorist operations of Hamas. The Jordanians retorted that even if this were true, Israel could not take such liberties in their country. Batikhi got very angry and walked out. Yatom had been roundly rebuked and was forced to leave without having obtained any access to, or information on, the perpetrators of the crime. It was one of the shortest meetings in the annals of Israeli–Jordanian relations.
The most urgent problem for the Jordanians was how to save the life of Khalid Mishal, who was in an intensive care unit in hospital. For this they needed the antidote to the poison that had been injected into his ear. Ali Shukri called Dr Oded Eran, the Israeli ambassador, who had been at his post for only two weeks before the crisis erupted. Eran called the prime minister’s office and then called back. Netanyahu was reported as saying that the antidote was a state asset and that he could not reveal it. Shukri threatened to tell the press that Israel, like Iraq, had chemical weapons and had used them against a Jordanian citizen. He also warned that if the antidote was not divulged, Jordan would storm the embassy to capture the four Mossad agents who were holed up there. Eran remonstrated that this would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Shukri retorted sharply that the Geneva Convention does not authorize embassies to harbour terrorists. He was not bluffing. An army unit was readied to storm the Israeli Embassy. Colonel Abdullah bin Hussein, the king’s eldest son and the commander of the special forces, was put in charge of the operation.
It took the intervention of President Clinton to force Israel to relent. Hussein called Clinton to inform him of the crisis and to tell him that the future of the peace treaty was linked to the life of the Jordanian citizen who had been poisoned. If Mishal died, said Hussein, he would go on television that same evening, expose the whole story, suspend the peace treaty and put the attackers on public trial in Jordan. Clinton was dumbfounded and exclaimed about Netanyahu: ‘This man is impossible!’ He added that Netanyahu was harming not only Jordanian and American interests but also jeopardizing the entire peace process in the Middle East. Clinton listened sympathetically as Hussein vented his anger; he tried to calm him down and urged him not to break off relations with Israel. A while later Clinton called to say that Netanyahu had agreed to release the antidote. Shortly before midnight an Israeli doctor arrived in a small aircraft and was taken straight to the hospital. The doctors did not want to take any chances with the sample of the antidote brought by the Israelis. Mishal, who was by now on a respirator, was instead given the correct drug from a supply in the hospital’s stores, and he recovered.18
Jordan suspended all security cooperation with Israel following the meeting with Yatom. All Israel’s efforts to send high-level emissaries were rebuffed by the king. He felt personally betrayed and did not want to see any Israelis. He specifically asked that Halevy should not be involved: he valued the relationship with him and did not want it to be tarnished by this sordid episode. Halevy himself responded to Netanyahu’s desperate call for help and left his post in Brussels in haste to present himself in Jerusalem. He did not want his involvement to be made public because he considered that the relationship he had developed with the Hashemite house was a national, and not merely a personal, asset. Halevy looked at the situation from the king’s point of view. Hussein had taken the courageous step of leading his country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in the face of bitter opposition from the majority of his citizens. His relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was a delicate one: it was allied to Hamas, and the attempt on Mishal’s life could not have come at a worst time. Israel had placed him in an acutely embarrassing situation, and Israel had to solve his problem in order to solve its own problem. If the king released the six Israeli agents, he would be seen by his own people as a collaborator with the Mossad. The specific idea that Halevy put forward was the release of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas who had been languishing in an Israeli prison. This would enable the king to release the six agents. There was little support for Halevy’s idea, but Netanyahu allowed him to try it out on the king.
Halevy went to Amman on Sunday, 28 September. He was received by Prince Hassan and General Batikhi. After listening to a litany of complaints, he put forward his proposal regarding Shaikh Yassin. Hassan said it was worthy of consideration, but Batikhi took a different line. He was out to exact as much as he could and indicated that the price for resolving the crisis would have to be the release of more prisoners in Israeli hands. In the early afternoon Halevy was taken to see the king, who made no effort to conceal his bitter feelings over what had transpired. But he intimated that he could accept the offer
of the release of Shaikh Yassin together with other prisoners yet to be specified. Halevy obtained two other concessions. First, the king allowed him, in the face of strong opposition from Batikhi, to collect the four Mossad operatives from the embassy and take them back to Israel with him. Second, the king agreed that Netanyahu should come over to Amman that very evening to solidify the understandings that were beginning to emerge.
Towards midnight a helicopter left Jerusalem with a large Israeli delegation that included the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, the minister of national infrastructure, Itzhak Mordechai, the minister of defence, Efraim Halevy, Elyakim Rubinstein, the attorney general, and several aides. The king did not want to meet Netanyahu, so he asked Hassan and Batikhi to handle the discussion. They drove a hard bargain. It soon became clear that the release of the two detainees was not imminent. An understanding was reached on the principles of the deal, but the detailed negotiations were left in the hands of first Elyakim Rubinstein and then Ariel Sharon. Halevy, having extricated his prime minister from an exceedingly awkward situation, returned to his post in Brussels.19 Rubinstein’s abiding memory of the meeting is that the king kept repeating, ‘Why, why, why?’20
Sharon was never slow to seize opportunities, and the Mishal Affair allowed him to consolidate his own power and influence at the expense of the prime minister. At the meeting with the king, Sharon dissociated himself from the botched operation, which he described as ‘a terrible mistake’.21 Sharon’s adviser for Arab affairs was Mjali Wahbah, a Druze from Beit Jan in the north and a member of the Knesset who had previously been a lieutenant-colonel in the IDF. Wahbah relates that shortly after he had started to work for Sharon in 1996, Ali Shukri called him and invited him to meet with his king in Amman. Wahbah was probably the only Israeli official who spoke to the king in Arabic. At the meeting Wahbah said he was very moved because it was his first encounter with a king. The king said, ‘Feel at home, my son.’ Wahbah spoke about his grandfather, who had met Hussein’s grandfather, King Abdullah. The king told Wahbah about his mistake in joining the war against Israel in 1967 and his warning in 1973 that no one had listened to. The meeting lasted five hours, and at the end it was agreed to set up a channel of communication between the palace and Sharon.22
After the assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal, the king reluctantly agreed to see Sharon. Shukri had advised the king that Sharon hated Netanyahu’s guts and that he was waiting for an opportunity to overthrow him.23 Sharon spoke in Hebrew to the king, and Wahbah translated into Arabic. Sharon, who had a large farm in the Negev, said, ‘Your Majesty, if you let me take the two Mossad agents, I’ll tie them up like kids. Then, as a punishment for their blunder, I’ll sit on them all the way back home and, as you can see, I am not a lightweight.’ The deal was clinched. Jordan freed all the remaining Mossad operatives in return for the release of Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, 23 Jordanians and 50 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. After the meeting Shukri took Wahbah on one side and said to him, ‘I have a piece of advice for you. His Majesty does not like your prime minister, to put it mildly. It would be better if from now on you and Sharon handle this matter.’24 Netanyahu trusted Sharon about as much as Sharon trusted him but after the Amman disaster the prime minister handed over to his powerful rival the unofficial ‘Jordanian portfolio’, sidelining David Levy, the hapless foreign minister, in the process. In the past Hussein and his brother used to worry about whether Israel and the PLO would collaborate to overthrow the house of Hashem. Now it was the turn of the Palestinians to worry about whether Hussein and Ariel Sharon, of all people, were in cahoots against them. It was a curious twist to the ever-changing triangular relationship between the principal parties to the conflict over Palestine.
Jordanian officials linked the botched assassination attempt to the peace process. They recalled that Hamas had hitherto refrained from mounting terrorist attacks outside the borders of Israel and the occupied territories. They reasoned that by trying to assassinate Mishal outside these borders, Israel intended to create an intolerable provocation. This would have compelled Hamas to react and to extend the terrorist war to new areas. Israel would have blamed Arafat for the new wave of violence, and the peace process would have once again been put on hold.25 In this context the Hamas offer of a thirty-year truce that Hussein communicated to Netanyahu assumes added significance. Netanyahu was later to claim that he did not receive the offer until after the operation was over. Nobody in Jordan believed him. The message was given by Hussein himself to David Silberg, a Mossad official for whom he had a particular liking, for urgent transmission to the prime minister. Silberg told his Jordanian colleagues that he made sure that his report was on the prime minister’s desk as soon as he got back – three days before the attack on Mishal. Hussein’s conclusion was simple: Netanyahu was out to destroy peace. Hussein thought that Netanyahu was sending him a message to say that the peace with Jordan was not important to him and that peace with the Palestinians mattered even less. The fact that Mishal was hit after getting Hamas’s offer of a moratorium meant that this was the Israeli answer: that Israel was not interested. So Hamas carried on with its operations to the detriment of Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel.26
By ordering the operation in Amman, Netanyahu showed himself to be irresponsible and short-sighted. The respected British weekly the Economist featured Netanyahu on its 11 October 1997 cover with the caption ‘Serial Bungler’. The consequences of this particular bungle were very grave. Jordan froze security cooperation with Israel, asked for the closure of the Mossad station in Amman, and sought the resignation of General Yatom.27 The operation also weakened Hussein, whose peace treaty with Israel remained as unpopular among his own people as it was popular among Israelis. The release of Shaikh Yassin, and his triumphal return to Gaza via Amman, made it more difficult for Arafat to meet Israel’s demands for a mass arrest of Hamas activists. The fact that Israel was forced to release Shaikh Yassin increased his prestige and that of the organization he had founded during the first intifada. Thus, by relentlessly concentrating on Hamas, Netanyahu ended up raising it to a position of pivotal importance. By his own actions he came close to destroying one of the central planks in his policy towards the Palestinians: the refusal to negotiate until the violence was halted. Just as his opening of the tunnel in the Old City of Jerusalem forced him to reverse his policy of not trading land for peace, so the Mishal fiasco undermined his case for refusing to implement the Oslo Accords until the Palestinian Authority uprooted the infrastructure of Hamas.
Following a visit to the United States, during which many American Jewish leaders had expressed to them their dismay over Netanyahu’s approach, Hussein and his wife paid a visit to London and stayed in their house in Kensington. Netanyahu asked for an urgent meeting there, apparently having been urged by his US Jewish supporters to repair relations with Hussein. Queen Noor was in the shower the next evening when Netanyahu arrived. The protocol officers had agreed that he alone would be going to the house, so she was startled to be informed that Mrs Netanyahu had unexpectedly arrived with him. Noor went down to the drawing room with her hair half dried, determined to be hospitable and entirely apolitical, but she unintentionally stepped into a minefield. She tried to stress the positive impact on both societies – Arab and Israeli – of the institutional, business and individual contacts that had developed in recent years. As part of the progress in the peace process, they had been very encouraged to see that Israeli and Arab historians and scholars were reviewing textbooks and historical accounts with a view to correcting the propaganda on both sides. Mrs Netanyahu bristled. ‘What do you mean, propaganda?’ she said. Noor replied that one example of a distorting myth was the description of Palestine as ‘a land without a people for people without a land’, when in fact generations of Palestinians had been living in Palestine for thousands of years. Sarah Netanyahu bristled again. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘When the Jews came to this area, there were no Arabs here. They came to find work when we built
cities. There was nothing here before that.’ ‘Iam certain many of your own historians would agree that that is not accurate,’ Noor replied. The exchange was quite an insight for her. Binyamin Netanyahu was known for his conservative rigidity, but to hear an erroneous version of history stated so emphatically by his wife in private was truly alarming. Did they really believe myths like this one? Noor wondered. And if so, what other misconceptions might impede their working together for a lasting peace?28
Disillusion with the treaty and with Israel undermined the king’s position. He reacted by adopting increasingly authoritarian measures to suppress dissent. Democracy in Jordan had never been a historic right of the people but something that was granted in small doses by the monarch. Democracy did not develop its own impetus but remained subordinate to the royal agenda. Peace and democracy were intended to go hand in hand, but in practice the reverse happened: setbacks in the peace process impeded progress towards democracy and in some respects even reversed it. The press law was amended to enable the government to take punitive measures against opposition newspapers and weeklies. The king, who had been an excellent listener in the past, stopped listening. The man who had been renowned for his patience became angry and irascible, and the vision of a constitutional monarchy that had inspired him in the late 1980s faded away.29 He paid no attention to parliament, and even more than before acted as his own prime minister and foreign minister. He also became increasingly intolerant of criticism of his policies, treating opposition to normalization as illegitimate. Repression reached such a level that the main Islamic opposition parties, and some mainstream politicians such as former Prime Minister Ahmad Obeidat, decided to boycott the parliamentary elections of 4 November 1997, which robbed them of their legitimacy.