Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  19. Outgoing Foreign Minister Yigal Allon (left) with his successor Moshe Dayan. On the extreme right, Efraim Halevy. Jerusalem, 1977

  20. Hussein in a secret meeting with Dr Yaacov Herzog, c. 1968/9

  21. Golda Meir, 1970

  22. Hussein confers with President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office of the White House, March 1974

  23. Zaid al-Rifa’i, as Jordanian ambassador to Great Britain, 1970

  24. Hussein with his third wife, Queen Alia, pictured a few months before the helicopter crash that killed her, with their children Ali and Haya and their adopted child, Abir (left) 1976

  25. Hussein announces his engagement to Lisa Halaby, May 1978

  26. President Carter (left), Hussein and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, at the Niavaran Palace, Tehran, 1978

  27. Hussein with Saddam Hussein, 1980

  28. Hussein with President Hafiz Al-Asad of Syria, 1985

  29. Celebrating Jordanian Independence Day, 1992

  30. Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin and Hussein shake hands as President Clinton watches, Washington, 26 July 1994

  31. Hussein addressing the audience during the Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty signing ceremony, Wadi Araba, 26 October 1994

  32. The heads of state adjust their neckwear in preparation for the ‘Oslo II’ signing ceremony at the White House, 28 September 1995 (left to right): Rabin, Mubarak, Hussein, Clinton and Arafat

  33. King Hussein and Queen Noor’s twentieth wedding anniversary, 1998 (from left): (front row) Prince Hamzah, Prince Ali, Prince Hashim; (back row) Princess Iman, Princess Haya, Queen Noor, King Hussein, Princess Raiyah and Abir

  34. Hussein praying with Prince Abdullah (right) and Prince Hamzah (left) at the Prophet’s Tomb in Medina, Saudi Arabia, 1998

  35. Hussein returns home to Jordan after six months’ medical treatment in the US, 19 January 1999

  36. Hussein appointing Abdullah Crown Prince over Hassan, 25 January 1999

  37. Mourners at Hussein’s funeral, 8 February 1999, including King Mohammed VI of Morocco, Arafat, Clinton, Sultan Qaboos of Oman and Carter

  38. King Abdullah salutes a portrait of his father before taking the oath of office, February 1999

  Epilogue: The Life and Legacy

  An Israeli intelligence report written in the early 1980s described Jordan’s King Hussein as a man trapped on a bridge burning at both ends, with crocodiles in the river beneath him: he cannot go forward, he cannot retreat, he cannot jump. He is a slave of the status quo. This uncharacteristically flowery intelligence assessment rightly stresses the extraordinarily severe constraints under which Hussein had to operate throughout his political career. What it leaves out of account are the personal qualities of charisma, courage, determination and farsightedness that enabled Hussein to cope with these constraints and to survive in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Hussein was a full-blooded Hashemite king. He was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and the great-grandson of Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, the leader of the Arab struggle for independence during the First World War. But it was his grandfather Abdullah, the founder of the Emirate of Transjordan, who had the most profound influence on his political thinking. It was Abdullah who educated Hussein, who taught him what it meant to be a Hashemite, and who enjoined him to preserve and develop the kingdom that he had created. The assassination of his grandfather and mentor at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in 1951 was the most formative influence in Hussein’s early life. He was only fifteen years old at the time, and the hopes of his family, and especially of his formidable mother, were pinned on him. Thus, from a very young age, Hussein carried on his shoulders a heavy sense of responsibility for the Hashemite heritage. Above all, this meant preserving Jordan as an independent state under the rule of the Hashemite dynasty. It also meant making Jordan a major player in regional and international politics.

  From the beginning there was a huge disparity between these lofty ambitions and the paucity of the means available for achieving them. The Hashemite rulers of Jordan were dealt a weak hand. When Hussein ascended the throne he inherited a poor desert kingdom, with no oil and limited industrial capacity, surrounded by enemies who questioned its very right to exist. Hussein’s principal legacy was one of success in defying the obituarists and transcending the in-built limitations of his kingdom. He was able to give Jordan political weight in regional affairs and even at the global level that went a long way beyond its small population, limited economy and proud but modest army. This is the legacy that King Abdullah II inherited from his father in 1999 and one that, despite being unprepared for the job, he has succeeded in perpetuating.

  But though Hussein succeeded in building Jordan as a polity, as a political entity with a significant role in regional affairs and in international diplomacy, he never had a vision of a self-sustaining economy for Jordan. He had no understanding and virtually no interest in economic matters. Instead he used his international connections to maintain a steady stream of funds from abroad to keep his country afloat. His talents as the fundraiser-in-chief were stretched to the limit in finding new sources of supply as the international political situation kept changing. The main sources of economic aid were Britain in the early 1950s, America from 1957 onwards, the Gulf states in the 1960s and 1970s, the Arab League after the expulsion of Egypt over its separate peace with Israel in the late 1970s, Iraq in the 1980s until the Gulf War of 1991, and America again after the conclusion of the peace treaty with Israel in 1994. At the end of Hussein’s reign Jordan was still crucially dependent on external sources of funding. This was another legacy that he bequeathed to his son and successor: the never ending struggle for solvency.

  No problem that Hussein had to confront during his reign was more taxing or more persistent than the problem of Palestine, the roots of which went back to the emergence of Zionism as a political movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The result was a clash between two peoples and two national movements over the same land. In the 1948 war for Palestine, the real losers were the Palestinians. The State of Israel was established, Jordan occupied and later annexed the West Bank, and the Palestinians were left out in the cold. Abdullah pursued a policy of absorbing the Palestinians into his enlarged kingdom but met with only limited success. Palestinians accounted for roughly half of Jordan’s population, but most of them did not want to be loyal subjects of the Hashemites; they wanted their own independent state, flag and anthem. King Abdullah was assassinated by Palestinian nationalists in 1951 because they considered that he had betrayed their national cause. The Palestinian problem, from their perspective, was the product of a conspiracy between Hashemites and Zionists.

  As I hope this book has shown, Hussein never underestimated the seriousness of the Palestinian challenge. In his speeches he repeatedly referred to the Palestine question as a question of life and death for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He knew that there was a great deal of Arab and international sympathy and support for the Palestinians. He therefore posed as, and gradually made himself, in his own eyes, the champion of the Palestinians so that this support would be to the benefit and not to the detriment of his country. With the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid 1960s it became increasingly difficult to maintain the idea that Jordan was one united family. Hussein and the PLO were competitors for the allegiance of the Palestinians living in Jordan. True, the PLO had been created to liberate Palestine from Israel, but its struggle against Israel had far-reaching consequences for Jordan.

  The difference between Hussein and the PLO leaders was that they believed in the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine and he did not. Like his grandfather, he was the king of realism. In 1948 King Abdullah was the only Arab leader with a realistic appreciation of the military balance between the two sides. Abdullah may not have understood fully the ideological forces that drove the Jews to strive so relentlessly for a state of their own, but he could tell a going conc
ern when he saw one.

  Hussein, similarly, faced up to facts. He realized that Israel was a strong neighbour which was there to stay. He never harboured any illusions that Israel could be defeated on the battlefield or of fighting Israel for the sake of eliminating it. The issue for him was how to resolve the Arab–Israeli dispute peacefully, how to end the conflict, how to reach an accommodation with the State of Israel and to close this war-filled chapter in the history of the region. These aims could only be achieved, he concluded, by means of a direct dialogue with the enemy which, in view of the Arab taboo, had to be secret. Moreover, Hussein did not want to have this dialogue second-hand; he wanted to meet the enemy face-to-face to see what they were about and to work out together a way forward. Significantly, it was not the Israelis but Hussein himself who took the initiative, in 1963, in establishing the covert dialogue across the battle lines that continued, with some intervals, until the peace treaty was concluded three decades later.

  A great deal changed in the Middle East in the intervening years, most notably as a result of the June War of 1967. Hussein always maintained that he had no choice but to join the other Arab countries in the war against Israel, but his explanations were unconvincing. Joining in the war was a catastrophic miscalculation and one that cost him half his kingdom. In six fateful days he lost East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which his grandfather had succeeded in salvaging from the dismal wreck of Arab Palestine in 1948. He felt an acute sense of personal responsibility to recover the lost territory, and especially the old city of Jerusalem, because of its importance not just to Jordanians but to Arabs and Muslims everywhere. While other Arab leaders indulged in mutual recriminations, Hussein dealt in a practical way with the bitter consequences of defeat. He understood better than any other leader the new rules of the game.

  First of all, Jordan accepted UN resolution 242 of November 1967 and the principle of land for peace, which became the corner stone of Jordanian diplomacy. At a deeper level, however, Hussein understood the importance of giving Israel the sense of security needed to make concessions for the sake of peace. In the aftermath of defeat, the dialogue across the battle lines was resumed and intensified. Hussein’s terms never changed. From the beginning he offered his Israeli interlocutors full, contractual peace in exchange for the occupied territories with only minor border modifications. His aim was not a separate peace with Israel but a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Nor was he alone in striving for peace on the Arab side. After the war, he and Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the leading moderates in the Arab camp. Nasser knew and approved of Hussein’s secret talks with the enemy, provided they did not lead to a separate peace. Despite Nasser’s tacit support, it took a great deal of courage on Hussein’s part to pursue this solo diplomacy.

  The quest for a land-for-peace deal was frustrated not by Arab intransigence but by Israeli intransigence. By its actions Israel revealed that it preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Soon after the end of the 1967 war it began to build settlements in the occupied territories. Building civilian settlements on occupied territory was not just illegal under international law but a major obstacle to peace. There were some early signs of flexibility on the part of the Israeli cabinet in relation to the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights but none towards the West Bank. All the major parties in the 1967–70 national unity government were united in their determination to keep at least a substantial part of the West Bank in perpetuity. There were proponents of the ‘Jordanian option’ and proponents of the ‘Palestinian option’, but in practical terms the debate was between those who did not want to return the West Bank to Jordan and those who did not want to return it to the Palestinians who lived there. Despite Hussein’s best efforts, the diplomatic deadlock persisted for another decade, until Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Sadat did what Hussein had studiously avoided, namely, a bilateral deal with Israel that left the Palestinian problem unresolved. The two countries changed places: Egypt was drummed out of the Arab League while Jordan joined the Arab mainstream.

  In the aftermath of the Lebanon War of 1982 Ronald Reagan launched a peace plan that called for the creation of a Palestinian homeland in association with Jordan. The Likud government headed by Menachem Begin flatly rejected this plan. In the mid 1980s Hussein tried a new tack. He wanted to ‘repackage’ the PLO in a way that would make it acceptable to America so that America would put pressure on Israel to negotiate. The result was the Jordan–PLO accord of 11 February 1985. But the PLO turned out to be evasive and unreliable and the peace partnership broke down the following year. In April 1987 Hussein reached an agreement with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on an international conference to which all the parties to the conflict would be invited and which would then divide up into bilateral working groups. But Itzhak Shamir, the Likud leader and prime minister, scuppered this ‘London Agreement’. Later that year the first intifada broke out. It was a full-scale revolt against Israeli rule in Gaza and the West Bank, a non-violent Palestinian war of independence. Fearing that the intifada would spread from the West Bank to the East Bank, on 31 July 1988 Hussein severed the legal and administrative links between his kingdom and the West Bank. Belatedly and reluctantly, he acknowledged that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

  Following this disengagement from the West Bank, and in a sense from the Palestine problem, Hussein concentrated his efforts on building a liberal, moderate Arab order. He wanted the moderates rather than the PLO and the radicals to set the tone in the Arab world and to build a pro-Western Arab coalition that would promote stability and prosperity in the region. The main achievement of this phase was the creation of the Arab Cooperation Council, consisting of Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. A second important aspect of Hussein’s foreign policy during the 1980s was the cultivation of an alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The alliance constituted some sort of a strategic counterweight to Israel and it brought rich economic rewards, but because of Saddam’s unpredictability it also carried risks. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 destroyed the emerging moderate Arab order and split the Arabs down the middle. Hussein tried to work out an Arab solution to the crisis, but he was not given a chance. He came under strong pressure to join the American-led war against Iraq but he resisted all the pressures and the blandishments. It was a difficult period in Jordan’s history, fraught with perils and uncertainties. There was a real danger that Jordan would become a battleground between Iraq and Israel and that the hard-liners on the Israeli right would seize the opportunity to realize their programme of turning the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into a Palestinian state. Hussein forestalled the danger by secretly meeting Itzhak Shamir in England and getting him to agree to respect Jordan’s neutrality when the bombs started falling. This was a striking example of the use made by Hussein of his back channel to Tel Aviv to protect the security of his country.

  Jordan was an enthusiastic participant in the American-led peace process that got under way after the Gulf War, and provided an umbrella for non-PLO Palestinian participation in the Madrid peace conference. But little progress was made in the subsequent bilateral negotiations in Washington under American auspices. The Oslo Accord between the PLO and Israel in September 1993 took Jordan and the other Arab states by complete surprise. Hussein’s initial reaction was anger at the PLO for breaking rank and suspicion that Israel intended to drop him in favour of a partnership with the PLO. But Itzhak Rabin succeeded in reassuring him that his government remained committed to the survival of the monarchy in Amman and that Jordan’s interests would be taken into account in all future negotiations with the PLO. The Oslo Accord involved not just a risk but also an opportunity for Jordan. Once the PLO had made its peace with the Jewish state, there was no longer any reason for Jordan to hold back from doing so too. The Arab taboo had been broken, and the road was clear to the direct negotiations that culminated in the signature of a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel on 26 October 1994.

 
Hussein viewed the peace treaty with Israel as the crowning achievement of his reign. It clearly served his dynastic interests but he firmly believed that it also served Jordan’s national interests. It restored the alliance with America which had been badly damaged by Jordan’s stand during the Gulf War; it restored lost territory and water resources; it revived the strategic understanding with the State of Israel; and it underpinned the centrality of Jordan in regional politics. Crucially, it also protected his kingdom from a takeover bid by his Palestinian opponents and forestalled the emergence of an Israeli–Palestinian axis. By concluding his own pact with Israel, Hussein turned the tables on his radical Palestinian rivals and reasserted the Hashemite dynasty’s position as Israel’s natural ally in the region. Most of all, the peace agreement provided a lasting defence against the dreaded policy of the Israeli right of toppling the monarchy in Amman and transforming the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into the Republic of Palestine. The spectre of Jordan becoming an alternative homeland for the Palestinians was finally laid to rest. A comprehensive peace settlement for the Middle East was beyond Hussein’s reach, but he successfully stopped Jordan from becoming the solution to the Palestinian problem.

  There was, however, an internal price to pay for the peace with Israel. Peace and democracy usually go hand in hand, but they did not do so in this case. There was strong popular opposition to peace and normalization with Israel, and many prominent Jordanian politicians thought that Hussein was in too much of a hurry, that he was conceding too much in his dealings with the Israelis. Hussein realized the depth of the opposition to his peace policy but he counted on the material benefits of peace to bring about a change in attitudes. The much vaunted ‘peace dividend’, however, failed to materialize, and the opposition to his policy persisted and gathered momentum. Hussein had never been particularly tolerant of political opposition but, feeling increasingly isolated and embattled, he resorted to draconian measures, including the arrest and imprisonment of his opponents. Even when elections were allowed, the electoral law was manipulated to produce results that favoured the king. Neither parliament nor the constitution could limit his decision-making power. The freedom of the press was curtailed, dissident parliamentarians were subjected to pressure from the palace, and the power of the secret police grew at an alarming rate. Far from paving the way to greater freedom and democracy, the peace treaty with Israel ushered in an era of political repression and authoritarianism. This too was part of the legacy that Hussein bequeathed to his successor. Hussein’s legacy is thus a mixed one: there were shadows as well as light; failures as well as some remarkable successes.