Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Lion of Jordan

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  British Foreign Secretaries since 1945

  (with Peter Jones and Keith Sainsbury, 1977)

  The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:

  A Study in Crisis-Decision Making (1983)

  The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:

  A Study in Crisis-Decision Making (1983)

  Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah,

  The Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988)

  The Politics of Partition (1990)

  War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995)

  The Cold War and the Middle East

  (co-editor with Yezid Sayigh, 1997)

  The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)

  The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948

  (co-editor with Eugene L. Rogan, 2001)

  AVI SHLAIM

  Lion of Jordan

  The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2007

  1

  Copyright © Avi Shlaim, 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90635–5

  To Gwyn

  Contents

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  1 The Hashemite Heritage

  2 Murder of a Mentor

  3 The Making of a King

  4 The Baghdad Pact Fiasco

  5 The Dismissal of Glubb

  6 The Liberal Experiment

  7 A Royal Coup

  8 The Year of Revolution

  9 Arab Foes and Jewish Friends

  10 The Palestinian Challenge

  11 The Road to War

  12 Picking up the Pieces

  13 Dialogue across the Battle Lines

  14 Civil War

  15 The United Arab Kingdom Plan

  16 The October War

  17 The Road to Rabat

  18 The Camp David Accords

  19 Lebanon and the Reagan Plan

  20 Peace Partnership with the PLO

  21 The London Agreement

  22 Intifada and Disengagement

  23 The Gulf Crisis and War

  24 From Madrid to Oslo

  25 Peace Treaty

  26 The King’s Peace

  27 Collision Course

  28 The Last Journey

  Epilogue: The Life and Legacy

  Notes

  Jordanian Secret Meetings with Israeli Officials

  The Hashemite Dynasty

  Chronology

  List of Interviews

  Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  1. Jordan and the Arab World

  2. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

  3. The 1949 Armistice Lines

  4. The Middle East after the June 1967 War

  5. The Allon Plan for the West Bank, 1967

  6. Jordan 1970

  List of Illustrations

  1 King Hussein ibn Ali, King of the Hijaz (Corbis/Bettman)

  2 King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan (Corbis/Bettman)

  3 Sir John Glubb (Getty Images)

  4 Prince Hussein with his parents (Hashemite Archives)

  5 Burial of King Abdullah (Corbis/Bettman)

  6 Hussein before the Accession to the Throne Ceremony (Hashemite Archives)

  7 Hussein at Sandhurst (Topfoto)

  8 Hussein and Princess Dina (Topfoto)

  9 Hussein and Faisal II of Iraq (Corbis/Bettman)

  10 Hussein and Toni Gardiner (Topfoto)

  11 Hussein at the wheel of his Mercedes (Hashemite Archives/Flouti)

  12 Crown Prince Abdullah (Corbis/Bettman)

  13 Hussein with the Royal Family (Albert Flouti/Camera Press)

  14 Hussein visits the trenches (AP/PA Photos)

  15 Hussein with Sharif Zaid bin Shaker and Sharif Nasser bin Jamil (Hashemite Archives)

  16 Hussein during 1967 Press Conference (AP/PA Photos)

  17 Hussein with Wasfi al-Tall (Corbis/Sygma/Geneviève Chauvel)

  18 Arab heads of state at the Nile Hilton (Corbis/Gamma/UPI)

  19 Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan and Efraim Halevy (Israel Govt Press Office/Sa’ar Ya’acov)

  20 Hussein with Herzog Yaacov (Private Collection)

  21 Golda Meir (Penny Tweedie/Camera Press)

  22 Hussein with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Hulton Archives/Getty Images)

  23 Zaid al-Rifa’i (UPPA/Topfoto)

  24 Hussein with Queen Alia, Princess Haya, Prince Ali and Abir (Camera Press)

  25 Hussein with Lisa Halaby (Hashemite Archives/Zohrab)

  26 Jimmy Carter, Hussein and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran (Popperfoto)

  27 Hussein with Saddam Hussein (Jean-Claude Francolon/Gamma/ Camera Press)

  28 Hussein with Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (Corbis/Sygma/Bernard Bisson)

  29 Hussein on Independence Day (Camera Press)

  30 Itzhak Rabin, Hussein and Bill Clinton (Israel Government Press Office/Sa’ar Ya’acov)

  31 Hussein during the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty signing ceremony (Israel Government Press Office/Avi Ohayon)

  32 Itzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Hussein, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat (Corbis/CNP/Barbara Kinney)

  33 Hussein and Queen Noor with family (Hashemite Archives)

  34 Hussein with Princes Abdullah and Hamzah (Hashemite Archives/ Meldos)

  35 Hussein returns home (Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)

  36 Hussein appointing Abdullah Crown Prince (Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)

  37 Hussein’s funeral (Corbis/Sygma/Neuhaus Nadav)

  38 King Abdullah takes oath of office (Corbis/Sygma/Stephane Cardinale)

  Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

  Preface

  This preface is written wit
h a mixture of satisfaction and sadness: satisfaction at having completed a big book; but a tinge of sadness at having to put it to bed and losing the chance to further revise or add to it. Gibbon compared the finishing of a book to saying the final farewell to a very old and dear friend. I feel somewhat the same way about this one, a much more modest book than his. I have been working on it for the last seven years, and it is difficult to imagine life without it.

  This is not the book I set out to write, and it is three times longer than I had envisaged. As I was on leave for three out of the past seven years, I cannot plead that I did not have the time to write a short book. My original plan was to write a monograph, King Hussein and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East, with the emphasis on his diplomacy in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. But, as I did the research for this study in diplomatic history, I became fascinated by the personality of the PLK, or ‘plucky little king’, as he was often referred to in the West. The book acquired a life of its own and gradually developed, almost without my making a conscious decision, into a full-scale biography.

  A. J. P. Taylor once said that every historian should write a biography, if only to discover how different this is from the writing of history. My own academic discipline is International Relations, and I am well aware that writing with reference to one individual is not in the best tradition of social science research. Yet, in this particular instance, given the king’s dominant position within his own country and his highly personalized, not to say idiosyncratic, style of conducting foreign policy, it is the only sensible approach. International Relations is primarily the study of conflict and conflict resolution, of war and peace, and King Hussein’s entire career, as the subtitle to this biography indicates, revolved round waging war and making peace.

  One makes peace with one’s enemies, not with one’s friends. With Jordan and Israel, however, the dichotomy between war and peace is less clear-cut than in most other cases. They have been aptly described as ‘the best of enemies’. The triangular relationship between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians is difficult to analyse. But it is as vital to understanding the past as it is crucial in determining the final shape of the peace settlement in the Middle East. Jordan was a pivotal actor in the peace process that got under way in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. Whereas the literature on Israel and the Palestinians is very extensive, little has been written on Jordan. One of the main aims of this book is to fill the gap by providing an account of King Hussein’s role in the search for peace in the Middle East, with particular emphasis on his involvement in the Palestinian question and on his secret contacts with Israel, which culminated in the signature of a peace treaty in 1994.

  This book represents a natural development of my academic work over the last three decades. My training has been both in history and in the social sciences, and I like to think that I combine the skills of an International Relations generalist with those of a Middle East area specialist. The earlier book that is most directly relevant to the present project is Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988). There I challenge many of the myths that have come to surround the birth of the State of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, most notably the myth that Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that persisted for three decades after the guns fell silent. In contrast to the conventional view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair, I dwelt on the special relationship between King Abdullah of Jordan (the grandfather of King Hussein) and the Zionist movement, and on the interest that the Hashemites and the Zionists shared in containing Palestinian nationalism. The central thesis advanced is that, in November 1947, the Hashemite ruler of Transjordan and the Jewish Agency reached a tacit agreement to divide up mandatory Palestine among themselves and to help abort the birth of an independent Palestinian state, and that this agreement laid the foundations for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of the war – until Abdullah’s assassination by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951.

  The other book that is intimately connected with the present one is The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000). That work extends my revisionist critique of Israeli foreign policy from 1948 to 1998, in other words, to the first fifty years of statehood. Among the themes covered are seven Arab–Israeli wars and all the major diplomatic initiatives to settle the Arab–Israeli dispute. It is not a comprehensive history of the Arab–Israeli conflict but a detailed study of one actor: Israel. Jordan features but no more prominently than any of the neighbouring Arab states or the Palestinians. The main theme of The Iron Wall is that since 1948 Israel has been too ready to use military force and remarkably reluctant to engage in meaningful diplomacy to resolve its dispute with the Arabs. From 1967 Israel had ample opportunities to trade land for peace in accordance with UN Resolution 242, the cornerstone of nearly all international plans to resolve the conflict. But, with the exception of the peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994, Israel preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Israel did sign the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993 but began to renege on this historic compromise with the other principal party to the conflict following the return to power of the Likud three years later. The blind spot that Israeli leaders have always had in dealing with Palestinian nationalism persists down to the current day.

  The present book examines the Arab–Israeli conflict and many of the same attempts to resolve it peacefully, but this time not from an Israeli perspective but from a Jordanian one, or, more specifically, from the perspective of Jordan’s principal decision-maker: Hussein bin Talal. It explores the four main circles of Hussein’s foreign policy: Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world and the Great Powers. Special attention is devoted to the persistent tension in Hussein’s foreign policy between the commitment to Arab nationalism and the desire to reach a modus vivendi with Israel. The key to understanding all four strands of his foreign policy, it will be argued, was the survival of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. This was the overarching aim; everything else flowed from it.

  The first part covers the colonial context for the emergence of modern Jordan, the Hashemite legacy, Hussein’s childhood, the making of a king and the early years of his reign. But the bulk of the book deals with the period after 1967, and, more specifically, with Hussein’s efforts to recover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It was in this context that Hussein repeatedly offered full peace in return for full withdrawal but encountered relentless Israeli expansionism. This is where the covert contacts with Israel’s leaders fitted into the broader framework of his foreign policy. The first meeting across the battle lines was in fact held as early as 1963. The initiative for the meeting came from the Jordanian monarch, who followed in the footsteps of his grandfather. Each sought a peaceful solution to the conflict, each broke the Arab taboo on direct contact with the enemy, and each was described by his own supporters as the king of realism. But for Hussein the great watershed was 1967. It was only after the loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that his back channel to Tel Aviv assumed critical importance.

  The list of prominent Israeli politicians who met secretly with Hussein before 1994 included Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, Itzhak Rabin and Itzhak Shamir. The list of Hussein’s secret meetings with Israeli officials printed at the end of this book is probably incomplete, but it gives an idea of the scope and intensity of the extraordinary dialogue between two parties that remained formally at war with one another, and lends substance to the description ‘the best of enemies’. It captures the essence of a unique adversarial partnership.

  My primary aim in writing this book has been to provide an account of Hussein’s long reign and to make it as detailed, accurate, readable and interesting as possible. I hope it will also help the reader make sense of nearly half a century of tangled and tortuous Middle Eastern history. It attempts to break new ground in a number of ways. First, it provides information that is not currently availab
le on a crucial aspect of the diplomacy surrounding the Arab–Israeli conflict. Second, and more importantly, it challenges the conventional view that Israel faced a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world and the related myth of Arab intransigence. Third, whereas much of the literature on the Middle East peace process is written by American and Israeli scholars and focuses on the roles of the United States and Israel, this book focuses on the role of one of the major Arab actors. Like Britain in the post-war era, King Hussein constantly strove to ‘punch above his weight’. His influence in regional affairs was much greater than one might reasonably expect from the ruler of an impecunious and insignificant desert kingdom. He was also a master of the art of political survival. Against all odds, he remained on the Hashemite throne for forty-six years, from 1953 until his death from natural causes in 1999.

  Historians of the recent past need lucky breaks; mine was that Hussein very trustingly gave me an interview on the most sensitive of subjects: his clandestine relationship with Israel. The interview took place on 3 December 1996 at Hussein’s residence in Britain, Buckhurst Park. It lasted two hours, was recorded and later transcribed. This was one of the rare occasions when Hussein spoke on the record about his meetings with Israeli leaders prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The interview explains a good deal of his thinking about Israel and individual Israeli leaders, about his troubled relations with the PLO and with other Arab rulers, and about the major stages in his struggle for peace. After the king’s death, I published an edited version of this interview: ‘His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel’ (New York Review of Books, 15 July 1999). The complete transcript of this interview runs to thirty-six pages, and it served as a major source for this biography.

  At the meeting at Buckhurst Park, I indicated to King Hussein that after finishing the book on Israel’s foreign policy, I planned to write a book about him, and he gave me every encouragement. He invited me to visit him in Amman and volunteered to share with me his notes on the meetings that I found so fascinating. But I was too slow: he fell ill, and I lost my chance. Despite missing the opportunity for further privileged access to Hussein and his papers, I did not abandon the idea of writing a book about him. But, as with any contemporary history project, this one presented me with problems as well as opportunities. The main problem has been that of access to the relevant official documents; it is particularly acute in this case because Jordan has no proper national archive. My answer has been to make the most of the primary sources I could access rather than lament the ones I could not, on the principle that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The main opportunity has been to get the first-hand testimony of people who were involved in the events that I have written about. Interviews are, of course, notoriously fallible in some respects, but for a project such as this one they are also indispensable.