Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  The truth about the second Abdullah–Meir meeting is rather more nuanced than this self-serving Zionist account would have us believe. Abdullah had not entirely betrayed the agreement, nor was he entirely loyal to it, but something in between. Even Meir’s own account of her mission, given to her colleagues on the Provisional State Council shortly after her return from Amman, was nowhere near as unsympathetic or unflattering as the account she included much later in her memoirs. From her own contemporary report on her mission, a number of important points emerge. First, Abdullah did not go back on his word; he only stressed that circumstances had changed. Second, Abdullah did not say he wanted war; it was Meir who threatened him with dire consequences in the event of war. Third, they did not part as enemies. On the contrary, Abdullah seemed anxious to maintain contact with the Jewish side even after the outbreak of hostilities. Abdullah needed to send his army across the Jordan River in order to gain control over the Arab part of Palestine contiguous with his kingdom. He did not say anything about attacking the Jewish forces on their own territory. The distinction was a subtle one, and Meir was not renowned for her subtlety.

  Part of the problem was that Abdullah had to pretend to be going along with the other members of the Arab League who had unanimously rejected the UN partition plan and were bitterly opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state. What is more, the military experts of the Arab League had worked out a unified plan for invasion, one that was all the more dangerous for having been geared to the real capabilities of the regular Arab armies rather than to the wild rhetoric about throwing the Jews into the sea. But the forces actually made available by the Arab states for the campaign in Palestine were well below the level demanded by the Military Committee of the Arab League. Moreover, Abdullah wrecked the invasion plan by making last-minute changes. His objective in ordering his army across the Jordan River was not to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state but to make a bid for the Arab part of Palestine. Abdullah never wanted the other Arab armies to intervene in Palestine. Their plan was to prevent partition; his plan was to effect partition. His plan assumed and even required a Jewish presence in Palestine, although his preference was for Jewish autonomy under his crown. By concentrating his forces on the West Bank, Abdullah intended to eliminate once and for all any possibility of an independent Palestinian state and to present his Arab partners with annexation as a fait accompli. In the course of the war for Palestine there were some bitter clashes between the Arab Legion and the Israel Defence Force (IDF), especially in and around Jerusalem. But by the end all the invading Arab armies had been repelled and only the Arab Legion held its ground in central Palestine.

  Thus there are two rival versions of Jordan’s conduct in the First Arab–Israeli War: the loyalist version and the Arab nationalist one. The loyalist version maintains that Abdullah acted in accordance with the wishes of the Palestinians both in sending the Arab Legion into Palestine in 1948 and in uniting the West Bank with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. The Arab nationalist version portrays Abdullah as a greedy villain whose collaboration with the Jews led to the Arab defeat in the 1948 war and to the enlargement of his kingdom at the expense of the Palestinians.27

  The principal weakness of the loyalist narrative lies in its failure to make any mention of Abdullah’s secret dealings with the Jewish Agency in the lead-up to the Palestine war. My own version of events is set out in my book Collusion across the Jordan and is close to the Arab nationalist narrative in as much as it stresses the importance of this secret diplomacy in determining the course and outcome of the First Arab–Israeli War. The main thesis advanced in my book is that in November 1947 Abdullah reached a tacit agreement with the Jewish Agency to divide Palestine between themselves following the termination of the British mandate, and that this laid the foundations for mutual restraint during the 1948 war and for continued collaboration in the aftermath of that war.

  The thesis of ‘Collusion across the Jordan’ has been hotly denied by some Israeli scholars.28 This thesis contradicts the traditional, heroic, moralistic version of the emergence of the State of Israel and of the 1948 war. It also challenges the conventional view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair in which a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world is pitted against the Jews. It suggests that the Arab rulers were deeply divided among themselves on how to deal with the Zionist challenge and that one of them favoured accommodation rather than confrontation and had indeed reached an understanding with the Jews on the partition of Palestine. The evidence for this comes mainly from official Israeli documents, and it is far too extensive to reproduce here. But one piece of evidence is worth quoting at length because it is particularly incisive and illuminating: the testimony of Yaacov Shimoni, a senior official in the Jewish Agency, who was directly involved in the contacts with Abdullah. In an interview with the present author, Shimoni emphatically maintained that, despite Abdullah’s evasions, the understanding with him

  was entirely clear in its general spirit. We would agree to the conquest of the Arab part of Palestine by Abdullah. We would not stand in his way. We would not help him, would not seize it and hand it over to him. He would have to take it by his own means and stratagems but we would not disturb him. He, for his part, would not prevent us from establishing the State of Israel, from dividing the country, taking our share and establishing a state in it. Now his vagueness, his ambiguity, consisted of declining to write anything, to draft anything, which would bind him. To this he did not agree. But to the end, until the last minute, and if I am not mistaken even during his last talk with Golda [on 10 May 1948], he always said again and again: ‘Perhaps you would settle for less than complete independence and statehood, after all; under my sovereignty or within a common framework with me, you would receive full autonomy or a Jewish canton, not a totally separate one but under the roof of the Hashemite crown.’ This he did try to raise every now and again and, of course, always met with a blank wall. We told him we were talking about complete, full, and total independence and are not prepared to discuss anything else. And to this he seemed resigned but without ever saying: ‘OK, an independent state.’ He did not say that, he did not commit himself, he was not precise. But such was the spirit of the agreement and it was totally unambiguous.

  Incidentally, the agreement included a provision that if Abdullah succeeded in capturing Syria, and realized his dream of Greater Syria – something we did not think he had the power to do – we would not disturb him. We did not believe either in the strength of his faction in Syria. But the agreement included a provision that if he does accomplish it, we would not stand in his way.

  But regarding the Arab part of Palestine, we did think it was serious and that he had every chance of taking it, all the more so since the Arabs of Palestine, with their official leadership, did not want to establish a state at all. That meant that we were not interfering with anybody. It was they who refused. Had they accepted a state, we might not have entered into the conspiracy. I do not know. But the fact was that they refused, so there was a complete power vacuum here and we agreed that he will go in and take the Arab part, provided he consented to the establishment of our state and to a joint declaration that there will be peaceful relations between us and him after the dust had settled. That was the spirit of the agreement. A text did not exist.29

  Shimoni uses the word ‘conspiracy’, which is even stronger than ‘collusion’. On the other hand, unlike the Arab nationalists, he does not lay all the blame for the Arab defeat at Abdullah’s door. In particular, Shimoni draws attention to the part that the Palestinians themselves played in the loss of Palestine. Abdullah, in fact, offered the Palestinians his protection, but they rejected it. They put their trust in the Arab League, which failed them. True, after being spurned by the Palestinians, Abdullah proceeded to play a part in aborting the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947 that called for the establishment of two states, one Palestinian and one Jewish. But since the Arab League,
the Arab states and the Palestinians all categorically rejected the partition plan, they were hardly entitled to complain. There was, as Shimoni points out, a complete power vacuum on the Arab side. To be sure, there was a great deal of rhetoric coming from the Arab side on the liberation of Palestine. Rhetoric, however, as the Palestinians were to discover to their cost, was not much use on the battlefield.

  Abdullah was not alone in pursuing a dynastic agenda. All the Arab participants in the 1948 war were propelled by narrow national interests while pretending to serve the common cause. The difference was that Abdullah was alone among the Arab leaders in possessing a realistic appreciation of the balance of forces in 1948. Because of his realism, he was more successful in achieving his objectives than they were. But it was the inability of the Arab leaders as a group to coordinate their diplomatic and military strategies that was in no small measure responsible for the catastrophic defeat that they suffered at the hands of the infant Jewish state. Inter-Arab conflict is the untold story of the war for Palestine.30

  Only two parties emerged as winners from the Palestine war: Jordan and Israel. Jordan managed to defend the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and to incorporate them into its territory. Israel succeeded in extending its territory considerably beyond the UN partition borders. Egypt was soundly defeated in Palestine, but it did hold on to the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean coast. The losers were the Palestinians. Having rejected the partition of Palestine, they were left with no part of Palestine at all, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map.31 Over 700,000 Palestinians became refugees and over half of that number ended up in Jordan, drastically changing the demographic balance of the kingdom.

  The Palestinians called Abdullah a traitor. He sold them down the river, they said. Yet, if Abdullah had not sent his army into Palestine upon expiry of the British mandate, it is likely that the whole of Palestine would have been occupied by Israel and an even larger number of Palestinians turned into refugees. There is thus at least a case to be made for viewing Abdullah not as a traitor but as a saviour of the Palestinians.32 The Palestinian retort is that Abdullah preserved a part of Palestine from being swallowed up by Israel, only in order to swallow it up in Jordan. Some arguments never end.

  After the guns fell silent, Israel signed armistice agreements with all its neighbours: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The Israel–Jordan armistice agreement was signed on 3 April 1949. The armistice demarcation line between Jordan and Israel, including the division of Jerusalem, was the product of secret negotiations between Abdullah and the Israelis. Jerusalem, the scene of some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the entire war, was quietly partitioned between the two sides along the ceasefire line in order to pre-empt the United Nations’ move to turn it into an international city. The Arab states that had rejected the UN partition plan of November 1947 now ironically became enthusiastic proponents of a UN regime for the Holy City. Abdullah understood that his Arab rivals were out to deprive him of the most glittering prize he had won in the war. So he and the Israelis bypassed the UN and partitioned Jerusalem between themselves in a remarkable display of the common interests that set them apart from the rest of the Arab world.

  Even after the yielding of some territory under duress, Abdullah emerged as the most successful Arab participant from the First Arab–Israeli War. That ‘falcon trapped in a canary’s cage’ at long last succeeded in breaking out and expanding his exiguous dominion. He not only held on to the Old City and East Jerusalem but also acquired additional land on the West Bank of the Jordan River. His Arab detractors denounced Abdullah as a traitor and a quisling, and at least one British official described him as ‘a born land-grabber’. No saint, Abdullah bin Hussein. Yet those who sit in judgement upon him should recall that after the Arab rejection of the UN partition plan, the war for Palestine degenerated into a general land-grab, and the real distinction was not between saints and sinners but between more successful and less successful land-grabbers. Only the Palestinians did not figure in this equation. They were the real losers in that war.

  In Abdullah’s defence it can be argued that he saved what he could from the dismal wreck of Arab Palestine. This is more than can be said for his detractors. With his extraordinary sense of realism, his practice in war and peace of the art of the possible, his willingness to look beyond ideological and religious differences, and his penchant for the sly, saving bargain, he was typical of a Middle Eastern political culture that was to be blown away by the politics of zeal, with ruinous results for the Arab world in the Palestine war and its aftermath.

  The end of the war brought no respite from the endemic inter-Arab rivalries. Unable to close ranks in the face of the bitter consequences of defeat, the Arabs indulged in mutual recrimination and the search for scapegoats, which further weakened their position in the diplomatic negotiations that followed the end of hostilities. Abdullah was singled out for the most vituperative attacks because he had accepted partition, because he was willing to trade on Palestinian rights and because he was widely suspected of being in cahoots with the Jews against his Arab kinsmen. Though he had done well out of the war in terms of territory, Abdullah was thus doomed to spend the closing years of his reign in bitter conflict with his fellow Arabs. In Palestine he met his triumph and his nemesis.

  Undeterred by the hostile propaganda and the shrill charges of treason levelled against him, Abdullah pressed on with the incorporation of the West Bank into his realm. ‘Union’ between the two banks of the Jordan was formally proclaimed in April 1950. The Palestinians for the most part resigned themselves to annexation by Jordan, if only to avert the threat of being overrun by the Israeli Army. They were so demoralized, divided and helpless that the idea of an independent Palestinian state was no more than a pipe-dream, and the union of the two banks of Jordan was the most sensible course of action open to them. Yet Abdullah’s claim to the West Bank was rejected by all the other members of the Arab League. It was recognized officially only by Britain and Pakistan, and privately by Israel.

  Abdullah wanted to secure his enlarged kingdom by concluding a peace settlement with Israel, and for a while he pursued both aims simultaneously. His negotiations for an overall settlement with Israel were protracted and tortuous, but they appeared to be on the verge of a dramatic breakthrough in February 1950 when the ‘Draft Agreement between Israel and Jordan’ was initialled. At this point Abdullah realistically estimated that he could not simultaneously defy the Arab League on both the peace talks and the annexation, so he suspended the talks with Israel in order to go forward with the union of the two banks. The suspension was meant to be temporary, but the attempt to sign a peace treaty, though subsequently renewed, never regained its momentum. In retrospect it is clear that the suspension of the talks constituted a massive and irreversible defeat in Abdullah’s quest for peace, marking the end of serious Arab–Israeli peace negotiations until Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Abdullah himself continued his talks with the Israelis almost literally until his dying day.

  Two principal reasons account for the failure of the peace negotiations: Israel’s strength and Abdullah’s weakness. Abdullah displayed considerable courage in swimming against the powerful current of Arab hostility towards the State of Israel. The Israelis unquestionably wanted a settlement with Abdullah and even offered him an outlet to the Mediterranean with a narrow corridor, 50–100 metres wide, under Jordanian sovereignty, as well as various economic concessions. But this was not enough. The king needed to recover sufficient lost territory to justify the making of peace with Israel in the eyes of the Arab world. The Israelis felt that a corridor of the width he required would jeopardize their security. They were not prepared to relinquish any significant area of Palestine or to allow the return of the Palestinian refugees in order to attain peace. They wanted peace, but as the victors they were under no pressure to pay the price for it.

  David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was a striking example of t
hese contradictory impulses. Peace with the Arabs was something he desired, but it was not an urgent need or a priority. In an interview with Kenneth Bilby, the correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, Ben-Gurion succinctly summed up his contradictory position: ‘I am prepared to get up in the middle of the night in order to sign a peace agreement – but I am not in a hurry and I can wait ten years. We are under no pressure whatsoever.’33 Ben-Gurion had especially serious doubts about the desirability of a final peace settlement with Jordan. He gave several reasons. First, Jordan was not a natural or stable political entity but a regime based on one man who could die any minute and who was entirely dependent on Britain. Second, a political settlement with Jordan was liable to get in the way of a settlement with Egypt, the most important of the Arab states. Third, an accord with Abdullah without peace with Egypt could not end Israel’s isolation in Asia, Africa and Europe. Fourth, such an accord would reinforce Britain’s hold in the surrounding area. Fifth, Ben-Gurion did not want to commit himself to the existing border with Jordan, which he called ‘ridiculous’. In other words, he wanted to leave open the possibility of territorial expansion at Jordan’s expense.34 This lack of commitment to a political settlement with Jordan was a major factor in the failure of the talks.

  The other principal reason for the failure of the peace talks was Abdullah’s weakness, or what the Israeli Arabists termed ‘the sinking of Abdullah’s regime’. By adding the West Bank and its inhabitants to his kingdom, Abdullah helped to unleash forces that ended up eroding his previously absolute personal rule. In the new political constellation created by the union, he could no longer lay down the law in the arbitrary fashion to which he was accustomed but had to take account of public opinion, of the feelings of his Palestinian subjects, of parliament and above all of the growing opposition among his own ministers to his policy of accommodation with Israel. The anti-peace faction in the Jordanian government, bolstered by the popular anti-Israeli groundswell and pan-Arab opposition to negotiations with Israel, ultimately prevailed. Although the king’s personal commitment to peace was unaffected by the new setting, his ability to give practical expression to it was seriously diminished.