Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Prince Muhammad and His late Majesty had gone through a lot together as children. Prince Hassan and I were that much younger. The two elder brothers shared a lot of childhood experiences, memories and difficult times. They always maintained a very close relationship. He was also very protective of Prince Muhammad, accepted him and supported him in whatever he wanted to do. He was much more flexible with him than he was with anybody else. Prince Muhammad was totally devoted to him.

  Princess Basma found it astonishing that, despite all the pressures on Hussein in the early years of his reign, he always managed to stay in such close touch with his family and to fulfil his filial duties:

  He always had time. And when he came to my mother’s house it was a wonderful relationship. His ties with her were extremely special. They were based on a lot of mutual respect. He was her eldest son and obviously she had huge concerns, worries and anxieties as a mother. But at the same time, the reflection to us was that while he was her son, he was also head of the family and king. So, whereas his love for her was very obvious and clear, it was mutually reciprocated by a lot of dignity and respect in the way she responded to him. Things were very simple, traditional but informal. All of us knew that when he was at home with his mother and younger siblings, it was family. He could probably really relax and be himself.2

  As a young king Hussein had to work with men who were much older than himself, such as Abul Huda, Glubb and Kirkbride. Hussein did, however, form around him a small circle of friends and confidants who were closer to him in age and in outlook. Two of these friends were also officers in the Arab Legion. Perhaps the most influential was Hussein’s maternal uncle, Sharif Nasser bin Jamil, a captain in the Arab Legion who became his ADC. Sharif Nasser’s father, Sharif Jamil, was an Iraqi Hashemite. His sister Zain, who was much older than he was and very indulgent towards him, brought him over to Jordan during the crisis of the succession to help her protect her eldest son. Sharif Nasser was a good field officer and a figure of strength in the vulnerable royal family. But he was also a dissolute and corrupt man, and ultimately a destructive force. He used army Land Rovers to smuggle hashish from Syria to Jordan. He was big and burly, with blue eyes and a prodigious strength; often he came across as a bully and a thug. His rivals feared rather than respected him. Despite his hashish smuggling activities, he became firmly ensconced in the palace. Within the inner circle there, Sharif Nasser lobbied against Glubb Pasha and quickly emerged as a strong advocate of a proactive national security policy and of seizing the initiative in regional politics.3

  Another member of the inner circle was Hussein’s cousin and close friend from Victoria College, Sharif Zaid bin Shaker, who was now a lieutenant in the Arab Legion. The three of them, as Hussein later described it, had ‘formed a trio – you could perhaps have described us, by comparison with the more conservative, traditional elements of the family, as being the wild bunch – I mean, what we really most enjoyed was going out, travelling around the country, visiting the armed forces whenever possible, seeing the people as they really were, natural, unaffected.’4

  A third person who exerted considerable influence on the impressionable young monarch was Major Ali Abu Nuwar. Born in Salt to a Circassian mother, he was commissioned as an artillery officer in 1946 and served as a lieutenant in the First Arab–Israeli War in 1948. After the war he was sent for training to Britain’s staff college at Camberley. Hussein’s relationship with Ali Abu Nuwar is difficult to reconstruct but essential for understanding some of the most important episodes of the mid 1950s. The Arab defeat in the Palestine war discredited the old order and radicalized army officers, leading to the coup by Colonel Husni Za’im in Syria in 1949 and to the Free Officers’ Revolution in Egypt in 1952. The Ba’th Party in Syria expounded a militant Arab nationalist ideology and attracted some supporters in Jordan. These supporters, led by Shahir Abu Shahut and Mahmud Ma’ayta, formed the Secret Organization of Jordanian Officers with the aim of liberating the Jordanian Army from the influence of the British and establishing military unity with Syria. Under the impact of the revolution in Egypt, the still secret organization changed its name to the Movement of Free Jordanian Officers. By the time King Talal’s reign was over, these nationalist officers were a force to be reckoned with.5

  Ali Abu Nuwar was not a founding member of the movement but when approached he completely identified with its aims. On his return to Jordan in 1950, he emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of British control over the Arab Legion. Glubb was generally suspicious of officers from urban areas because, on the whole, they had a higher level of education than officers from the rural areas, and because they were more politically conscious and more receptive to left-wing ideas. Glubb was wedded to the existing order and determined to keep politics out of his little army. During Talal’s reign, Glubb suspected Abu Nuwar of conspiring against the British, so he exiled him to Paris as a military attaché. Hussein first met Abu Nuwar in 1953 during a stop in Paris on his way back to Jordan to succeed his father to the throne. According to Abu Nuwar, Hussein was receptive to his nationalist ideas and to his suggestions for freeing Jordan from British control. In August that year the young king visited London and invited Abu Nuwar and a number of other Jordanian officers to a party held at the embassy in his honour. Although he was an outsider, Abu Nuwar presented himself to Hussein as a senior member of the Free Officers. He also informed Hussein that the aim of the group was to ‘Arabize’ the Jordanian Army. Hussein was impressed and asked to meet some of the other members of the group. After his return to Amman, Hussein repeatedly asked Glubb to transfer Abu Nuwar back to Jordan, but Glubb kept stalling. In the end, Hussein overruled Glubb and appointed Abu Nuwar as a senior ADC in November 1955.6

  From the beginning of his reign Hussein took a close interest in the affairs of the Arab Legion; he got to know some of its radical young officers, and he was attracted to their nationalist agenda. His time for the first two months was almost entirely taken up with the receiving and paying of official visits, followed by a trip to London and a long holiday in Europe. Gradually, he began to make his presence felt in the political arena, expressing opposition, for example, to frequent changes of government. His chief interest, however, remained the armed services, leading him to follow closely all branches of military activity. He learned to fly but submitted to his government’s desire that he should not fly solo.7 Sharif Zaid bin Shaker testified that ‘His Majesty loved the army and the military. His happiest days were those he spent with his army.’ But it was not simply a matter of personal preferences: ‘The underlying conception of Jordan’s security was to make sure that the army is well equipped and well trained.’8

  On social and economic matters Hussein had only half-formed ideas, which had begun to germinate when he attended Victoria College in Egypt. ‘I was impressed in the period when I was a student there’, Hussein later recalled, ‘by the gaps that existed between the people in power and ordinary people. I didn’t like that at all. In fact, it might have steered me towards having more leftist tendencies in terms of the idea of greater sharing and equality amongst human beings. Maybe now when I think back on it, it is really a question of human rights, much more than a political ideology, that I felt was missing then and I think is still missing in many parts of the Arab world.’9

  Hussein’s choice for the first prime minister of his reign reflected these incipient liberal-populist ideas. Three days after ascending the throne, he accepted the resignation of Tawfiq Abul Huda and appointed in his place Dr Fawzi al-Mulki, who had been his friend and confidant while studying at Harrow and at Sandhurst. Aged forty-one, Mulki was Jordan’s first native-born prime minister and a representative of a new breed of politicians. He was born in Irbid to parents who had originally come from Syria, and studied veterinary medicine at the American University of Beirut and at the University of Edinburgh before embarking on a successful career in the diplomatic service of his country. As a student in Britain, Mulki came to admire the democratic
system of government, with its political and civil liberties, the independence of the judiciary and the British model of constitutional monarchy. His plans to introduce liberal reforms and to increase political participation were backed by the king. What Mulki lacked was a power base in Jordan, although this may have commended Mulki to the queen mother. According to one observer, for Zain ‘there was political advantage in having as a premier a relatively weak political outsider who could not easily overwhelm and suffocate her son.’10

  King Hussein’s letter of appointment instructed Mulki to pursue liberal reforms at home and Arab unity abroad. Mulki formed a coalition government that included some of the opposition parties; his style was based on consultation and compromise. But he turned out to be such a weak and ineffectual leader that people joked that there were ten prime ministers and one minister in his cabinet. Despite his weakness, Mulki had some success in implementing a progressive agenda in his first six months in power. He released political prisoners, lifted restrictions on the freedom of the press, revised the defence regulations and passed legislation guaranteeing freedom of speech. He also increased the power of parliament by enabling it to pass a vote of no confidence in the executive by a simple majority instead of by two thirds of the votes cast. Yet the democratic experiment over which he presided was not an unqualified success. Mulki became a victim of the revolution of rising expectations that he himself had helped to unleash. The concessions he made to parliament and the press only whetted their appetite for more.

  The press took advantage of the lifting of censorship to launch virulent attacks on individual members of the royal family and on the Western powers. The communists and the Ba’thists exploited the new climate of freedom to engage in subversive activities, to incite the public against the monarchy and even to call for its overthrow in favour of a republic. New newspapers were started by the opposition groups with the help of funding from the enemies of the Hashemites in the Arab world. The staple diet on which these papers fed their readers consisted of tirades against the Hashemite throne and its imperialist backers. The result was growing political instability that provided the more conservative law-and-order elements in the political establishment with a stick with which to beat the government. As so often in history, the most dangerous moment for an autocratic regime is precisely when it begins to reform itself.

  In foreign affairs Hussein enjoined his prime minister to promote Arab unity. In this respect too Hussein was closer to his father than to his grandfather. Abdullah had been a great proponent of Arab unity, but he tended to equate it with Hashemite hegemony. This contributed to the division of the Arab world into a Hashemite bloc consisting of Jordan and Iraq and an anti-Hashemite bloc led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As we have seen, Abdullah was also a territorial expansionist who dreamed about the reconquest of his ancestral home in the Hijaz and the establishment of Greater Syria. Talal abandoned these ambitions. His foreign policy was aimed at bringing Jordan into line with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria and was thus directed against Britain and Iraq.

  On becoming king, Hussein adopted a policy of keeping on good terms with all the Arab states, while resisting the tendency on the part of the Iraqi government to claim a privileged position in Jordan’s affairs. There was also a marked improvement in Jordanian–British relations following Talal’s abdication. Hussein was Jordan’s first native-born king. To his nephew Talal bin Muhammad this point was crucial: ‘Although he was an Arab, in the good sense of the word, he was also a Jordanian. Jordan was his home. He had no sentimental attachment to the Hijaz. Jordan was the land that he loved, and Jordanians were the people that he loved.’11

  The most difficult problem that Hussein and his government had to deal with – partly domestic, partly foreign and at both levels hellishly complicated – was that of Palestine. Its root cause was the Zionist displacement of the Palestine Arabs, culminating in the Nakbah of 1948. Palestine was lost and, as already mentioned, more than 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. They were dispersed throughout all the neighbouring Arab countries, but 450,000 ended up in Jordan, which did more than any other Arab state to help them resettle and integrate with the rest of society. Self-interest was one of the motives behind this relatively benevolent policy. The refugees in Jordan wanted to preserve their separate Palestinian identity, but this ran counter to Abdullah’s policy of ‘Jordanization’. His expansionist agenda compelled him to extend to the Palestinians normal citizenship rights.12 But the refugees were a great burden on the weak Jordanian economy; it simply did not have the financial resources to cope with a humanitarian tragedy on such a vast scale. As a consequence, the bulk of the displaced Palestinians continued to live in refugee camps in conditions of appalling poverty and misery, which bred political extremism with a deep hatred of Israel and of the Western powers, and constituted an easy recruiting ground for the various pan-Arab, leftist and Islamist parties.13 The Palestinians thus became an important factor in domestic Jordanian politics.

  Another consequence of 1948 was that Palestinian refugees began to cross the armistice lines into what was now Israel. When the armistice agreements were signed, many Palestinians innocently believed that they would be allowed to go back to their homes. Even when their return was blocked by Israel, some persisted in their attempts to cross the lines. Israeli spokesmen claimed that Palestinian infiltration into its territory was aided and abetted by the Arab governments following the defeat of their regular armies on the battlefield; and that it was a form of undeclared guerrilla warfare designed to weaken and even destroy the infant Jewish state. Israel, on the other hand, was portrayed as the innocent victim of Arab provocations and aggression while its own policy of military reprisals was depicted as a legitimate form of self-defence.

  In an important book entitled Israel’s Border Wars Israeli historian Benny Morris has challenged this conventional view at three critical points: the character and causes of infiltration; the attitude of the Arab governments towards this phenomenon; and the motives and consequences of the Israeli response. On the basis of painstaking archival evidence, Morris has concluded that infiltration into Israel was a direct consequence of the displacement and dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians in the course of the Palestine war and that the motives behind it were largely economic and social, rather than political. Many of the infiltrators were Palestinian refugees whose reasons for crossing the border included looking for relatives, returning to their homes, recovering possessions, tending to their fields, collecting their crops and, occasionally, exacting revenge. Some were thieves and smugglers; some were involved in the hashish convoys; and some were nomadic Bedouins, more accustomed to grazing rights than to state borders. There were terrorist actions and politically motivated raids, such as those organized by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the ex-Mufti, and financed by Saudi Arabia, but they did not amount to very much. In the period 1949–56 as a whole, 90 per cent or more of all infiltrations, in Morris’s estimate, were motivated by economic and social concerns.14

  Morris has also shown that the governments of the neighbouring Arab states were opposed to the cross-border forays into Israel for most of the period under discussion. Arab governments were caught on the horns of a dilemma: if they openly intervened to stop infiltration, they risked alienating their own passionately pro-Palestinian publics; if they were seen to condone infiltration, they risked clashes with the Israeli Army and the possible loss of more territory. Each government dealt with this problem in its own way and with varying degrees of success. Jordan had the longest and most complicated border with Israel, with the largest number of civilians on both sides. The upshot was numerous cases of infiltration and an increasingly brutal Israeli policy of military retaliation that took the form of ground raids against villages in the West Bank, beginning in January 1951.

  One of the most serious problems that Hussein had to grapple with after ascending the throne was the tension and violence along Jordan’s border with its aggressive western neighbour. Hussein inheri
ted from his grandfather an attitude of moderation towards the Zionists, but he was also aware that the Palestinians blamed his grandfather for betraying their cause and that this was the reason given for his assassination. Hussein put up a spirited defence of his grandfather in a foreword he wrote for Abdullah’s second autobiographical volume, My Memoirs Completed: ‘Al Takmilah’. He sharply contrasted his grandfather’s realism with the lack of realism of his critics:

  Let me set the record straight, clearly and categorically. No country in the world likes to be partitioned, and Palestine is no exception. King Abdullah… was, in his innermost soul, as opposed to the alienation of any part of Palestine as anyone else. But to him, moral judgement and personal beliefs were an exercise in futility, unless backed by viable and adequate power, in the broad meaning of the term.

  He had perceived the Zionist iceberg and its dimensions, while others had seen only its tip. He makes reference to it in the Takmilah. His tactics and strategy were therefore attuned to circumventing and minimizing the possible consequences of a head-on collision. Others saw only the tip, and their responses were over-confidence, inflexibility and outright complacency.15

  This foreword, however, was written in 1978. It does not reflect any of the doubts and uncertainties that Hussein experienced on assuming responsibility for his country and its problems. In 1996, when I asked him what were his initial impressions and thoughts about Israel when he ascended the throne in 1953, he said:

  My initial thoughts and impressions were ones of not knowing very much of what actually the Israelis and their leadership thought of or had in mind regarding the future of our region. At the same time it was a period of violence. There had apparently been from time to time some incursions over the long ceasefire line. We had the longest line, longer than all the Arab ceasefire lines with Israel put together. And Israel’s responses were extremely severe, extremely devastating, with attacks on villages, on police posts and on civilians along the long ceasefire line. Obviously, I was not very happy with that and it caused us a great deal of difficulty in terms of the internal scene in Jordan.