Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Egypt’s attitude towards us was another problem, especially given the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser as the leader of the Arab world. Jordan was placed in the position of the conspirator or the betrayer, and this was the perpetual thrust of the Egyptian propaganda machine. So that undermined even further the situation within Jordan itself. The Palestinians looked towards Egypt as the major power in the area and treated whatever was said there as the gospel truth. The Israeli raids worsened the situation in Jordan. They showed us as being incompetent and unable to defend our territory. And the Israeli attacks continued, although we had done everything that we could to prevent infiltration and to prevent access to Israel.

  So this was the atmosphere in which I lived my first years, plus the loss of my grandfather, which was another factor. I knew that he had tried his best for peace and that he had not achieved it. But I did not have any details. When I assumed responsibility, I looked for papers to do with my grandfather’s reign, but unfortunately no documents were found. So I didn’t have any idea as to what exactly had happened. But gradually there was more and more of a feeling that, for whatever reason, we had a neighbour, a people who were close to us historically, whom circumstances in the world had forced into our region. The dilemma was how to avoid mutual destruction and how to find a way of living together once again and not to continue to pay the high price, which was not fair on either side. That was in fact what went on in my mind at that time, apart from thoughts on how to strengthen my country.16

  Hussein’s chief military adviser, Glubb Pasha, had been doing everything in his power to curb infiltration into Israel, to eschew violence and to cooperate with the Israeli authorities in maintaining security along the common border. Glubb’s constant refrain to anyone who would listen was that the Arab Legion was doing its level best to maintain a peaceful border with Israel. Israel’s response was that the Jordanian authorities were aiding and abetting border violations, and that they alone must be held responsible for the progressive breakdown of the armistice regime. These charges were contradicted not simply by Glubb’s declarations but by the constructive and cooperative attitude displayed by all the Jordanian representatives within the Jordanian–Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) in dealing with the problems that kept cropping up. The Mixed Armistice Commission was established after the conclusion of the armistice agreement in 1949. It consisted of Jordanian and Israeli military representatives and a UN chairman whose task was to deal with all aspects of border security.

  Secret Jordanian military documents captured by the Israeli Army during the June War of 1967 have proved conclusively that Glubb’s version of Jordanian policy was correct and that the Israeli version was utterly false. They reveal strenuous efforts on the part of the Jordanian civilian and military authorities in general and on the part of Glubb in particular to prevent civilians from crossing the line. For example, a document of 2 July 1952 shows that Glubb attended a meeting with district commanders that was devoted to the problem of infiltration. He estimated that if they adopted strict measures they should be able to prevent 85 per cent of the incidents from taking place. He urged them to make greater efforts, show more vigilance and monitor more closely the behaviour of the police chiefs in their district. Glubb gave three reasons for this policy. First and foremost, curbing infiltration was necessary for Jordan’s sake, not for Israel’s sake. Second, the Jews gained

  much more from confiscation in the Arab areas than the infiltrators gained from stealing from the Jewish area. Third, there was real fear of revenge being exacted by Jewish units inside Jordan.17 This document and numerous others like it demonstrate beyond any doubt the high priority given to the border problem at the highest levels of the Jordanian government and armed forces.

  The Israeli policy of military retaliation against West Bank villages continued despite all the messages and signals coming from the Jordanian side. The largest and most notorious of these raids was directed against the village of Qibya on the night of 14–15 October 1953. The attack followed the murder of an Israeli mother and her two children by infiltrators who had crossed the armistice line near Qibya. At the meeting of the MAC on 15 October the Jordanian representative denounced the murder, promised full cooperation in tracking down the perpetrators and conveyed Glubb’s request to Israel to refrain from retaliation. The request was ignored and swift retribution followed.

  The attack on Qibya was carried out by Unit 101, a small commando unit designed to give a sharp edge to the policy of reprisals and com-mandedby an unusually aggressive, ambitious and devious young major, Ariel (‘Arik’) Sharon. On this, as on many subsequent occasions, Sharon exceeded his orders. The village was reduced to a pile of rubble: 45 houses were blown up, the village school was destroyed and 69 civilians, two thirds of whom were women and children, were killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses. The UN observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: ‘One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’18 Glubb was appalled to learn that the Israeli soldiers had fired at anyone who attempted to leave their house and that they threw incendiary bombs as well before withdrawing.19

  The principal perpetrator of the massacre, however, remained unrepentant. Sharon was well pleased with his handiwork. He thought the operation did a power of good to IDF morale, and in his memoirs he claimed that David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister and minister of defence, even congratulated him on this operation. Ben-Gurion, according to Sharon, said to him that what mattered was not what was said about Qibya around the world but its impact in their region: ‘This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’20 Not all Israelis shared Ben-Gurion’s positive verdict on the murdering of innocent civilians in their sleep. In some quarters in the IDF Sharon became known as ‘the murderer of Qibya’.

  At a cabinet meeting on 18 October, Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, who had been horrified by the scale and brutality of the operation, proposed an official statement expressing regret about the action and its consequences. Ben-Gurion was against admitting that the IDF had carried out the action and proposed issuing a statement to say that it was the irate Israeli villagers who had taken the law into their own hands. The majority of the ministers supported Ben-Gurion, and it was decided that he should draft the statement. In a radio broadcast the following day Ben-Gurion gave the official version. He denied any IDF involvement; he placed responsibility for the action on the villagers, who were said to have been provoked beyond endurance; and he expressed the government’s regret that innocent people had been killed.21 This was to be one of Ben-Gurion’s most blatant lies for what he saw as the good of his country.

  The massacre unleashed a storm of international protest against Israel. Sending regular armed forces across an international border, without the intention of triggering a full-scale war, was a tactic that at the time distinguished Israel from all other countries; no other state acted in this way. Disturbing though this was, the world was even more shocked by the fact that soldiers murdered civilians in cold blood. The Israeli claim that the infiltrators were sponsored by the Arab Legion was utterly baseless. When in January 1954 Arye Eilan, an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, asked Yehoshafat Harkabi, the deputy director of military intelligence, for some clear documentary proof of the Arab Legion’s complicity, Harkabi answered that ‘no proof could be given because no proof existed.’ Harkabi added that, having personally made a detailed study of the subject, he had arrived at the conclusion that ‘Jordanians and especially the Legion were doing their best to prevent infiltration, which was a natural, decentralized and sporadic movement.’ To this plainly stated message Eilan reacted by insisting that, whatever the truth of the matter, as Israel’s leaders had repeatedly gone on record asserting Jord
anian official complicity, Israeli spokesmen could not but continue to press the same point. As he put it, ‘if Jordanian complicity is a lie, we have to keep on lying. If there are no proofs, we have to fabricate them.’22 Israeli brutality was thus fully matched by Israeli mendacity.

  The Qibya raid triggered serious civilian unrest inside Jordan and provoked street demonstrations on both the East and the West banks. There was a public explosion of anger at the government for its failure to protect the civilian population in the border area and to repel Israeli aggression. There were also manifestations of hostility towards Britain, whose reliability as an ally was loudly called into question. Opposition parties went on the offensive in parliament, with one group of deputies issuing calls to court martial Glubb, to dismiss the army’s entire British officer corps and to tear up the Anglo-Jordanian defence treaty. One charge against the British officers was that they failed to dispatch an Arab Legion unit posted near by to the rescue of Qibya. Another was that they kept the legion short of ammunition.

  Hussein was also dissatisfied with the British officers’ performance. His source of information was Natheer al-Rasheed, a young man from the town of Salt and a member of the Movement of Free Jordanian Officers. At the time of the attack on Qibya, Rasheed was commanding an anti-tank unit on the West Bank. His unit indeed did not have adequate stocks of ammunition, and Rasheed did not think much of the British plans for the defence of the border area. Rasheed contacted the king, who received him in the royal palace, along with one of his ADCs, to hear what he had to say. The following day Hussein went to the army headquarters to call on Glubb. The officer in charge of army ammunition was at the meeting. This officer, who was also from Salt, told Rasheed that the king gave Glubb ‘a very hard time’ over the amount of ammunition supplied by Britain to the army.23 The British commander in the West Bank and the local battalion commander were dismissed immediately after the meeting.

  The consequences of the Qibya massacre reflected the growth of nationalism in Jordan. Fawzi Mulki distanced himself from Britain and moved closer to the Arab states. He underlined the gravity of the Israeli threat to Jordan to the Political Committee of the Arab League, which met in Amman on 21 October and responded by passing a series of resolutions to rebuild Qibya at the Arab League’s expense, to supply arms and ammunition to the border villages, and to make a contribution of £2 million to the Jordanian National Guard. These commitments were not wholly fulfilled, but by creating the illusion of an ‘Arab option’, they added weight to the opposition’s case for cutting off all connections with the British and thereby increased the pressure on Hussein to do so.24

  Qibya was the first, indirect encounter between Hussein and Sharon. It was followed by many more, both direct and indirect, none of them amicable. It was also a landmark in the making of the king. After Qibya, Hussein became more a prime mover than an onlooker on the political stage. He began to inject himself more and more forcefully into the affairs of state, to meet alone with foreign diplomats and to move beyond the expression of opinions to the issuing of orders to his ministers. This more assertive style reflected growing personal self-confidence on the one hand and disillusion with parliamentary democracy on the other. Hussein later suggested that this early political experiment failed because he and Mulki tried to move too quickly. But it was not at all clear how Hussein himself envisioned the development of Jordanian institutions.25 Mulki was not a reliable instrument. Under his ministry ‘liberty turned into licence’.26 He was unable to control the press, parliament or even his own ministers. In May 1954 Hussein decided to dismiss him. As one scholar has observed, ‘That the protégé would finally sack the mentor was an important turning-point in Hussein’s own political development.’27 By sacking Mulki, Hussein also put an end to the liberal experiment and reverted to the older style of Hashemite autocracy.

  4

  The Baghdad Pact Fiasco

  The hiring and firing of prime ministers was a habit that Hussein acquired early on in his reign. On becoming king he announced his opposition to frequent changes of government but his adherence to this principle was short-lived. Fawzi Mulki lasted only a year in power, from May 1953 to May 1954. His replacement, Tawfiq Abul Huda, also lasted a year, from May 1954 until May 1955. Thereafter the pace of change quickened, with three further cabinet reshuffles before the end of the year. Frequent changes of prime minister became a permanent feature of Hussein’s reign. The choice of an individual to form a government was usually connected with a policy that the king wanted to pursue at the time. Thus, if the king wanted to promote better relations with Iraq, he would choose a candidate with pro-Iraqi credentials. Prime ministers were also used to serve a second purpose, that of ‘shock absorbers’. Dumping a prime minister was a way of dissociating the king from a policy that had become unpopular and of appeasing the public. Practice made the king more adept at playing this game. If there was a guiding principle, it was to protect the interests of the Hashemite dynasty.

  Domestic politics were closely connected with regional politics. Everything in the Arab world was judged by the touchstone of Palestine and Israel, and it is on this that Jordan, or rather the Hashemite dynasty, was regarded with the greatest suspicion. The Hashemites were still seen as Britain’s clients, planted in Jordan to divide the Arab world and to cooperate with the Zionists against the Palestinians. Abdullah was denounced as a traitor to the Arab cause and as a collaborator with the Jews. It was widely believed that the Hashemite family had abandoned the struggle for Palestine and that it might be willing to recognize the State of Israel in return for control over the territory to the east of Israel. This was the prevalent view in the Arab world among the intellectuals as well as the masses. Jordan’s efforts to rehabilitate the Palestinian refugees did nothing to allay these fears. Public opinion in the Arab world sided with the Palestinians in Jordan against the regime. Consequently, Hashemites were thrown on the defensive. What is more, because of the centrality of the Palestine question in Arab public discourse, the entire Jordanian political system became susceptible to propaganda and pressures from its neighbouring Arab states.

  The year 1955 was a crucial one in the history of Jordan and of the Arab world. It was the year of the Baghdad Pact, a Western attempt to organize the Middle East into a defensive alliance to block Soviet advances. Jordan became the cockpit of two cold wars that were going on simultaneously: the global cold war between East and West, and the regional cold war between President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and his rivals.

  The Baghdad Pact was the unofficial name for the defence treaty concluded between Iraq and Turkey on 24 February 1955. It had its origins in Western fears of Soviet aggression and was part of a global strategy of containment. It had been preceded by an agreement between Turkey and Pakistan, and by bilateral military aid agreements between the USA and these three countries. Britain, Pakistan and Iran joined the pact in 1955. America was expected to join but it changed its mind, leaving Britain in the lurch. Although America participated in a number of committees and provided most of the funding, it did not formally join the pact. The upshot was a rather odd organization that ended by dividing the Arab world. Basically, the pact pledged military aid in the event of communist aggression against a fellow member, but the organization had little military power, and, in any case, only two of its members bordered on the Soviet Union. For most of them the main incentive for joining was to curry favour with Britain and the United States. With Iraq as the only Arab member, the organization could not boast of a strong link to the Arab world. To remedy this deficiency, all the existing members embarked on a drive to recruit more Arab members. Jordan was a prime target both because of its close links with Britain and its dynastic links with Iraq.

  Nuri as-Said, Iraq’s perennial prime minister, argued forcefully for Arab participation in the Western-sponsored Pact of Mutual Cooperation. He was a staunch friend of Britain and an equally staunch enemy of the Soviet Union. He viewed Zionism and communism as serious threats to th
e security of Iraq and the entire Arab world. But, like the rest of the Iraqi ruling elite, he regarded the Soviet threat as the greater and more immediate one. He ruled out Iraqi collaboration with the Soviets for fear that it would end in complete subordination to the Kremlin. Collaboration with the West, by contrast, was presented by Said as natural and in line with the covenant of the Arab League, provided agreement could be reached on the Suez base and Palestine issues.1 For Said the region’s progress and destiny lay in close alliance with the West.

  Gamal Abdel Nasser was the leading proponent of a purely Arab collective security scheme under the Arab League. For him, the real threat to the security of Egypt and the Arab world lay in Israel, not in the faraway Soviet Union. In world politics he preferred the Arab world to pursue, under Egypt’s leadership, an independent, non-aligned policy between the Western and the Eastern blocs. When the Baghdad Pact was announced, Nasser regarded it as a conspiracy between Britain and Iraq, and as a betrayal of Arab interests by the Iraqi premier. Nasser immediately denounced the pact for introducing great power rivalries into the Middle East, dividing and weakening the Arabs, and threatening to encircle Egypt. It was, Nasser felt, a Western device designed to perpetuate colonial control over the Arab world just as the Arab world was asserting its independence and autonomy. On both the ideological and the political planes, the pact thus represented a challenge to Nasser’s bid for Egyptian hegemony in the Arab world. He therefore unleashed a violent propaganda campaign over the airwaves against Iraq and Nuri as-Said. The Egyptian radio station Sawt al-Arab, ‘The Voice of the Arabs’, relentlessly pilloried Said as a traitor to the Arab cause and as the cat’s-paw of Western imperialism. The war of words between Cairo and Baghdad went on for a few weeks and then died down.