Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Not surprisingly, Hussein wanted to put his failed marriage behind him and move on. In his memoirs, he dwelt very briefly on this chapter in his life. His account consists of two terse and exceedingly uninformative paragraphs:

  On 19 April 1955, I was married to Sharifa Dina Abdul Hamed, a distant cousin and a member of the Hashemite dynasty, who lived in Cairo. She was a highly intelligent woman with an MA degree at Cambridge, and a few years my senior. At first I was very hopeful that I could build a happy family life around this marriage, and when our baby daughter Alia was born I was overjoyed.

  I have always wanted to share the fundamental happiness of the life of an ordinary man, but it was not to be – not then. The marriage was a failure. It was just one of those things that did not work out, despite all efforts; it was far better, and only fair to both of us, to end it. It was a sad and difficult period. There have been many criticisms about the divorce, but the basic principle of life is to live in the best way one can, honestly, regardless of people’s opinions. It is better to meet such a crisis with courage and frankness. Eighteen months after our marriage we separated, and my ex-wife left for Cairo.34

  In reality, Hussein’s handling of the crisis in his first marriage displayed neither courage nor frankness, while his account of the divorce is highly economical with the truth. The official version, repeated by several of Hussein’s British biographers, is that Dina went on holiday to Egypt in the autumn of 1956, leaving her baby daughter behind her, and that she did not return. In fact, she went to visit her father, who had been injured in a car accident, and she was not allowed to return. What the official version does not say is that Dina was not permitted to see her daughter, with one brief exception, for six years after the failure of the marriage.

  Dina did not tell her side of the story until many years later and to the most improbable of chroniclers: two Israeli journalists, a husband and a wife. In 1986 Aharon and Amalia Barnea published in Hebrew a book that came out three years later in English under the title Mine Enemy: The Moving, Hopeful Friendship of Two Couples – Israeli and Arab.35 The authors were the Israeli couple while the Arab couple were Dina and her second husband, Salah Ta’amari, a high-ranking member of the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a lieutenant-colonel in the PLO’s armed forces. Dina had always felt deep sympathy for the long-suffering Palestinian people, and as the short-lived queen of Jordan she developed a special affinity with the refugees among them. The Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank set in motion a second wave of refugees. The PLO guerrilla forces relocated to the East Bank of the Jordan to resume the armed struggle against Israel. Dina, who was then living in London, was outspoken in her support for the Palestinian cause. She opened a boutique to sell Palestinian handicrafts, the proceeds of which went to Fatah. At a reception for a visiting Fatah delegation in the summer of 1968 Dina met Salah Ta’amari, and two years later they got married.

  Salah Ta’amari was twelve years younger than Dina. He was born in 1942 in Bethlehem, on what became the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 1955, when he was thirteen, Ta’amari took part in a demonstration in Bethlehem against Jordan’s entry into the Baghdad Pact. He remembered well the spectacle of Jordanian soldiers opening fire on the demonstrators and killing four. Afterwards, the schools were closed for almost a year, increasing local resentment against the regime. Ta’amari studied at Ein Shams University in Cairo for a degree in English literature, and he did an MA thesis on T. S. Eliot. He also read widely about Jewish history, the Holocaust, Zionism and the State of Israel. His aim was to go back to Bethlehem to become a schoolteacher. But when the PLO was formed in 1964 he joined Fatah and after the June War he could not go back. From 1967 he rose fast in the Fatah chain of command, to become coordinator of raids from the East Bank into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. During the confrontation between the Jordanian regime and the Palestinian guerrillas in September 1970, Dina’s first and second husbands therefore fought on opposite sides. Having been defeated in Jordan, the guerrilla organizations regrouped in southern Lebanon to resume the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, and Ta’amari was captured and taken prisoner. He was the highest-ranking Fatah commander to fall into Israel’s hands. Aharon Barnea went to interview him for a radio programme.

  This was the first of a series of meetings that grew into a friendship between the two men. As a special concession, the prisoner was allowed to pay a visit to Aharon Barnea at his home. Barnea was also instrumental in arranging a clandestine, conjugal visit for Dina with her husband in a beachfront hotel. Thus was born the unusual friendship between the two couples that cut across all the regional battle lines. The book that the Barneas wrote has only one chapter about Dina’s first marriage, but it is a highly revealing one. Because the account of the marriage and its disintegration comes to us second-hand, its accuracy cannot be guaranteed, but it certainly has the ring of authenticity.

  The most interesting part of Dina’s account relates to the break-up of her marriage to Hussein. For a brief period following the birth of Alia, they succeeded in overcoming their troubles. But the rumours against her and the court intrigues persisted, until the king succumbed to the pressures on him. In the autumn of 1956, when Dina went to her father’s bedside, she left six-month-old Alia in the care of Mrs Craig, the British nanny, because Hussein refused to let her take the baby with her. When she called Hussein to make the arrangements for her return, she was in for a shock. He said, ‘I think you had better stay where you are, until the situation becomes more propitious.’ Dina’s increasingly desperate pleas to Hussein to allow her to be reunited with her daughter all fell on deaf ears. When Alia was about nine months old, Hussein allegedly said to Dina, ‘If you think you and my enemies can use my daughter as a weapon against me, you are mistaken.’ He issued orders banning all communication between the queen and the court. In August 1957 Hussein sent word to Dina through the Jordanian ambassador to Cairo: as a twenty-eighth birthday present she would be allowed to see Alia but only on neutral territory and under strict supervision. The meeting took place in a hotel in Istanbul. The party from Amman included Alia, Mrs Craig, several servants, three Circasssian bodyguards and Queen Zain. Dina spent twenty-four hours with her daughter, and then a messenger from Queen Zain came to tell her that her time was up. Hussein subsequently charged his ambassador to Cairo with the mission of serving Dina the divorce papers.

  Dina had to wait nearly five years to see her daughter again. It was not until Hussein got married for a second time, to the English girl who became Princess Muna, that the unbelievably cruel royal ban was lifted. It was Muna who persuaded Hussein to change his mind. Dina was invited to stay at the palace to see her daughter and to begin a series of regular meetings with her. Dina had had hardly any contact with Hussein after her visit to Amman, but his conscience must have troubled him. One day, many years after the reunion, he got word that Dina was seriously ill in a London hospital. He asked to see her but she refused. The next morning, as she was being wheeled to the operating theatre, her carers diverted her bed to a small room. Her former husband was standing there. He uttered one sentence: ‘I am sorry.’ She felt that she had no choice but to forgive him.36

  Hussein’s belated apology to his first wife indicates, above all, how much he had learned in the intervening period. One should therefore not be too harsh in judging his handling of either the political crisis or his private life in 1955. At that time he was barely twenty years old. He made serious mistakes, but they were the result of youth and inexperience in the face of unprecedented political upheavals. Political immaturity was more than matched by emotional immaturity: a callow youth with a passion for dancing, he married a woman who was not just older but considerably more mature, sophisticated and politically progressive than himself. He simply could not handle the relationship, and he behaved abominably. But he was not inherently cruel or callous. He was simply
at the bottom of a steep learning curve.

  5

  The Dismissal of Glubb

  The most spectacular event in Anglo-Jordanian relations in 1956 was the dismissal by royal edict of John Bagot Glubb from his position as commander-in-chief of the Arab Legion. Britain’s pressure on Jordan to join the Baghdad Pact unleashed a powerful popular current of anti-British feelings that culminated in removal of the renowned British general. Glubb was an employee of the Jordanian government, and to this extent his dismissal was an internal Jordanian affair. But most Jordanians saw him as a British proconsul in Amman; most foreigners saw him as the real power behind the throne; and the Arab world saw him as the symbol of foreign control over the political and economic life of Jordan. Egypt and Syria, in particular, used Glubb’s exalted position to taunt Jordan with being a British colony while they were free. By sacking Glubb, Hussein made a dramatic assertion, at the practical as well as the symbolic level, of his country’s independence.

  Personal relations between Hussein and Glubb had never been close or cordial. The gap in age between them was one problem. To the 21-year-old king, the Englishman, who was now only a month off sixty, smacked too much of the Victorian era. There were other issues too. In the words of one British observer,

  Hussein remained open to suggestions from the modernists and the reformers: and in particular he was sensitive, as a young king of pride and lofty breeding, to the insinuation that he was no more than a British toy, dancing to the batons of Glubb Pasha and the Foreign Office. It was obvious that Glubb was not the political master of Jordan, and had no pretensions to Kirkbride’s role of grey eminence. His profession was soldiering, his responsibility was security, and on political matters he was not even consulted, let alone obeyed. Hussein had a skulking suspicion, though, that some other canards about Glubb were true: that he had in fact so hampered the Legion in Palestine that the war was lost; that he was outdated or defeatist in his thinking… Hussein was understandably overawed by Glubb, a soldier of long experience from his grandfather’s generation, from whom he was separated by a great gulf of age and ingrained respect. As a young man of dashing tastes, he no doubt thought Glubb an old fuddy-duddy slow-coach, better at defence than offence. He was also often in the company of young, ambitious and politically conscious… Jordanian officers, jealous of British control of their Army, and covetous of senior commands; and he began to see that while in Jordanian eyes the Legion was an instrument of war against Israel, to the British War Office it was part of the West’s defences against Russia. By 1955 Hussein had fostered a profound resentment of Glubb’s dominating position, both commander and creator of the modern Arab Legion. His throne depended upon the surety of the Army, and it was galling to be dependent upon the skills of an elderly foreigner.1

  The British failed to see any of this. During a visit to London in October 1955 Hussein tried to alert Foreign Office officials to the need to make changes in the command of the Arab Legion, but they did not take him seriously. Had they done so, they might have avoided the explosion that took place four months later.2 Hussein’s broad political reason for dismissing Glubb stemmed from his fear that if he did not place himself at the head of the nationalist movement, he would be overwhelmed by it.3 But Hussein and Glubb also disagreed on two fundamental issues: the role of Arab officers in the Arab Legion and defence strategy. The Arab Legion was the single strongest national institution in Jordan, yet it was led by senior officers who could not ignore their loyalty to Britain. Hussein wanted to see a more rapid transfer of command and responsibility in the legion from British to Arab officers. Glubb dragged his feet. After months of patient negotiations, the British authorities finally agreed to submit a plan of Arabization that ‘in due course’ would give more opportunities to Jordanian officers. Excitement at this minor victory turned into exasperation, however, when Hussein was informed that this meant that the Royal Engineers of the Arab Legion would have an Arab commander in 1985. This answer rankled with Hussein, especially as the question of when an Arab might command the armed forces of Jordan was not even mentioned.

  The second issue on which the two men disagreed concerned the defence of the West Bank in the event of a war with Israel. Glubb proposed a conservative and cautious strategy of concentrating Jordan’s slim forces on the defence of strategic high points and pulling them back at the outset of an attack from the West Bank to the East Bank. Hussein rejected this plan in favour of a more forward strategy. He argued that they should start their defence right on the 400-mile frontier and accept death with honour if they could not hold it. To his way of thinking, a purely defensive strategy could not possibly deter an enemy attack, though an offensive strategy might.

  Behind these specific disagreements, wrote Hussein, lay the ghost of his grandfather. From his grandfather he had learned that all Arab peoples must be masters of their own affairs.4 Here, however, the grandfather received more credit than he deserved. Although Abdullah was a proponent of Arab independence in theory, he was a client of Britain in practice. Whereas the idea of sacking Glubb would have been unthinkable to him, Hussein not only conceived it but carried it out. On the other hand, Hussein hardly mentioned the encouragement and support that he received from the Jordanian Free Officers to embark on this audacious undertaking. After all, his agenda was their agenda: to Arabize the Arab Legion. His early contacts with them went back to his days as a cadet at Sandhurst. One of their members, Ali Abu Nuwar, was constantly at the king’s side following his appointment as ADC in November 1955, arguing for the removal of Glubb and a break with Britain. James Morris has painted a vivid portrait of the king and his ADC:

  Hussein was not a very brilliant young man. Sometimes, when he appeared during these anxious months, his face looked old and creased, his eyes were tired, his body was tense and thin, and he seemed the very embodiment of a struggling conscience, of a man trying hard to do his best. Ali Abu Nuwar, on the other hand, was almost a parody of the evil counsellor: a saturnine, beak-nosed Iago, his eyebrows bushy, his moustache sneaky, his grin gleaming but forced, the sort of face you sometimes see, peering through silken draperies, in the shaded backgrounds of Japanese prints. This unsavoury partnership presently sparked an explosion.5

  While Abu Nuwar was influential, a more important link between Hussein and the Free Officers was his cousin and childhood friend Zaid bin Shaker. During this period, Shaker was Hussein’s closest confidant. This intimate relationship provoked jealousy on the part of Queen Zain and her brother Sharif Nasser. They tried to discredit Zaid by suggesting that he was a Ba’thist and by questioning his loyalty to the monarchy. But Zaid was completely devoted to the king and shared his aspirations for the country and for the Arab Legion.6 The decision to dismiss Glubb belonged to the king alone, but it was made against a background of rising tension between the British commander-in-chief and the young nationalist officers. Things came to a head on 28 February 1956 when Hussein was presented by the prime minister with papers containing the names of those officers whom Glubb wanted dismissed from the army. Hussein was shocked: he knew and respected some of the officers on the list. The only fault of these men, as far as he could see, was that they were nationalistic and ambitious. Hussein threw the papers on the table. ‘Tell Glubb Pasha I refuse to sign them,’ he said angrily.7

  In the evening of that day, a crucial meeting took place in Shaker’s house; present were the king and five of the Free Officers, led by Maher Abu Shahut and Mahmud Ma’ayta. There the king disclosed for the first time his plan to get rid of Glubb. Hussein asked the officers whether they were ready to move, and they replied without any hesitation that they were. Hussein then asked them whether they were sure they could pull it off, and again they replied positively, encouraging him to proceed.8 At the end of the meeting Hussein gave the order to execute ‘Operation Dunlop’. Speed and secrecy were of the essence. Three people in particular, Hussein instructed Shaker, had to be kept in ignorance. One was Bahjat Talhouni, the chief of the royal court, who,
despite his poor English, was a client of the British and therefore likely to tip them off. Another was Queen Zain, who was expected to interfere with the plan because she saw Glubb and the British as the guarantors of the Hashemite throne. The third was Sharif Nasser, who was certain to tell the British and to try to foil the plot.9

  Hussein also felt that Operation Dunlop had to be executed swiftly and decisively, so as to deny Glubb’s allies the chance to rally to his support. The Arab Legion was divided into Bedouin regiments, recruited from the rural areas, and the Haderi regiments, recruited mostly from the urban areas. Glubb favoured the Bedouins because he thought they made better soldiers and were less interested in politics. He did a great deal to educate and train these Bedouin recruits and to help their families, and his bodyguard consisted of Bedouins from the areas bordering on Iraq and Saudi Arabia. They were fiercely loyal to him personally, and there was a real risk that they might try to stage a counter-coup to restore him. Various precautions were taken to ensure that this did not happen. Glubb’s house was surrounded with armoured cars, his telephone lines were cut, and loyal troops were stationed on the way to the airport. The British officers were confined to their quarters, and their telephone lines were also severed.