Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  This was a ludicrously high price to demand for the privilege of using Israel’s airspace. The Americans thought that Ben-Gurion had ideas above his station and politely put him in his place. John Foster Dulles bitterly resented the constant pressure that the Israelis brought to bear on him throughout the long crisis. In his public utterances he was careful not to show his true feelings. But in private Anglo-American exchanges he called Israel ‘this millstone round our necks’.33 The British were equally resentful and even more resistant to Ben-Gurion’s proposal for partnership on a footing of equality. To Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office it seemed that if they went along with this proposal, ‘we should simply be adding another heavy link to the chain hanging round our neck which started with the Balfour Declaration and has been steadily drowning us ever since.’34

  If Western support was damaging to Hussein’s standing in the Arab world, Israeli support was even more so. But the combination of external and internal challenges that he faced left him little choice. Jordan was under siege, its supply lines were severed by its enemies, and serious food and fuel shortages were beginning to develop. Hussein was grateful for Britain’s help and for Israel’s part in facilitating it. The situation in Jordan was becoming more ominous by the day, as he recalled many years later: ‘Suddenly, we found ourselves isolated; our oil tankers were caught up in Iraq and couldn’t come through. The Syrian border was closed. Nasser straddled both Syria and Egypt. The Saudis would not permit overflights or the supply of food… So we were totally cut off and we needed oil and there was only one way: to fly it across Israel into Jordan. We did not have any direct negotiations over that. The British and Americans did and we certainly appreciated it.’35 In his memoirs Hussein recorded with some bitterness that every gallon of fuel had to be flown over the skies of Israel: ‘Where an Arab nation refused, an enemy agreed.’36

  Saudi Arabia’s refusal to help Jordan was a particularly bitter blow. Jordan’s position was precarious because without oil it could not survive. The Americans responded instantly to Hussein’s desperate appeal for help with the offer to fly oil in tanker aircraft from the Gulf across Saudi Arabia to Jordan. The first consignment went through, but at this critical juncture the Saudis changed their minds. This about-turn reflected an internal shift in the balance of power between King Saud and his brother Faisal, who favoured an accommodation with Nasser. Hussein called King Saud and asked him to explain the hostile stand against Jordan. Saud replied lamely that there was nothing he could do because the government had already met and taken this decision. Turning to his chief of the royal court and others who had been listening, Hussein said bitterly, ‘This is probably the first time in history that any government has ever taken any decision in Saudi Arabia, or for that matter, even met!’37

  For the Hashemites in Jordan this was a very trying time. As Hussein’s nephew, Talal bin Muhammad, noted, ‘For us, the Iraqi revolution was the low watermark. We were totally vulnerable. We were completely encircled: Syria and Iraq to the north, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Egypt further afield. Britain had to fly over Israel with our fuel supplies, which was humiliating for us because our so-called Arab brothers would not give us the oil. Our obituary was in the paper every week in anticipation. But through sheer guts a young man was able to pull it off.’38

  The young man was, of course, King Hussein. The grief he felt at the loss of his cousin Faisal seared itself in his mind. Hussein and Faisal had been the best of friends; they were born the same year, and were at Harrow together; their fathers were first cousins and best friends; their mothers were sisters; and they became kings on the same day. Prince Talal once asked his uncle what was the most difficult experience that he had gone through in his life. There were so many things Hussein could have said: the assassination of King Abdullah, the June War and the loss of Jerusalem, the death of his wife Alia in a helicopter crash. But Hussein answered that the worst thing was the loss of his cousin Faisal and the manner in which he and his whole family were murdered. This was the thing that grieved him the most in his lifetime. Hussein told Talal that Faisal was too gentle a person for a country like Iraq, and he reserved most of his anger for Abd al-Ilah. Hussein ‘held Abd al-Ilah entirely responsible for the mishandling of the situation in 1958. He hated him with a passion; he saw him as an oppressor and a bully.’39

  Hussein did not speak much about this period because it was too painful. Nor did he allow himself to wallow in self-pity. The British ambassador, at his first interview with the king and his prime minister on the morning of 18 July, found them in a mood of dour resolution. ‘After all,’ said the king, ‘one can only die once.’40 The death of his cousin was a shattering blow for Hussein but outwardly he struggled to remain calm and composed. In his predicament he convened a press conference on 19 July to tell his countrymen and the world at large where he stood. James Morris, who was at the press conference, gave the following description of Hussein:

  He walked into the conference room of his palace closely surrounded by officers, officials, policemen, security guards, walking quickly and tensely to the head of the table. His face was lined and tired, and moisture glistened in the corners of his eyes. The ministers and officers grouped themselves behind his chair (and who could tell, looking at their dark-eyed meditative faces, which of them was loyal, and which had a subversive pay-packet in his office drawer?). The old Prime Minister, hatchet-faced, sat beside him. The King cleared his throat huskily. ‘I have now had confirmation’, he said slowly, ‘of the murder of my cousin, brother and childhood playmate, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family.’ He paused, his eyes filling, his lip trembling, a muscle working rhythmically in the side of his jaw, and then he said it again, in identical words, but with a voice that was awkwardly thickening. ‘I have now received confirmation of the murder of my cousin, brother and childhood playmate, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family.’ And raising his head from his notes, Hussein added in his strange formal English: ‘They are only the last in a caravan of martyrs.’41

  ‘A caravan of martyrs’ was how the embattled king, looking back over five decades of struggle and violence, saw the progress of his family. ‘On one level of analysis they were the mere satellites of an alien empire, waxing and waning with its fortunes. On another they represented a last stand of authority – religious, social, moral, political – against the advancing forces of disorder. On yet a third they were the mercenaries of a retreating civilization, posted on the walls to do or die. Their tragedy was their aloneness… They were kings in an age of republicanism; Arabs in a century of Arab impotence; Anglophiles in the last days of British supremacy; Moslems among agnostics; traditionalists amid constant change.’42

  Four days after this sad press conference, further details reached the palace of the horrors that had been committed in Baghdad against the supporters of the royal family during the revolution. Two Jordanian ministers, Ibrahim Hashem and Suleiman Toukan, had also been butchered by the blood-thirsty Baghdad mob. Hussein and Rifa’i were badly shaken by the reports of these atrocities. Outside the British Embassy, the virtually unanimous view of foreign observers in Amman was that the monarchy had no chance of surviving. Most Jordanians too thought that their monarchy was doomed. ‘This was the period’, wrote Charles Johnston, ‘when the airlift droned gloomily overhead; when, for lack of anything more encouraging, the Hashemite radio went on broadcasting pipe music all day long; when the anterooms of the Palace (normally the best club in Amman, full of cheerful coffee-drinking place-seekers) were deserted except for a few lugubrious tribal sheikhs.’ One day Johnston found Samir Rifa’i grey-faced in his office, looking at a photograph of an obscenely mutilated body dangling from a balcony. ‘Abd al-Ilah,’ he said.43

  Johnston was one of the very few foreign observers who believed that with a bit of luck and support from the West, Hussein would be able to carry on. Johnston’s estimate of the importance of Jordan’s survival went further than the thinking in London. But the basic d
ifference was that the British Embassy in Amman believed that Jordan would survive the emergency, whereas the Americans were sure that it would not. In spite of these different estimates, Anglo-American cooperation in Jordan remained excellent. President Eisenhower’s advisers were all for supporting Hussein, even though they doubted his chances. On two occasions during the crisis the Americans made plans for the evacuation of Hussein and his family from Jordan. On 17 July the Sixth Fleet was ordered to prepare two passenger planes with appropriate air cover to pick up Hussein and fly him to safety. In mid August, when the situation seemed perilous again, Hussein made arrangements with American and British officials to fly him, his family and his retainers to Europe.44

  Israel’s leaders tried to keep as close as possible to the Americans during the crisis. Towards the end of August, Ben-Gurion sent two very senior officials to a secret meeting with John Foster Dulles at the residence of the American ambassador in London. One was Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and the other was Reuven Shiloah, a former head of the Mossad. They told Dulles that if it was not possible to maintain the status quo in Jordan, Ben-Gurion’s thinking was that the West Bank belonged to the land mass of Palestine. The tentative idea he advanced was a union between the eastern part of Jordan and Iraq, and between the western part of Jordan and Israel with the West Bank turned into some kind of an autonomous unit. Dulles pointed out that most of the population of the West Bank were Palestinians who were highly emotional on the question of Israel. Eban and Shiloah did not press this idea but urged America to do everything possible to maintain the status quo in the area and to encourage wider cooperation among the anti-Nasser governments towards this end.45

  Hussein had good cause to fear both for the independence of his country and for his own life. The general sense that his days were numbered was bound to affect his self-confidence and his morale. Of all the many crises of his career, this one, according to one sympathetic Israeli observer, brought him to the brink of giving up.

  Hussein descended into his personal crisis only after the first threat was over. About a week after the ‘Rihab slaughter’ at Baghdad, he virtually locked himself up in his palace, tightly surrounded by his bodyguards and inaccessible to the visitors who normally paid their respects. It was the low point, to this day, of his image as a ruler, of his morale, and of his resilience. There are reports of Hussein’s fear of assassination bordering on panic during those days. And it is said that he spoke of going into exile abroad: no such stories are credibly connected with any other emergency through which he has passed.46

  British moral and material support helped Hussein, more than any other factor, to recover his confidence in himself and his customary resilience. One man in particular made a huge difference: Wing Commander Jock Dalgleish, who had turned up at the airport on the outskirts of Jerusalem after the murder of King Abdullah. When the crisis in the Middle East broke out, Dalgleish was serving in the RAF headquarters in High Wycombe. He was sent to Jordan with the first group of paratroopers to report again to duty. The presence of the British Parachute Brigade in the capital sent a powerful signal to all Hussein’s enemies and enabled him to stay on his throne until the shockwaves from the Iraqi capital had subsided. It gave him the breathing space he needed to rebuild his authority and to recapture the initiative. After a period of listlessness, he regained his energy and the courage to leave his fortified hill. He ‘began a round of successful visits to Army units, showing characteristic courage in moving without an escort through crowded gatherings of troops drawn from units of doubtful allegiance. This programme of visits did more than anything else to restore King Hussein’s prestige and personal ascendancy in the Army and throughout the country.’47

  The security situation continued to improve. A further regiment of loyal Bedouins was brought to reinforce the garrison of Amman. The British opened a sea route from Aqaba and a line of communication from Aqaba to Amman. But the crisis was by no means over. On 1 August, Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, ‘The position in Jordan is precarious and may blow up at any moment. God grant that we can avoid a disaster. But, of course, our force is too small for any real conflict – if, for instance, the Jordanian Army deserts the King. Its only use is to strengthen the hand of the Government and provide an element of stability. The danger is that it might be overwhelmed. I do not think a mob could do this. But if the Jordanian armoured division went over to Nasser, we should have difficulty in extricating our troops. So it is – and will be – a continual worry, until we can get a UN force in their place.’48

  On 21 August a Special Session of the UN General Assembly met to consider the situation in the Middle East. Hussein recognized the need for a UN role in resolving the crisis, but he had serious worries that the session would result in an unworkable formula and a premature departure of the British troops. It therefore came as a great relief when the session unanimously adopted an Arab League-sponsored resolution calling on all Arab states to respect the territorial integrity of other states and to observe ‘strict non-interference in each other’s internal affairs’. The resolution also called on the secretary-general to make practical arrangements for the evacuation of foreign forces from Lebanon and Jordan. The ‘Arab resolution’ reduced the tension between Nasser’s camp and the pro-Western camp and paved the way to the withdrawal of the American marines from Lebanon and of the British paratroops from Jordan. Dag Hammarskjold, the UN secretary-general, arrived in Jordan at the end of the month, expecting, on the basis of press reports, to find it in its last gasp. He was therefore surprised by the calm and stability of the internal situation and impressed with the personalities of Hussein and Rifa’i. They had no difficulty in persuading him that British troops should not be withdrawn except on conditions to be agreed between themselves and the British government.49 Intervention by the UN also served to enhance Jordan’s international legitimacy. Hussein’s critics claimed that foreign troops were stationed in Jordan to protect him from his own people. UN involvement was used by him to show that the threat to his regime was external, not internal.

  As the UN stepped in, Jordan’s Western friends stepped up their financial assistance. The American government pledged a total of $40 million in the current fiscal year and another $10 million were earmarked for development. The British government promised a million pounds in aid, an interest-free loan and other forms of economic assistance. Despite the offers of aid, some Western policy-makers remained pessimistic about Jordan’s prospects of survival. In a letter home on 31 August, Charles Johnston revealed that

  There is a school of thought in London and Washington which believes that Jordan is a dead loss and that the best thing is to… let Nasser have it, but in a decent-looking way, using Hammarskjold and the UN to do the deed, rather as the Runciman mission was used to scupper Czechoslovakia in 1938. I think this would be not only ignoble but also very foolish of us, and I have been screaming my head off by telegraph against any such thing. Whether my screams were listened to or not, London and Washington have now agreed to keep this place afloat for the time being. An odd twist to the story is that Nasser doesn’t really want Jordan anyway. So what with one thing and another the prospects of this Kingdom staggering on for some time are better than could have been expected – barring accidents and bullets of course.50

  The withdrawal of British troops was carefully managed so as not to disturb the calm and weaken the king’s position. It began on 20 October and was completed by 29 October. In his memoirs he noted with gratitude that ‘The British force was small, but its very presence had given us a chance to breathe. The famous red berets in the streets made people realize we were not alone, that this was no time for despair.’51 Dag Hammarskjold secured from Nasser assurances of ‘good neighbourliness’ and an agreement to lift the blockade of Jordan. On 29 October the UAR announced the resumption of normal land and air communications with Jordan. On the surface at least the crisis seemed to be over.

  After the strains and stres
ses of the last three months Hussein felt in need of a rest. He decided to fly to Lausanne in Switzerland for a three-week holiday with his mother, Queen Zain, his daughter Alia and the rest of his family. He also planned to celebrate his twenty-third birthday with them. On the morning of 10 November, Hussein took off from Amman Airport in his twin-engine De Haviland Dove, which had belonged to his grandfather. His co-pilot was Wing Commander Jock Dalgleish, who stayed behind after the crisis as an air adviser within the Joint Services Mission. The other members of the party were Sharif Nasser and two Jordanian pilots who were to fly the plane back home. The flight path went through Damascus, Beirut and Athens, and all the necessary overflight permits had been obtained. The first sign of trouble was a message from Syrian air flight control that said: ‘You are not cleared to overfly. You must land at Damascus.’ The aircraft replied that they were cleared to overfly though not to land at Damascus, but the order to land was repeated more insistently. At this point Hussein and his co-pilot turned the plane around, dropped to a low altitude and made a dash for the nearest point of the Jordanian border. To their dismay, two Syrian MiGs appeared overhead and started to make attacking passes at the Dove. Hussein handed over the controls to Dalgleish, who took repeatedly evasive action and after several near misses landed safely at Amman Airport. The Syrian authorities gave no explanation for this wanton attack on an unarmed aircraft on a lawful flight. Hussein concluded that the motive was to kill him and put an end to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.52