by Avi Shlaim
In February 1965 Hussein appointed Wasfi Tall as prime minister for the second time. Hussein’s back was giving him trouble, and he was beginning to feel the strain of the previous year. Having a strong and competent prime minister left Hussein with some time on his hands, and he used it to take a month-long vacation in Europe and to attend to his health. Tall’s main complaint on resuming office was that his original Seven-year Development Plan was now dead, and there had been virtually no economic progress in the intervening two years. For the first few months, he drove himself and his ministers like a man possessed in a frantic effort to get results. But ‘having huffed and puffed to the limit of his lungs, Wasfi at last began to relax, to everyone’s relief.’20 Containing the PLO replaced economic development as the dominant issue for the rest of Tall’s second term. From the beginning he had been opposed to the creation of the PLO, predicting that it would be too weak to mount a serious challenge to Israel and that it would end up by making peace. He also suspected that Nasser had originally sponsored the PLO not in order to fight for the liberation of Palestine but in order to saddle it with the responsibility for settling the dispute with Israel. In his more paranoid moods, Tall even spoke of Israel and America as being the evil spirits behind the invention of the PLO. He was certainly in no doubt that the new organization and its leader posed a serious threat to the survival of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.21
The foreign minister at that time was Dr Hazem Nusseibeh, a Princeton-educated member of a prominent Palestinian family from Jerusalem. Nusseibeh put forward a proposal for giving the West Bank a limited degree of autonomy and changing the name of the country from ‘The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’ to ‘The United Kingdom of Palestine and Jordan’. He wrote a White Paper on relations between Jordan and the nascent Palestinian organization, and included this idea in it. Nusseibeh believed that the alternative name he suggested could remove the dichotomy and allow the Palestinians to feel included. By allowing the Palestinians to choose their own representatives, he wanted to forestall more radical demands. The king was quite agreeable to the idea after listening attentively to the reasoning behind it. Wasfi Tall, on the other hand, spoke forcefully against it. He feared that it would create friction and lead to divided loyalties among Jordanians and Palestinians. Tall won the argument, as usual. In retrospect, Nusseibeh regretted that his proposal was not adopted because he believed it would have made unnecessary the role that the PLO later assumed, that of being the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Under Nusseibeh’s scheme, the PLO would have been able to call itself a representative of the Palestinian people, but by no means the sole representative of the Palestinian people.22 But it was a compromise proposal, and Tall did not like compromises.
Within a relatively short time, the tensions between the PLO and the regime came to the surface. The clash became inevitable following the second Arab summit’s endorsement of the proposal to create the Palestine Liberation Army. Hussein realized this, but he did not wish to stage a showdown with Shuqairi for fear of jeopardizing his relationship with Nasser. It was Shuqairi who issued the first challenge on arrival in Amman, on 24 February 1965, for talks with the Jordanian government. To allay Jordanian fears, Shuqairi declared that Jordan and the PLO were ‘two wings of the same bird’. His actual proposals, however, revealed an unbridgeable chasm between them. They included the setting-up of Palestinian regiments; the arming and fortification of West Bank villages along the border with Israel; military training for the Palestinians in Jordan; and the raising of ‘popular resistance’ units among the Palestinians there. The purpose of the plan was to transform the Palestinians along the border with Israel into ‘soldiers in the army of return’. In addition, Shuqairi demanded the opening of a PLO office in Amman and the collection of 5 per cent of the salaries of Palestinian officials in Jordan for the PLO. What Shuqairi proposed, in effect, was a division of labour between the PLO and the Jordanian government whereby the latter would operate on the official state level while the former would operate on the popular level. Tall rejected all of these requests. Jordan and the PLO were now on a collision course.23
The breakdown of the negotiations encouraged militant Palestinians to take direct action against Israel in defiance of the authority of the Jordanian government. Al-Fatah, a militant clandestine group formed by Yasser Arafat and others, advocated a guerrilla war to liberate Palestine. Its general strategy was to drag the Arab states into war with Israel by stoking up the fire along the borders. From Jordanian territory al-Fatah mounted a series of rather ineffectual sabotage operations inside Israel. Israel retaliated against these hit-and-run raids with severe military reprisals against Jordanian targets along the border, which prompted the Jordanian government to step up its efforts to prevent the incursions. Its security services carried out arrests of activists, confiscated small arms and explosives, and rounded up Fatah cells on the West Bank. Al-Fatah acted independently of the PLO, but its operations had the effect of making Shuqairi adopt a more combative posture in relation to Israel, and this in turn widened the rift between him and the Jordanian regime. Various measures were taken by Hussein and Tall to fight Shuqairi’s irridenta and to prevent him from consolidating his power base on the West Bank. For example, the National Guard, which was based on the West Bank and provided a focus for a possible Palestinian rebellion against the regime, was disbanded and its units integrated with the regular army.
At the third Arab summit, held in Casablanca from 13 to 17 September 1965, the conflict between Jordan and the PLO came out into the open. The ‘unity of ranks’ forged at the first summit in Cairo collapsed in a welter of disputes and mutual recriminations. Shuqairi’s demand that the Palestine Liberation Army be allowed to recruit Palestinians from Jordan met with a firm rebuff from Hussein. Lieutenant General Ali Amir, the Egyptian head of the United Arab Command, pressed for permission to send Iraqi and Saudi troops into Jordan before the actual outbreak of hostilities; Hussein made it clear that Jordan would agree to accommodate Arab forces only following the outbreak of hostilities. There was thus no change in the Jordanian position. Collectively, the Arab leaders endorsed gradualism rather than extremism on the Palestine issue. The other major issue was the diversion of the headwaters of the Jordan River. The secretary-general of the Arab League reported that the diversion work had to be stopped because of Israeli aggression. The Syrian representative vowed to keep up the fight against the Zionist enemy, but Nasser injected a characteristic note of caution by warning against resuming the diversion work before the Arabs had improved their land and air defence capabilities. He hinted that if Syria acted unilaterally it would not be able to count on his assistance. In effect he conceded that Israel had won the water war.
From Casablanca, Hussein went to Paris, where he had a secret meeting with Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir. The transition from an Arab summit conference at which Israel featured as the greatest enemy to a face-to-face meeting with the representative of this enemy was rather dramatic, but then Hussein’s relations with the official enemy were full of paradoxes. At Casablanca the discussions revolved round the conflict with Israel; in Paris the leaders explored avenues of cooperation.24 This was Hussein’s first meeting at the ministerial level with the Israeli side. It was arranged by Israel’s ambassador to Paris, Walter Eytan, in a private flat in 19 Rue Reynard in the Sixteenth Arondissement.
‘I have wanted to meet you for a long time, and I am pleased about this meeting,’ said the king to Mrs Meir when they were introduced. He referred to her meetings with King Abdullah, and expressed his pleasure at being able to follow in the tradition of his beloved grandfather.25 Thirty years later Hussein was hazy about the details but he recalled clearly the atmosphere that formed the backdrop to the talk:
It was a good meeting. It was really a meeting of breaking the ice, of getting to know one another. And we talked about our dreams for our children and grandchildren to live in an era of peace in the region and I think she s
uggested that maybe a day would come when we could put aside all the arms on both sides and create a monument in Jerusalem that would signify peace between us and where our young people could see what a futile struggle it had been and what a heavy burden on both sides. Essentially, it didn’t go beyond that. There wasn’t very much indeed that happened, just an agreement to keep in touch whenever possible.26
There was slightly more substance to the meeting than Hussein remembered. Both sides reaffirmed their agreement to abide by the water quotas allocated to them by Eric Johnston in 1955. Jordan departed from the pan-Arab position in agreeing to Israel’s diversion of water to the Negev, while Israel approved Jordan’s various water conservation projects. Then there was the question of the balance, security and trust. Hussein was expecting to take delivery of the 250 M48 tanks, and he knew that a bad report on his behaviour from Israel could cause delays and complications. Nor was he oblivious to the power of Israel’s friends on Capitol Hill. He was therefore anxious to reassure Meir that Israel had nothing to worry about, that no foreign troops would be allowed on Jordan’s soil, and that he would honour his commitment not to deploy the new American tanks on the West Bank. Another topic that came up in the talk concerned keeping the border between their two countries quiet. Meir knew that at the Casablanca summit Hussein had fought against Shuqairi’s proposal to extend his sphere of operations in Jordan, but she was not content with declarations. She urged the king to take more energetic steps against the groups who were fomenting trouble along the border and especially against the Fatah men, who were crossing into Israel from Syria via Jordan.27 From Meir’s vantage point too this was a good talk both because of the friendly atmosphere in which it was conducted and because of the specific agreements that were reached. The meeting was only one link in a chain of contacts and communications, but it contributed to the de facto peace that prevailed between Israel and Jordan in the mid 1960s, despite the activities of irregular Palestinian forces operating from Jordan’s territory and a limited number of retaliatory raids by Israel.28
Hussein placed the meeting in the context of a long-term effort to find a peaceful solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict and the proximity of the parties who lived cheek-by-jowl: ‘with the passage of years one realized we were not talking about a country hundreds of miles away. We were talking about a people and a country with a destiny, both of us. We were in a very small region and we had to figure out how we could resolve our problems. If we looked at water, it was a problem that both of us suffered from. If we looked at even a flu epidemic, it affected both of us. Every aspect of life was interrelated and interlinked in some way or another. And to simply ignore that was something I could not understand. Maybe others could, others who were distant, who were not equally aware or involved. By now there were Palestinians and Jordanians, and their rights, their future was at stake. One had to do something; one had to explore what was possible and what was not.’29
11
The Road to War
On 13 November 1966 the IDF launched a devastating attack on the village of Samu’, south of Hebron on the West Bank, about four miles from the border with Israel. It was staged in broad daylight by a large force with infantry, an armoured brigade, heavy artillery, mortars, engineers and two Mirage squadrons. A Jordanian Army unit was rushed to the scene, but it careered into an ambush and suffered heavy casualties. As a result, 15 Jordanian soldiers and 5 civilians died, 36 soldiers and 4 civilians were wounded, and 93 houses were destroyed, including the police station, the local school, a medical clinic and a mosque. One Jordanian Hunter aircraft was shot down in an air battle and its pilot was killed. The attack was a reprisal for a landmine that had exploded the previous day on the Israeli side of the border, killing three soldiers.
Israel, as was its wont, exacted an overwhelming revenge, but this time it was exacted from the wrong Arab party. Israel’s leaders knew full well that Hussein was doing everything in his power to prevent Fatah from staging sabotage operations from his territory because they heard it directly from him and from his representatives on the Mixed Armistice Commission. The Israelis knew equally well that the militant Syrian regime that had come to power in February was training Fatah saboteurs and supporting Fatah operations against Israel from Jordan. For some time Israel’s leaders had been pointing an accusing finger at Syria and threatening dire consequences if these attacks did not cease. So the attack on the Jordanian civilians came as a complete surprise both at home and abroad. The reason given by the IDF spokesman was that the saboteurs who had planted the mines on the Israeli side of the border had come from the Hebron area, but no satisfactory explanation was ever given for the scale or ferocity of the attack. This was no routine reprisal raid but the biggest operation of the IDF since the Suez War.
Inside Jordan, the effects of the raid were highly destabilizing, opening old wounds, exposing dramatically the country’s military weakness and fragility, and touching off large-scale unrest and violent protest against the regime. Hussein felt personally betrayed by the Israelis because their action contradicted their previously expressed commitment to the safety and stability of Jordan. Furthermore, the raid occurred on his thirty-first birthday and the pilot who was killed was one of his friends. Speaking about this incident thirty years later, Hussein chose to stress the unbalanced and unreasonable nature of the Israeli action:
It really created a devastating effect in Jordan itself, because the action, if it had been an action from Jordan, was not something that Jordan had condoned or sponsored or supported in any way or form. And to my way of thinking at that time, what I couldn’t figure out was why react in this way, if a small irrigation ditch or pipe was blown up (assuming it was, which I didn’t necessarily know for sure)? Was there any balance between the two? Why did the Israelis attack instead of trying to figure out a way of dealing with the threats in a different way, in a joint way? So it was a shock and it was not a very pleasant birthday present.1
At the time Hussein took a much graver view of the raid on Samu’, seeing it as a signal of a change in Israel’s attitude towards his regime and possibly even as part of a larger design to provoke a war that would enable the IDF to capture the West Bank. No evidence, however, has come to light to support this suspicion, at least not on the part of the Labour-led government. Itzhak Rabin, the IDF chief of staff at that time, claimed that some of the more serious consequences of the raid were unintended. He had repeatedly emphasized that whereas in Syria the problem was the regime, in Jordan the problem was not the regime but the civilians who assisted Israel’s Palestinian enemies. The plan of action he had proposed to the cabinet was not intended to inflict casualties on the Jordanian Army but to serve as a warning to the civilian population not to cooperate with the Palestinian saboteurs. The damage greatly exceeded the estimate he had given the cabinet and he later admitted that Levi Eshkol had good reason to be displeased with him. ‘We had neither political nor military reasons’, said Rabin ‘to arrive at a confrontation with Jordan or to humiliate Hussein.’2
Eshkol was in fact furious with Rabin for the bloodshed and destruction. He felt that the IDF top brass had given the cabinet bad advice and that the target should have been Syria, not Jordan. The result, in Eshkol’s earthy language, was that Israel hit the wife instead of the wicked mother-in-law. There was also an issue of principle. David Ben-Gurion, as prime minister and minister of defence, rarely called on the IDF to account for its actions. Eshkol also combined the premiership with the defence portfolio but he was determined to assert civilian control over the army. Miriam Eshkol, the prime minister’s wife, kept a diary. She recalled her husband’s bitterness towards the IDF leaders at that time. After the Samu’ raid, her husband said to her, ‘Write down in your diary that, unlike my predecessor, I am not the representative of the army in the government!’3 The main reason for Eshkol’s anger over the Samu’ raid, however, was that it ran counter to his policy of supporting Hussein and helping him in his struggle against the Palest
inian guerrilla organizations.
Hussein perceived the attack on Samu’ as an act of war rather than as a routine retaliatory raid. He interpreted it as an indication that the Israelis were no longer committed to the survival of his regime and were casting their beady eye on the West Bank of his kingdom. For him Samu’ was not an isolated incident but part of a wider Israeli design to escalate the border clashes into a full-scale, expansionist war. Ze’ev Bar-Lavie, who served on the Jordanian desk in Israeli Military Intelligence and used to celebrate the king’s birthday, gave the following assessment of the consequences of the operation: ‘The Samu’ affair disturbed Hussein deeply. He saw in it an Israeli intention to prepare the ground for the conquest of the West Bank and an aggressive patrol directed at out-flanking the Jordanian defence line-up from the south. All the attempts by the Western powers to calm him down were in vain. Hussein refused to relax and remained fixed in his fear that the Jews would exact from Jordan the price for the Syrian attacks and for the operations of the saboteurs. Why should the Jews content themselves with the destruction of a few inferior Syrian brigades? No, they, the Jews, would go for something more concrete like the conquest of the West Bank, the moment they find an excuse.’4 Wasfi Tall was equally convinced that Israel was looking for an excuse to capture the West Bank. He believed that Israel wanted to provoke Jordanian retaliation, which would provide the opportunity to go to war.5 In short, both Tall and Hussein suspected that Israel was setting a trap for Jordan, and they took care not to fall into it. Instead of retaliating, they referred the matter to the UN security council.
