Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  The deliberations of the cabinet culminated in the decision on 19 June in favour of peace agreements with Egypt and Syria based on the international border and the security needs of Israel. This formula allowed Israel to retain some of the territories it occupied, especially the Gaza Strip and the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it demanded the demilitarization of the rest. It was a reasonable offer, but unfortunately it was never conveyed to the governments of Egypt and Syria. As there was no consensus over the West Bank, the cabinet decided to defer decision on the position to be taken up with regard to Jordan. Thus, from the very start, the Israeli cabinet had nothing to offer Jordan.8 Its initially flexible position on the other fronts gradually hardened with the passage of time. As early as mid July the politicians approved plans for building Jewish settlements on the Golan Heights. In doing so, they reversed their own policy and embarked on the road towards creeping annexation. The decision of 19 June became null even before its formal cancellation in October.9

  In the Israeli–Jordanian context the most sensitive and intractable issue was the future of Jerusalem. For both sides this was a highly emotive issue. Jerusalem is the third holiest site of Islam after Mecca and Medina, and so was of paramount importance not just to Jordan but to Arabs and Muslims everywhere. It was also the jewel in the Hashemite crown, and a vital symbol of Hussein’s legitimacy as an Arab ruler. Hussein was a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, who, according to Muslim tradition, ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem. For Jews, Jerusalem has equally powerful symbolic and religious resonance. It was the city of David and the site of the ‘Wailing Wall’, the Western Wall of the Second Temple that was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. The capture of Jerusalem stirred passionate feelings about the historic rights of the Jewish people and of continuity with the past. At noon on 7 June, Moshe Dayan went to the Western Wall and declared that Jerusalem had been ‘liberated’: ‘We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our Holy Places, never to part from it again.’ The Zionist movement’s moderate position on Jerusalem disappeared overnight. Suddenly life in the Jewish state without Zion, one of the biblical names for Jerusalem, became difficult to imagine. The Israelis considered that they were sovereign in the unified city and proceeded to act accordingly. On 27 June, in a remarkable display of national unity, the Knesset enacted legislation to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration to Greater Jerusalem, which included the whole of the Old City. This amounted to annexation in all but name, an irreversible step that virtually doomed to failure all the post-war attempts at accommodation between Israel and Jordan.

  After recovering his composure Hussein concentrated his efforts on repairing his relationship with friendly states and mobilizing international opinion in the struggle to recover the occupied territories. On 26 June he presented the Arab position to the UN General Assembly, offering peace with Israel in return for territory. Two days later he met with President Johnson and his advisers in the White House. Johnson was always partial to Israel and so were most of his advisers, notably Walt Rostow, the special assistant to the president, his brother Eugene Rostow, the under-secretary of state for political affairs, and Nicholas Katzenbach, the under-secretary of state. Johnson was advised to tell Hussein not to rely on any outside force to settle the dispute and to encourage him to enter into bilateral negotiations with Israel.10

  The tone of Hussein’s meeting with Johnson was marked by seriousness and sympathetic frankness, but there was no real meeting of minds. The king stressed that the Arabs faced very critical decisions. They could opt for either what amounted to a settlement with Israel to be followed by concentration on economic development, or for rearmament, with a view to another round. The king said that he favoured the first course and that he intended to try to sell this position to the other Arabs, since there could be no real stability in the Middle East unless all the Arabs chose a settlement with Israel. Hussein added that he had some reason for hope for success in this regard. He pointed out that, as the Arab leader who had nothing to do with bringing about the confrontation, who had fought the hardest and who had lost the most, he was in a unique position to speak for a moderate course. The Americans agreed that the Arabs had reached a fork in the road and they believed that a peaceful solution was the only solution. But they also told Hussein that they could not impose a settlement, nor could they deliver the Israelis. They steered him, in effect, towards a separate settlement with Israel. His reply was along the following lines: ‘The first thing I must do is to try to convince all the Arab leaders to adopt a moderate solution. Only if this fails could I consider whether it would be feasible to pursue a solution on my own.’11

  On his way home Hussein stopped in London for a few days. On Sunday, 2 July, he met Dr Yaacov Herzog at the home of Dr Emanuel Herbert. This was their fourth meeting and the recent war cast a long shadow over it. It lasted an hour and a half, and Herzog’s account of it fills fifteen pages. But there was not much of substance to report. It was essentially an exploratory meeting in which each side tried to figure out the position of the other without committing itself to a particular outcome. This was especially true of Dr Herzog. Vagueness was the hallmark of his position at this and all subsequent meetings. He could not convey the cabinet’s terms for a settlement because the cabinet had reached no decision with regard to the future of the West Bank. Herzog himself became a proponent of Greater Israel under the impact of the resounding victory. He was deeply affected by the national mood of religious and spiritual elation that accompanied the encounter with the sacred biblical sites of Judea and Samaria, and he set his face against withdrawing from them. Although he took the initiative in requesting the meeting with the king, he approached it with some trepidation. His main worry was that the king would demand a clarification of Israel’s position regarding the West Bank, and, as he recorded in his diary, he resolved to remain evasive.12

  As he entered the room, Herzog bowed and said that he was grateful that the king could receive him despite his heavy preoccupations. He opened by saying that their contact had been valuable and that he always felt privileged by the confidence the king had reposed in him. At their first meeting four years previously he had given the king a ‘biblical undertaking’ that it would remain secret come what may, and he now wished to renew the promise of secrecy. The prime minister and the foreign minister asked Herzog to convey personally to the king their good wishes. They realized the stress under which he had been labouring and regretted deeply the loss of life and suffering on his side. The object of the visit was to inquire whether he wished to convey anything to the Israelis on the situation that had developed since the end of the war. They welcomed clarification of his thoughts. Herzog emphasized that he was talking to the king on an unofficial basis and invited him to speak his thoughts in an unfettered fashion.

  The king replied that he too valued the contact over the years and thanked his guest for coming to see him. He spoke without bitterness or recrimination and even admitted that in the Israelis’ place he would have acted as they had. For some years he had understood that war was inevitable. He had reached this conclusion from an appraisal of the difficult political and strategic circumstances of Israel. It had seemed to him inevitable that one day they would try to settle their problem by force. During the past months he had felt the crisis was approaching. The Arabs had made great mistakes. He had warned them time and again. He also bore responsibility for what had happened because he had not taken sufficient action to drive home his warnings. The Middle East was now at the crossroads. It could move towards a better future or it could become embroiled in further war, which would surely spread beyond the frontiers of the area. After the war, he had suggested an Arab summit conference with the view of achieving a common Arab purpose and a joint line. Other Arab leaders had refused. Now, however, he felt the summit would probably take place shortly. If the summit did not reach agreement, each country would
be free to act individually as it wished.

  Herzog replied that the king had been labouring under a basic misunderstanding. They had never planned war and they had no need for it. Their preparations over the years had been to meet an attack. Herzog then described the events that led to war in minute and often unnecessary detail in order to underline that Israel’s position had been purely defensive. There were two central points that Arab leaders never understood, he said. First, for a people that had been subjected to persecution down the ages culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, an assault on any individual Jew was an assault on the entire Jewish people. They could not live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv with farmers being shot down in frontier settlements. The general Jewish reaction to the murder of individual Jews flowed from the transcendental unity of the Jewish people, a unity forged in faith and fortified in the struggle for survival throughout history.

  Second, the Arab leaders had never understood the nature of Israel’s link with the land, which was unique in that it sprang from the distinctive spiritual sources of the Jewish people. Instead of trying to understand this phenomenon, the Arab leaders had sought rational explanations for the Jewish renaissance in the land of their fathers. They assumed that the Jews had returned to the land only as refugees, that the Jewish national movement was an artificial creation without basic roots, and that it drew its strength largely from political and financial machinations in Western capitals. Nazi persecution had indeed lent a great momentum to the Zionist movement. Influence by Jews throughout the world had been a vital contribution. But the basis had been, and remained, the undying attachment of the Jews to the Land of Israel. The acceptance of this central fact by the Arabs was an essential prelude to peace.

  To this grandiloquent lecture on the roots of Jewish nationalism Hussein responded with a down-to-earth account of the origins of the recent war. For him the attack on Samu’ was a great shock. It convinced him that, for Israel, Jordan and Syria were in the same class despite all of his actions against Fatah. When he visited Cairo, Nasser was convinced that Israel was about to attack Syria. As an Arab leader, Hussein had no choice but to get ready. He was absolutely sure that there had been no intention of mounting an all-out attack on Israel. There had been no cooperation and no joint planning for such an attack. Verbal threats meant nothing.

  From the prelude to the war Hussein moved to the war itself, slipping into the mode of a detached military analyst. In his assessment, there were three major factors behind Israel’s victory: its aircraft, its intelligence and its communications systems. Israel had shown remarkable organization and a capacity to move troops from point to point with great rapidity. Its striking power in the air and on the ground had been overwhelming. ‘Such is war,’ he said wistfully.

  What was past was past, said Herzog; what of the future? Hussein returned to the subject of the proposed Arab summit. Herzog asked whether he sought unity to prepare new aggression or to make peace. The question was crucial to Israel’s calculations. He therefore had to insist on an answer. Hussein replied very slowly and hesitantly:

  The extremists (sarcasm touched his voice) have one course, I have another. I must say frankly to you, if it is peace, it will have to be peace with dignity and honour (the last words were uttered firmly and in a deep tone). What you said earlier about the historic link with the land I have understood for some time now; others have not. This is the most difficult point for the Arabs to accept. Our basic problem is how to maintain Arab identity in the area. Not only you have rights. We also have rights. Do not push us into a corner. If you do this, even if there be no hope, we will have no alternative but to follow the extremist line. So much depends in the coming weeks on how you behave and how we behave. Be careful of our emotions. Treat them with respect and understanding. The area is now at a crossroads. I hope we will take a positive course. So much depends on you.

  Herzog remarked that the time had come for the moderate Arab group to speak out frankly for peace. The king had spoken of peace with dignity and honour but had yet to tell him officially that he was ready to enter into peace negotiations; and, until he did so, Herzog could not discuss the details of a peace settlement. He repeated that he had been sent on an unofficial basis to take away a clear idea of the king’s thoughts. All he could offer was his personal vision of peace, namely, an economic union between Jordan and Israel, with a joint effort to settle the refugee problem. He painted a dark picture of the future of the region without peace. Would the pattern of tension and aggression continue to be the pattern, or would they link hands to build a new Middle East? Hussein replied, ‘Give me a short time. I shall not hesitate to insist on my views and to state them publicly.’ Herzog summed up: Hussein was trying to get a summit meeting in order to achieve a united line on peace. If he did not succeed, he would feel free to act unilaterally in relation to Israel. Hussein nodded agreement. They parted with a warm handshake.

  At the end of his report Herzog recorded his general impressions. At their various meetings over four years, Hussein’s mood and presence had reflected the pendulum of his relations within the Arab world and particularly with Cairo and Damascus. ‘This time his expression bore the marks of what had recently passed over him, yet the mood seemed more of sadness and fatalism rather than of anger and bitterness. The furtive look at some of the previous meetings had left him. He seemed downcast and liberated at the same time. Throughout the talk it occurred to me that while he had lost a war and with it a large part of his kingdom, he had for the first time achieved real status in Arab leadership, his patriotism no longer challenged, his motives no longer suspect. The shock of events did not seem to have affected the inner core of his personality. At once he was sad and carefree, contemplative but easy of communication, broken and yet apparently filled with hope.’13

  Herzog assumed Hussein refrained from raising the question of the West Bank and Jerusalem in order to avoid putting Israel’s position on the record. But it was he who wanted to leave the question open. Hussein knew that time was not on his side, whereas Herzog was convinced that it was on Israel’s: that with the passage of time the chances of withdrawal from the West Bank would diminish. His ploy was to spin out the talks with Hussein in order to avert an internal cabinet crisis and to fend off external pressures on Israel to withdraw. To Yigal Allon, Herzog confessed that he and Abba Eban were divided: Eban believed that there was a chance of reaching agreement with Hussein, while Herzog did not. For him the importance of the talks was purely tactical. To Menachem Begin, Herzog said that he favoured the continuation of the contact with Hussein, although he was certain that nothing would come out of it.14 In this respect Herzog was the perfect representative for a divided government that preferred land to peace with Jordan. Meir Amit, the director of the Mossad, was even more cynical. He wanted to use the contact with Hussein in order to bring about division in the Arab camp on the issue of peace.15

  The day after the meeting with the evasive envoy, Hussein went to 10 Downing Street for a working lunch with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Foreign Secretary George Brown. Wilson’s brief for the meeting told him that ‘The Americans (or at least Mr Eugene Rostow) seem to have been persuaded by the Israelis into acceptance of the Israeli thesis that the way to a settlement is to press King Hussein into separate negotiations and the conclusion of an agreement within the next few weeks, using the threat that he will otherwise lose his West Bank territories.’ The Foreign Office view, on the other hand, was that it would be virtual suicide for Hussein to engage in separate negotiations at that time. There was no Palestinian tolerance even for heavily conditional engagement in negotiations. Consequently there was no scope for Hussein to challenge Israel publicly with the offer of peace for full withdrawal. The Foreign Office experts also assumed that separate negotiations would not recover the occupied territories. Moreover, the separation of the West Bank from Jordan was not seen as an attractive prospect for a stable settlement of the Arab–Israel dispute or for the future of the two halves of Jor
dan. Besides, Britain’s interests elsewhere in the Arab world required that they should continue to be seen to support Jordan, and should not under any circumstances get involved in the promotion of a settlement based on its dismemberment.16

  At the meeting Wilson and Brown expressed regret at the disaster that had befallen Jordan and inquired whether he was thinking of negotiating a separate peace with Israel. Hussein said that there were naturally grave tensions and difficulties in Jordan, an influx of refugees and the general shock to Arab morale resulting from their military defeat. There was also the danger of Soviet exploitation of the situation in an East–West context. But he was confident that he could hold the situation in Jordan satisfactorily, provided the Arab cause was not rebuffed at the United Nations and provided Israel were obliged to withdraw from the territories it had occupied. With regard to a separate peace, his first objective was, as he had said to Herzog the previous day, an Arab summit to try to concert a common stand. If this failed, then he might indeed have to ‘go it alone’, including some kind of separate settlement with Israel. Wilson commented that it would be a very rough summit meeting if it took place, and Hussein agreed. Brown thought the king had shown himself by his recent behaviour to be one of the bravest men alive; but he believed that the king could not afford, without serious risk to himself, to take any position in relation to Israel that put him too far ahead of his Arab colleagues in other countries.17