by Avi Shlaim
Whether the new administration would rise to the challenge was yet to be seen. In the meantime, Hussein could not afford to break off the contact with the Israelis. He knew that they were making much of their meetings with him and believed that their motive was to give the Western powers the misleading impression that the two sides were actually getting somewhere. He also felt that Israel’s obduracy stood in the way of progress. Nevertheless, he did not threaten to sever the contact. Whenever the Israelis asked for a meeting, he readily agreed. Dates and detailed arrangements for meetings were made by Herzog and Rifa’i with the help of Dr Herbert. On 19 December the two met in London to set up a high-level meeting. Rifa’i wanted to know whether the prime minister and the defence minister would take part, but he received no clear answer. He also said that His Majesty saw no point in holding a meeting unless the Israelis had something new to say. Herzog replied that he was not authorized to say what Eban and Allon would propose, but that both attached importance to continuing the contact.32
Levi Eshkol was still not prepared to meet Hussein face to face. His refusal is noteworthy against the often repeated official claim that Israel’s leaders were indefatigable in their search for peace but there was no one to talk to on the other side. This time Eshkol asked Defence Minister Moshe Dayan to meet with Hussein. Dayan favoured direct talks with the West Bank leaders without the involvement of the Jordanian monarch. Were he to meet Hussein, he warned, it would take him ten minutes to state his views and their side would be the loser, because the game of playing for time would be over.33 Dayan, unsuited to these tactics, stayed at home so the game could go on.
Herzog and Rifa’i met again at the home of Dr Herbert on 26 January 1969. Herzog said that the prime minister would be happy to go anywhere at any time for a meeting with Hussein, but that he could not take part in political talks so long as there was no cabinet decision, and that there could not be such a decision until the two sides were close enough to require it. This was a convoluted way of saying that Eshkol did not want to meet Hussein. Rifa’i replied that he understood the prime minister’s position and that the king would not complain. In his report to Jerusalem about the meeting, the Israeli ambassador to London wrote, ‘The infant most definitely does not want to sever the contact with us.’34
The following day Herzog called Dr Herbert and expressed a wish to meet Hussein, who was staying in London. By coincidence, Dr Herbert had a similar request from Hussein and a meeting was arranged for the evening of the 28th. Herzog opened the meeting by saying that Eshkol greatly appreciated the king’s courage and his dedication to peace. He repeated the official line: Eshkol could not participate personally in political discussions so long as there was no cabinet decision, but in the meantime it was hoped that the clarification process would continue with his two ministers. Herzog implied that direct contact was also in Hussein’s interests because the special relationship that had developed between them had led Israel to exercise restraint in responding to fedayeen provocations from Jordanian territory. Hussein nodded to indicate he understood. A long debate ensued between the two advisers about Nasser’s latest speech, in which he seemed to justify the continuation of Fatah operations against Israel. Rifa’i argued that the Israelis misunderstood Nasser’s meaning because of their complex about him, while Herzog argued that Nasser’s aggression and subversion were nothing new and that in the past they had not been confined to Israel. At this point Hussein turned to Rifa’i and said, ‘Let us face facts. The man sometimes says crazy things and does crazy things.’ Hussein spoke at length about his vision of peace and of the need to convince his people and the people of the region that its terms were just. He described the Middle East as a mess but was encouraged by the signs that the Great Powers wanted to help resolve their problems. Herzog warned him against pinning his hopes on an externally imposed solution. The atmosphere remained friendly throughout the meeting.35
The next meeting took place on Hussein’s boat in the Bay of Aqaba, on the evening of 20 February. After eating and drinking the serious conversation began. They dealt first with the security situation, and Allon did most of the talking. He warned Hussein against Fatah attacks on Israeli targets from his side of the border. Hussein replied that he was doing all he could and that he had divided up the brigade stationed in the border area into smaller units to achieve better control. Allon said that if Hussein could not control Fatah activities, Israel would be prepared to help him by sending its own forces into his territory, meaning the East Bank. The implication that the West Bank was no longer his territory could not have been lost on Hussein. With a bitter smile he thanked Allon for the offer but turned it down.
Eban talked at inordinate length about all the issues involved in holding talks under the auspices of Jarring. His main point was that the proposals they had made at the previous meetings were only a starting point for negotiations and that the Jordanians were free to criticize them and to modify them. This went down well with the Jordanians, and Hussein said that for the first time he was greatly encouraged. Herzog steered the conversation towards Nasser, and Allon asked Hussein to try to arrange a meeting for him with Nasser. Herzog argued that progress on the Egyptian front would facilitate progress on the Jordanian front. On this occasion Hussein spoke with some hesitation about Nasser, but he did say that he had sent Bahjat Talhouni to ask Nasser whether he still supported a settlement based on the Security Council resolution, and that Nasser had sent him a letter with a positive reply. Nasser also agreed to Hussein’s continuing his contacts with the Israelis.
Why was Hussein, in his own words, greatly encouraged by this meeting, although the Israeli officials had brought nothing new to the table? One possible explanation is that Eban presented the Allon Plan in a much more flexible manner than before, and Allon himself did not repeat his usual mantra that security came before peace. At any rate, the possibility of breaking off contact was never mentioned. Nor did the Jordanians press for a meeting with Eshkol, who died six days later after a long illness.
Allon and Eban were not as strict as Herzog in protecting the secrecy of the dialogue that took place across the battle lines. At the beginning of their conversation Eban had looked for a pen to make notes, and when he could not find one, Hussein handed him his own gold pen with the Hashemite crown at the top. The pen remained on the table, and at the end of the meeting Hussein gave it to Eban as a present. Later Eban waved the pen with the royal crown under the noses of Israeli newspaper editors.36 Allon committed a more serious indiscretion by telling a Vienna-based US correspondent that, public denials notwithstanding, he and Eban had had a meeting with Hussein that had come to naught, with Hussein declaring that he would not go down in history as the first Arab ruler to surrender Jerusalem to Israel.37 The new American secretary of state, William Rogers, found Allon’s indiscretion extremely disturbing. ‘Nothing’, he wrote to the ambassador in Tel Aviv, ‘could be better designed to undermine Hussein’s support for a peaceful settlement and, indeed, to jeopardize his regime if not his life than to give credence to reports that he has met with Israelis.’38
The international context for Jordanian diplomacy changed in two respects in the early months of 1969. In Washington the Nixon administration replaced the Johnson administration. The key foreign policymaker alongside Nixon was his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, rather than Secretary of State William Rogers. Nixon and Kissinger were cold-war warriors who looked at the Middle East through the prism of America’s global contest with the Soviet Union. For them Jordan was not a player in the cold war, whereas Egypt was, and therefore concerned them more. Hussein established good personal relations with members of the new administration, but he could not persuade them to lean more heavily on Israel for the sake of a settlement.
In Israel, Golda Meir replaced Eshkol as Labour Party leader and prime minister. Meir was a much more rigid and inflexible person than her predecessor. She had a black-and-white view of the world in which the Arabs featured as an unt
rustworthy, sinister and implacable adversary. In anything that touched Israel’s security she was completely intransigent. As she noted in her autobiography, ‘intransigent’ was to become her middle name.39 But in their thinking about the future of the West Bank she and Eshkol were not all that far apart. Both wanted to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, and both were therefore opposed to the annexation of the West Bank. Both came round to the view that the most promising solution to the Palestinian problem lay in a territorial compromise with Jordan that would keep the bulk of the Palestinian population outside Israel’s borders. The difference was largely one of presentation: Eshkol put the emphasis on what Israel was prepared to concede for the sake of a settlement with the Arabs, whereas Meir put the emphasis on Israel’s security-related conditions.40 Apart from her preference for the Jordanian over the Palestinian option, Meir had a personal liking for Hussein that went back to their meeting in Paris in 1965 when she served as foreign minister. As far as Israel’s terms for a settlement were concerned, however, there was no improvement whatsoever as a result of the change at the top.
At home Hussein had to contend with the rising power of the Palestinian resistance movement. Popular support for the movement’s objective for ‘liberating’ the whole of Palestine, combined with the lack of any tangible progress on the diplomatic front, had the effect of undermining the idea of a ‘peaceful solution’. The component parts of the resistance movement were in some disarray, but the trend was towards greater cohesion. Although the resistance movement had not established itself as a credible military force, it none the less brought about an upsurge in Palestinian self-confidence that made it more and more difficult to sell the alternative of a diplomatic solution. Most Jordanians and most Arabs had come round to the view that sooner or later they would have to fight Israel again. The election in February 1969 of Fatah leader Yasser Arafat as chairman of the PLO enhanced his standing and that of his organization in the Arab world. In April the Palestine Armed Struggle Command was set up with the purpose of coordinating paramilitary operations and overall strategy. Its progress was slow, but it included all the groups except the popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its extremist offshoots. These extremist groups succeeded in embarrassing the fedayeen ‘establishment’ by mounting operations that alienated international public opinion.41 The activities of both the establishment and the fringe groups became a burning issue in the dialogue across the battle lines.
Herzog met Rifa’i at the home of Dr Herbert in London on 23 April and recited a long list of recent cross-border raids in some of which, he alleged, the Jordanian Army was complicit. He then conveyed Meir’s request for a meeting between her chief of staff and the king. Rifa’i, who looked very tense, asked Herzog whether this was the only message he had brought. Herzog replied that he understood from a cable Hussein had sent from Paris that he wanted the two of them to set up another high-level meeting. Rifa’i reacted angrily by reading a prepared statement, the gist of which was that there had been numerous meetings since the previous May and that His Majesty was shocked that nothing had been achieved and that the Israelis had exploited the contacts to dissuade Jarring and the Americans from taking steps of their own. Rifa’i also warned that, if there was no progress on the political front, the security situation might deteriorate beyond their ability to control it. His Majesty had assumed a personal risk in formulating a six-point Arab peace plan and in getting Nasser to support it publicly. Israel had a first and last chance for true peace. If it responded, a new chapter would be opened, and Israel would be accepted as a sister state in the Middle East. On the other hand, if it chose to keep Arab territories, it would remain under siege until the Arabs decided to launch another round. Israel’s military power enabled it to reject peace proposals but not to impose a settlement. Rifa’i concluded by reading a statement from Hussein that said he saw no point in continuing the high-level talks with Israeli leaders unless they declared that they were ready to implement the Security Council Resolution 242. Herzog, however, asked for another meeting with Hussein before the talks were suspended.42
Hussein visited Washington in April to launch his six-point peace plan. At a meeting with President Nixon he presented the plan as a joint Jordanian–Egyptian initiative. In a speech to the National Press Club the king emphasized that the joint plan was based on UN Resolution 242. He proposed an end to belligerency, and the acknowledgement of Israel’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and right to live within secure and recognized borders. He also offered to guarantee Israel’s freedom of navigation through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. In return he expected Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied in June 1967 in accordance with the Arab interpretation of Resolution 242. Both he and the Egyptian president, he said, were prepared to sign an agreement with the Israeli government that fell short of a formal peace treaty, if the resolution was implemented. Israeli spokespersons immediately rejected the six-point plan. They insisted on the signing of a contractual peace treaty incorporating secure and recognized borders before withdrawal could begin. They pointed out that 242 did not demand complete withdrawal. And they insisted on direct negotiations between themselves and the neighbouring Arab states, although 242 did not require direct negotiations.43
Hussein’s patience with the Israelis was being stretched to breaking point. He met with Herzog on 25 April in Rifa’i’s room in the Dorchester Hotel in London. It was a tense meeting. Hussein said that if no political progress was achieved in the coming months, the clashes would escalate to the point where war would become inescapable. In response to a question, he said that the previous statement he had sent through Rifa’i referred to the suspension of the talks and not to breaking off contact. Since their last meeting the internal pressures on him had increased, and the situation along the border had deteriorated. In the Arab world he was under attack for striving for peace, while at the UN he heard that Israel was using the bilateral talks in order to prevent international action to deal with the dispute. Hussein wanted Israel to clarify its position regarding 242 before he would agree to another meeting. Herzog replied that he could not accept conditions for holding talks that were in their mutual interest but noted Hussein’s desire to have a detailed clarification of Israel’s stand at the next meeting. Hussein hoped to be presented with a clear and realistic stand rather than with a bargaining position. In his report on the meeting, Herzog commented that it was the first time that he had seen the king so deeply stressed.44 He paid a brief visit to Rifa’i two days later, and they set up another high-level meeting, in Aqaba Bay for 25 May.
This time the meeting took place neither on an Israeli ship nor on Hussein’s but on Coral Island. It started at eight in the evening, to enable the Israelis to leave Eilat under the cover of darkness. The conversation concluded with a decision that Eban would prepare a memorandum of principles for a peace settlement and that the advisers would meet again in June or July to take matters forward. Whereas in London Hussein had been very tense, on the island he seemed more relaxed and confident.45
Royal confidence was gradually eroded over the summer as a result of the escalation of the border war between the fedayeen and Israel. Paradoxically but unsurprisingly, the effort of the Jordanian government to assert control over the various fedayeen groups only drove them closer together. The border war took the form of guerrilla hit-and-run raids; Israeli shelling of fedayeen bases and Jordanian Army positions that gave them cover; heavy artillery battles in the Jordan Valley; and guerrilla incursions in the area of the Dead Sea and Eilat. On one occasion there was an exchange of fire near the king’s house in Aqaba. Under the leadership of defence minister Moshe Dayan, the IDF pursued an aggressive policy of retaliation that did not spare civilians, cities like Irbid and Salt, or regular army units suspected of extending active or passive support to the fedayeen. In Jordan the fedayeen were widely seen as brave freedom-fighters. In Israel they were seen as terrorists pure and simple, and dealt
with as such.
