Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  After his victory, Hussein took the initiative and arranged to meet with his old friend Yigal Allon. On 3 October, with Rifa’i and Herzog in attendance, the King of Jordan and the deputy prime minister of Israel carried on an uninterrupted conversation for ninety minutes in an air-conditioned car parked in the Araba Desert north of Eilat.57

  The king opened the conversation by expressing his heartfelt thanks for the willingness that Israel had shown to help him in the recent crisis. He then proceeded to shed some new light on what had happened in Jordan. There was a serious plan for a revolution to coincide with the general strike, and he had pre-empted it by only three days. In the Amman area alone he discovered 360 subterranean bases, modelled on those of the Vietcong. He held about 20,000 detainees – among them some Chinese ‘advisers’ – and planned to screen the rest thoroughly before releasing them. In the Fatah bases a lot of documents were captured that would be very valuable in tracking down the terrorists. The king thought he had succeeded in breaking the backbone of the terror organizations. Paradoxically, he said, Nasser’s last deed was to prevent the complete ostracizing of Jordan in Cairo. Hussein’s impression was that Nasser had not been opposed to the action against the fedayeen but was troubled by the length of time it took. Nasser thought that, had the Syrians got into trouble in Jordan, the Iraqis would have invaded Syria. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had not stopped their financial support for Jordan because of its actions; only Libya had done so. Arafat was a liar, and chiefly responsible for the crisis; but it was necessary to continue to deal with him because, in addition to being the leader of Fatah, he was the chairman of the umbrella Palestinian organization. Hussein said he was determined to build a new Jordanian society. There was no longer a place for the old politicians. He could not repeat the operation he had just carried out and only by building new foundations could a similar crisis be averted in future.

  The more concrete part of the conversation concerned joint action against the fedayeen and against Iraq. Hussein reported that the fedayeen were concentrated mainly in the Ajlun area. He kept forces between them and the border with Israel and also behind them. He promised to do his utmost to prevent fedayeen attacks against Israel and agreed to examine Allon’s suggestion of forming mobile units to patrol the border area. According to Hussein, the area south of Amman, including the area from the Dead Sea to Eilat, had been cleared of terrorists. He indicated that the forces he had stationed along the border were very slight because the bulk of them were engaged in completing the task of restoring order. Hussein also reported that he had started work on getting the Iraqi forces out of Jordan. He said he wanted to have a swift means of communication with the Israelis because he might again need to ask them at short notice for an air strike – this time against the Iraqis.

  There was some discussion about resuming the peace talks under the auspices of Dr Jarring, which had been suspended by Israel following the Egyptian violation of the terms of the Rogers Plan ceasefire. Hussein claimed that by accepting the plan, Nasser had in effect agreed to enter into peace talks with Israel. Nasser had told him that before agreeing, he had placed his deputy, Anwar Sadat, under house arrest to silence his opposition to the American initiative. Hussein himself wanted to resume the talks but could not do so until the talks with Egypt had begun. Allon suggested secret trilateral talks between Israel, Jordan and Egypt, but Hussein did not see this as a real possibility. He pointed out that the second stage of the Jarring talks involved direct negotiations between Israel and the Arabs.

  Finally, Allon put forward the idea of forming a Palestinian entity on the West Bank that would serve as an alternative to the guerrilla leaders and eventually link up with the Palestinians on the East Bank. In its original version, the Allon Plan envisaged a link between the West Bank and Israel. Hussein said that he accepted the idea in principle but could not make any commitments until he was presented with the details. Allon explained that this was a private idea of his for an interim settlement and that it had not been approved by the cabinet.58 Allon added that he had had this idea since 1967 and that he was prepared to raise it in cabinet since Hussein’s reaction was positive. Allon was encouraged by the fact that, having rejected the Allon Plan as a permanent settlement, Hussein was now willing to consider it as an interim one.

  After securing Hussein’s agreement, Allon presented his idea to the prime minister. He argued that a pro-Hashemite autonomy on the West Bank would provide the best available interim solution, with Israel remaining in the Jordan Valley and Hussein in charge of law and order in the heavily populated Palestinian areas. Allon also pointed out that an interim settlement could go on indefinitely. Meir convened an informal group of ministers who discussed the idea and rejected it unanimously, with Moshe Dayan leading the opposition. So Allon could not go back to Hussein with an official proposal, and the plan fell by the wayside. Allon considered Hussein’s agreement in principle to the plan of Palestinian autonomy as highly significant and the cabinet’s rejection of it as a cardinal error.59

  The more pressing issue for Hussein was how to regulate the presence of the Palestinian organizations on the East Bank of his kingdom. On 13 October he signed another agreement with Arafat. The Amman Agreement required the fedayeen to respect the laws of Jordan, to disband their bases and not to wear uniform or bear arms in public. But the fedayeen won one major victory: recognition by the Jordanian government of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. This clause enabled the fedayeen spokesmen to claim that, although they lost the battle militarily, they won it politically. Since the Palestinians constituted well over half the population of Jordan, the agreement implied recognition of Arafat as co-sovereign of the country. This was the first formal recognition of the PLO’s independent role by an Arab state, and it set in motion a process that culminated in the Rabat summit decision of 1974, which designated the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Wasfi Tall strongly objected to this clause, but Hussein disregarded his warning, saying they would find a way round it.60 On the Palestinian side Habash and Hawatmeh rejected the Amman Agreement and resumed their attacks on the monarchy. They openly called for the liberation of Jordan as a necessary prelude to the liberation of Palestine. Faced with a renewed challenge to his authority from radical Palestinian factions, Hussein invited Tall to form a new government.

  At the end of October, Tall thus became prime minister for the third time. The fedayeen regarded him as their arch-enemy and suspected that he was appointed to continue the war against them. This public image was not entirely justified. From the beginning of his political career Tall identified with the plight of the Palestinians and advocated turning Jordan into a springboard for the liberation of Palestine. His main criticism of the PLO was that, instead of pursuing the struggle against Israel, it became involved in subversion against the Jordanian regime. Tall also had a low opinion of Arafat and questioned his motives. On one occasion Tall lost his temper with Arafat and shouted at him: ‘You are a liar; you don’t want to fight!’61 On becoming prime minister, Tall insisted on strict observance of all previous agreements with the government by all the fedayeen organizations. His first priority was law and order for the sake of internal security and stability.

  Within a week of Tall’s installation, clashes occurred between the army and the PFLP and the PDFLP. Tall was much tougher and more uncompromising than Hussein, and very popular in the army. His name was a byword for loyalty to the crown, courage, honesty and, above all, integrity. Under Tall’s vigorous leadership the army continued to consolidate its control of the cities and of the roads leading to them, and in January 1971 launched an offensive against the fedayeen bases along the road from Amman to Jerash. In March it drove the fedayeen out of Irbid, their principal stronghold in the north. In April, Tall ordered the PLO to remove all the fedayeen from the capital and to relocate them in the wooded hills between Jerash and Ajlun. The feda-yeen put up some resistance, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and outg
unned. In the middle of July the army launched the final assault in the Jerash–Ajlun area and after four days of fighting overpowered the last pockets of resistance. About 2,000 fedayeen surrendered and were later allowed to move to Syria, and about 200 crossed the river, preferring to surrender to the Israeli rather than to the Jordanian Army. The rupture between Jordan and the PLO was complete. The PLO state within a state was snuffed out and exclusive Jordanian sovereignty was re-established over the country. At a press conference on 17 July, Hussein stated that Jordan was ‘completely quiet’ and that there was ‘no problem’ now.62

  Jordan had erupted into civil war not because of the relationship between the regime and its Palestinian population but because of the challenge to the regime mounted by the fedayeen as an armed movement. By driving out the fedayeen, the regime solved the immediate problem. But it also left behind a bitter legacy of mistrust and resentment, and an overwhelming desire to exact revenge. The civil war was one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Palestinians, and it came to be known as Eylul al-Aswad, or ‘Black September’. Fatah felt betrayed and humiliated by what it called the CIA-backed regime, and it formed a commando group that went by the name of Black September. Its first operation was an act of revenge against the regime that had driven all resistance out of Jordan. On 28 November 1971 four members of Black September assassinated Wasfi Tall outside the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo. His last words were: ‘They killed me. Murderers… they believe only in fire and destruction.’ Egyptian security was very lax, and the murderers were released a few months later, giving rise to Jordanian suspicions that the Egyptians and the Palestinians had plotted the murder together.63 The following day Tall was buried with full military honours in the Royal Cemetery adjoining Hussein’s palace in Amman. Hussein, who was said to be ‘desolated’ by the death of his prime minister, could not hold back his tears as he headed the thousands of mourners who accompanied Tall on his last journey.64

  The civil war of 1970/71 was a major landmark in the career of Hussein both internally and externally. Internally, it marked the emergence of a distinct Jordanian identity. Until the civil war Hussein had made a sustained effort to blur the distinction between Jordanians and Palestinians, and cultivated the myth that all his subjects were one big happy family. After the civil war Hussein embarked on a process of Jordanization of the civil service and of the armed forces of the kingdom. The rift between Hussein and his Palestinian subjects also weakened his will to reimpose his sovereignty over the West Bank. Hussein began a very slow and uncertain process of political disengagement from the West Bank of his kingdom, a process that reached its climax in 1988.

  In foreign relations too the crisis of September 1970 was rich in lessons and consequences for the king. On the one hand, it underlined Jordan’s isolation in the Arab world and its dependence on Western and Israeli support. The oil-producing states cut their subsidies to Jordan after the repression of the fedayeen. On the other, the courage and decisiveness with which Hussein eventually acted to defend his rule against the combined Palestinian-Syrian challenge greatly impressed the Western powers and Israel. Before the showdown the prevalent view among Anglo-American diplomats in Amman was that the monarchy was doomed and that the Palestinians were well on the way to taking over the country. Right-wing Israelis not only expected but wanted actively to support the PLO in its drive to transform the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into the Republic of Palestine. By crushing the fedayeen, Hussein confounded the prophets of doom and demonstrated to his enemies the staying power of his dynasty. Nixon commended him on his performance, authorized $10 million in aid to Jordan and requested another $30 million from Congress to reinforce the regime against its enemies. Hussein’s victory also persuaded some, though by no means all, right-wing Israelis that they could not solve the Palestinian problem at Jordan’s expense. From Hussein’s point of view the covert relationship with the Israeli political establishment gained even greater significance as a result of the role it played during the crisis. Israel became a crucial factor in the complex formula that governed Hussein’s foreign policy -one in which everything was variable except the interests of Jordan and the survival of the monarchy.

  15

  The United Arab Kingdom Plan

  Hussein’s victory over the fedayeen in 1970/71 restored his control over the East Bank of his kingdom but left unresolved many issues about the future of the West Bank. First among them was Israel’s consolidation of its presence through the steady expansion of civilian settlements. Hussein was also troubled by growing separatist tendencies: one on the East Bank, which had the support of an influential faction in Amman, including his mother; and another on the West Bank, which favoured drifting away from Jordan and towards coexistence with Israel. There was growing Arab and international support for the idea of a separate Palestinian entity. On top of all these concerns was the suspicion that Egypt and its closest allies were plotting a deal whereby the PLO would tacitly accept UN Resolution 242 in return for a Palestinian state comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and north-western Jordan. For Hussein this was too high a price to pay for ridding himself of the Palestinians and their aspirations – and even if he had been willing to pay it, his army would not have let him.1

  In fact, Hussein’s thinking was moving not towards cutting his losses on the West Bank but towards a more creative solution based on recognizing the emergence of a Palestinian identity and granting his Palestinian subjects the right to self-determination. Having defeated the fedayeen, he wanted to offer the Palestinians at least limited political independence. In the aftermath of the civil war, Hussein saw three possible solutions: for the West Bank to be reunited with Jordan in a unitary state as it had been from 1950 to 1967; a federation between the two banks of the Jordan; or an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank. Hussein favoured the second, federal, solution. All of these, however, were predicated on Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Palestinian agreement. Hussein was convinced that the party that had the best chance of regaining the West Bank was Jordan. He also felt a personal duty to regain Jerusalem. He claimed that he wanted Israel to withdraw not so that Jordan could re-establish its rule over the West Bank but so that the Palestinians would be able to choose their own future. He was even prepared to give the Arab League a mandate over the West Bank in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. But it was very difficult to persuade either the PLO or the Arab states that this was his true motive.2

  Suspicion was fuelled by what the British ambassador described as ‘a measure of schizophrenia’ in Hussein’s attitude to the West Bank. Once, in the dark days of September 1970, Hussein remarked that in order to get the Palestinians off his back he would gladly wash his hands of the West Bank and content himself with old Transjordan. Later, he started talking of self-determination for the West Bank after a settlement. Then ‘Jordanian Jerusalem’ became a sticking point. And finally he started speaking of giving the West Bankers a chance after a settlement to opt for self-government within a federation.3 If royal inconsistency was one problem, Palestinian disunity was another. Hussein thought that the Palestinians were so hopelessly split that they could never agree on anything among themselves. In the occupied territories alone there were at least three identifiable factions, not to mention the proliferation of ideologically opposed Palestinian organizations in Jordan and elsewhere. He concluded that they would be able to sort themselves out only after the imposition of a settlement.4

  On 15 March 1972, in an address to parliament, Hussein launched his plan for the radical reorganization of his kingdom. The plan was the product of a committee that had conducted its work in secret under the chairmanship of Crown Prince Hassan. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was to be renamed the United Arab Kingdom (UAK) and to consist of two autonomous regions, Jordan and Palestine, united under a central government, with a National Assembly in Amman. Amman was to be the capital of the Jordanian region while Arab Jerusalem was to be the capital of the Palestinian region. Each region
was to have its own governor-general, a government and a directly elected ‘People’s Council’. The central government was to be responsible for foreign affairs and defence, and there was to be one army with the king as its ‘Supreme Commander’. A supreme court was to serve as the central authority for both regions. In essence, Hussein’s speech was an affirmation of his belief in the unity of the kingdom but also the acknowledgement of some sort of separate Palestinian entity – a major development.5

  Hussein issued his manifesto for a United Arab Kingdom for several reasons. It offered a rallying point for the Palestinians, and especially the West Bankers: maintaining a Palestinian identity with a fellow Arab state would, he thought, always be preferable to maintaining it with Israel, which would inevitably dominate any Palestinian ‘independence’. Also, the plan staked a claim for the Jordanian monarch, and not the multi-vocal fedayeen leaders, to represent the Palestinians and to find a solution for the West Bank that could bring long-term security to his kingdom. Finally, by asserting himself as the champion of the Palestinians, Hussein hoped to regain respectability in the eyes of moderate Arab opinion and to create the conditions for the resumption of the subsidies from the oil-producing Arab states that were cut off following the repression of the fedayeen in Jordan.

  Hussien’s plan was an unmitigated failure that fell between every conceivable stool. It was greeted with a unanimous chorus of condemnation in the Arab world. Hussein was personally attacked in unusually strong language and his plan rejected out of hand. It was as if he were trying to steal something that did not belong to him: the land of the Palestinians. The general Arab view seemed to be that the whole thing was a plot between the Americans, the Israelis and the king. Hussein had succeeded in uniting all the Palestinian guerrilla organizations but, ironically, in total opposition to his proposals. Rejection, especially by the radical factions, was immediate, vehement, vitriolic and even violent. On the day after Hussein spoke, the PLO’s Executive Committee issued a statement that said the people of Palestine alone had the right to decide their own future and the future of their cause. The Jordanian regime was denounced for its cooperation with world imperialism and for ‘offering itself as an accomplice to the Zionist enemy’. The conflict was said to be not between Jordanian and Palestinian but ‘between a subservient and collusive regime and a people who have adopted armed struggle as a way to achieve their wishes and to recover their rights’. Hussein was charged with going against the Arab consensus ‘by breaking the isolation of the Israeli wild beast and unleashing it on the Arab nation’ through the United Arab Kingdom plan. The plan itself was said to be Arab only in name, ‘while its mind and will would be Israeli’. The statement ended with a rousing call on all patriotic Arabs to frustrate the plot by the ‘feudalist’ Hashemite regime to liquidate the Palestinian resistance.6