Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Fatah, the largest commando organization, went further in its reply and called for the overthrow of Hussein. Fatah’s statement said that ‘the centre of the dispute is the king, the Hashemite dynasty and the regime.’ The dynasty was denounced for its history of conspiracy against the Palestinian people and for its role in serving imperialist objectives in the region. Hussein’s plan was described as an ‘artificial and fake structure with reactionary contents designed to consecrate subjugation to imperialism and Zionism’. Accordingly, the statement called for ‘getting rid of the dynasty and overthrowing the monarchy in Jordan’.7 The Arab press generally sided with the Palestinians against the regime. Its comments were either negative or lukewarm about the plan, and there was the familiar preoccupation with restating Palestinian ‘rights’ rather than with any realistic discussion of how these might be realized.8 Reactions of the mayors on the West Bank were largely unenthusiastic or negative, although a few welcomed the plan. The mayor of Hebron captured the prevalent mood of scepticism when he remarked, using an old Arab saying, that the king was selling fish in the sea.9

  The Arab leaders, with very few exceptions, none of them heroic, joined in the chorus of condemnation. The PLO claimed to be the only party with the right to represent the Palestinians, and most Arab leaders found it convenient to placate the PLO by endorsing this claim. Some may have been motivated by genuine commitment to the Palestinian cause, while others played the Palestinian card for cynical reasons of their own. Foremost among the latter was Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor. For Hussein the death of Nasser removed his most weighty supporter in the Arab world and caused the collapse of the Amman–Cairo alliance. Sadat would reverse Nasser’s foreign policy by moving from pan-Arabism to an Egypt-first attitude, by changing from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation and by abandoning the commitment to a comprehensive settlement in favour of a separate deal with Israel. The change and the camouflage are illustrated by a popular story about Sadat and his driver. As they were approaching a crossroads, the driver asked Sadat which way to turn. Sadat asked which way Nasser used to go and the driver replied that Nasser used to turn left. Sadat’s instruction was ‘In that case, indicate left and turn right!’

  Sadat’s attitude towards Hussein was hostile from the beginning. Soon after Sadat became president, Hussein suggested a visit to Cairo in the hope of establishing a good working relationship. Against the background of rumours that Hussein had met with Yigal Allon, Sadat thought that a meeting with the Jordanian king would look like giving a blessing to his clandestine contacts with the Israelis. So, on 23 November, Sadat sent his chief of staff, General Muhammad Sadiq, to Amman to ask Hussein bluntly whether he had seen any Israeli leader recently. Although Hussein was evasive, Sadiq got the firm impression that Hussein had seen Allon, and the proposed visit was delayed.10 Another unfriendly act by Sadat was the release from prison of the assassins of Wasfi Tall. Sadat suspected Hussein of planning to make a separate deal with Israel over the West Bank, while Hussein suspected Sadat of planning to make a separate deal with Israel over Sinai. Sadat came under attack from the PLO for his own overtures towards Israel, and specifically for the offer of 4 February 1971 of an interim settlement based on the reopening of the Suez Canal and the withdrawal of the Israeli forces to the Sinai Passes. By posing as the champion of the Palestinians, Sadat sought to deflect their anger from himself to the Jordanian monarch. Sadat’s response to the launching of the United Arab Kingdom scheme was a dramatic announcement, at the Palestine Peoples Conference in Cairo, of his decision to sever diplomatic relations with Jordan. Objection to a hypothetical plan that had next to nothing to do with Egypt was a bizarre reason for breaking off diplomatic relations, but the decision was well received by the conference and the radical Arab states.

  Syria, Algeria and Libya had already broken off diplomatic relations with Jordan in September 1970. The Algerian press saw Hussein’s plan as proof of a Zionist–imperialist plot aimed at putting a double seal on the fate of the whole of Palestine, with one part administered from Amman and the other from Tel Aviv. A leading article in the government-controlled daily El Moudjahid labelled the Jordanian initiative as the Allon Plan under a different guise and found in it further evidence of the permanent collusion between Jordan and Israel.11 The Algerian article was typical of the entire Arab reaction to the UAK plan. Arab politicians and the Arab media worked themselves into a state of frenzy – over a plan that had no chance of being realized for the obvious reason that the area in question was under Israeli occupation. The sensible response would have been to let the whole thing drift into oblivion. The greatest irony of all was that on this occasion there was no consultation, let alone collusion, between Hussein and Israel prior to his speech.

  The initial Israeli reaction to Hussein’s announcement was overtly hostile. Israel rejected the king’s federal plan on the grounds that the king was presuming to regulate the future of Israeli-controlled territory before negotiating its return. If he wanted to recover the West Bank, he first had to negotiate with them and find out their conditions.12 But although Golda Meir’s rejection of the plan was swift, it was not absolute. She did not reject the federal idea, only the territorial conception behind the plan. In a speech to the Knesset on 16 March, she said that Israel never interfered in the internal structure or form of an Arab regime. If the King of Jordan had seen fit to change the name of his kingdom to ‘Palestine’ and modify its internal structure, she would have raised no objections. But she had strong objections to the king’s initiative because it affected Israel’s borders and security. She criticized Hussein’s speech for ignoring Israel’s presence on the West Bank; for making no mention of willingness to negotiate with Israel or to make peace with it before making changes to the status quo; and for treating the State of Israel as nothing but ‘a Zionist plot to gain control over Palestine’. The plan itself, according to Meir, was ‘a pretentious and one-sided statement which not only does not serve the interest of peace, but is liable to spur on all the extremist elements whose aim is war against Israel’. Meir’s strident rejection of Hussein’s federal plan was music to the ears of Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah and chairman of the PLO. Arafat and his colleagues regarded the king’s move as ‘an attempt to put the PLO out of business’. Arafat told his biographer that if Israel had agreed to withdraw from the West Bank, Hussein would have made peace with it immediately ‘and the PLO would have been finished. Absolutely finished. Sometimes I think we are lucky to have the Israelis as our enemies. They have saved us many times!’13

  Nothing could have been further removed from Meir’s intention than helping the PLO. Her rejection of it was absolute and unconditional. She had never shown any interest in the Palestinian option because she regarded the Palestinians as the irreconcilable enemy of Israel. Her views about the Palestinians had been formed in the pre-independence period and had hardly changed. In November 1947 she and King Abdullah had reached an agreement to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians, and that policy held until early June 1967. After June 1967 she remained unremittingly hostile towards Palestinian nationalism; in fact, she refused to acknowledge that the Palestinians were a nation or that they had any right to national self-determination. As prime minister she was well known for her anachronistic and hardline views about the Palestinian problem, and she achieved notoriety for her statement that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. ‘It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,’ she told journalists in June 1969. ‘They did not exist.’14

  Simha Dinitz, who served as director-general of the prime minister’s office from 1969 to 1973, explained: ‘For Golda the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, from the demographic and the geographic point of view, was to place them under Jordan’s jurisdiction. An attempt to deal with the Palestinian question without linking it to Jordan, in other word
s, an attempt to create an additional state between Israel and Jordan, would not succeed because such a state would not have an adequate geographic or demographic base. This was the foundation of her thinking. Consequently, in order to arrive at a solution to the Palestinian problem, a link with Jordan had to be forged. Hence all the meetings and discussions with Hussein.’ Dinitz also argued that, although a peace agreement was not achieved, Israel’s dealings with Jordan were successful in a number of different ways:

  First, the dialogue with Jordan prevented the rise of the PLO as a central force in the Palestinian arena. As long as the dialogue continued, the PLO was prevented from becoming the main spokesman of the Palestinians or the most important spokesman.

  Second, the contact yielded all sorts of agreements, ranging from the fight against terrorists to the fight against mosquitoes. These practical and security agreements between Israel and Hussein created a situation of de facto peace, though not de jure peace. On the one hand, there was the policy of open bridges across the Jordan River; on the other hand, there was a coordinated effort to suppress the terrorists who threatened both Jordan and us. There was also cooperation in practical matters such as the division of land, farming, pest control and irrigation.

  Third, the contacts with Hussein created a precedent for a direct dialogue with an Arab leader. They made Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem seem less revolutionary and less incredible than it would have otherwise.15

  Unlike Meir, Allon changed his position on the preferred partner for a settlement after 1967, largely as a result of the personal relationship he had formed with Hussein. Whereas the meetings with Hussein merely reinforced Meir’s basic pro-Hashemite views, in Allon’s case they brought about a change of orientation. Having been a proponent of the Palestinian option after the June War, Allon became the most fervent proponent of the Jordanian option. In an interview to the daily newspaper Ma’ariv, Allon tried to soften the impression created by Meir’s speech in the Knesset. He said that there was no absolute conflict between the Allon Plan and Hussein’s plan as far as the political structure of the Jordanian-Palestinian entity was concerned; the difference related to the borders with Israel. Hussein’s premise of a return to the pre-1967 borders was totally unacceptable to the Israeli deputy prime minister.16 Allon’s favourable comments about Hussein’s plan fed the rumours of collusion across the Jordan. But there had been no collusion and no prior agreement.

  Discussion between Hussein and the Israeli prime minister about the United Arab Kingdom plan took place after, not before, its public announcement. The meeting took place in an air-conditioned caravan in the Araba Desert, south of the Dead Sea, on 21 March 1972. By that time defence minister Moshe Dayan had established his ascendancy in the cabinet over his rival Allon. The exclusion of Allon from the meeting with his ‘old friend’ heralded a hardening of the Israeli position. Allon advocated peace with Jordan based on territorial compromise over the West Bank. Dayan wanted to maintain Israeli control over the whole of the West Bank even if it meant no peace treaty with Jordan. He advocated a functional solution, the essence of which was that the Palestinians would run their own affairs on the West Bank with open bridges to the East Bank, while Israel remained in charge of security and continued to build Jewish settlements there. This, too, was unacceptable to the king.17 Dayan’s position was dictated by internal politics and made no sense in terms of foreign policy. In her speech in the Knesset, Meir was prepared to go along with it and rebuked the king for ignoring the need to negotiate with Israel. But she offered no realistic alternative basis for negotiations.

  The Israeli plan was of course completely unacceptable to Hussein, but his interest in continuing to meet with the Israeli leaders was unaffected by their intransigence. He continued to believe that secret contact with the Israelis was important: first, it was essential to limit the extent of clashes that took place along the ceasefire line; second, he needed to check regularly for any sign of a less inflexible attitude on Israel’s part towards a settlement.18 At the start of the meeting on 21 March, Meir complained that Hussein had not given her advance warning of the United Arab Kingdom plan. Hussein apologized and said that his intention was to implement the plan after reaching a peace agreement with Israel. Meir was not mollified and complained further that in his speech Hussein spoke of liberating all the occupied territories – ‘Maybe you mean Tel Aviv as well?’ she inquired sarcastically. Since Hussein was not ready for significant territorial changes, she suggested seeking temporary arrangements. Hussein asked her to allow him access to the people of the West Bank in order to build up support for the federal plan. Meir replied that this was a complex matter that carried the risk of raising false hopes of a territorial settlement among the Palestinians.

  She then posed two questions of her own: could His Majesty sign a separate peace agreement with Israel; and could the peace agreement be based on substantial border modifications? To the first question Hussein gave an affirmative reply, provided the peace agreement could be fitted into an appropriate framework. He spoke of a peace that would put an end to all the wars. Regarding the second question, Hussein saw no possibility of significant border changes. The whole of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, had to be part of the federation under his crown. He realized that since 1967 Israel had built Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and dispossessed many Arabs, but the eastern part of the city had to remain under Arab rule. To reinforce his words, and to address the Israeli concern with security, Hussein presented a working paper in which Jordan agreed to the demilitarization of the entire West Bank after its transfer, along with the Gaza Strip, to Jordanian rule. Jerusalem would serve as the capital of the two nations and did not have to be redivided.

  Hussein argued that Jordan and Israel had a common interest in preventing the Syrians and the Iraqis from gaining political dominance over the Palestinians. Meir suggested that Jordan should not be part of an eastern front against Israel in the event of war; that Syrian and Iraqi forces should not be stationed on Jordanian territory; and that Jordan and Israel should prepare joint contingency plans to meet changes in the regional status quo. Hussein did not respond to these specific suggestions but asked again to be allowed to develop his links with the inhabitants of the West Bank. Meir made no promises but offered to send an authorized representative to discuss the matter. This would be Moshe Dayan, who as minister of defence was responsible for security in all the occupied territories.19

  On 29 June 1972 Dayan accompanied Meir to a meeting in Wadi Araba with Hussein and Zaid Rifa’i. Dayan urged Hussein to seek a settlement with Meir because of her strong position at home and her flexibility, but he warned that even she could not settle without significant border changes. In the absence of a settlement, the danger of war increased. The question was whether Jordan would join Egypt if Egypt went to war against Israel. Hussein rejected this approach and repeated his earlier request for access to the Palestinians of the West Bank. ‘I hoped you would come up with new ideas, as the prime minister promised,’ he said. Dayan, however, continued to make his pitch for an agreement with Meir: ‘Leave aside the Palestinian issue for twenty years. It is in your interest to reach an arrangement with Golda. Her line would be more convenient for you than my line.’ The most that Hussein was prepared to consider was changes to the 1949 armistice agreement that separated villages from their land. Dayan’s next move was to offer Hussein a defence pact. The idea was to formalize Israel’s policy of preserving the territorial integrity of Jordan in return for a Jordanian commitment not to join any Arab war coalition against Israel, as it did in 1967. ‘Israel’, said Dayan, ‘is prepared to rush to Jordan’s aid, possibly in cooperation with the United States, if pressure on Jordan increases as a result of its refusal to join in the war. We are even prepared for a defence pact.’

  Hussein and Rifa’i did not wish to pursue the suggestion of a secret agreement. They preferred to concentrate on practical matters such as the building of a security fence along the border in the sou
th to prevent infiltration and terrorist attacks. Although Hussein did not take up Dayan’s specific offer, he sought to preserve the option of Israeli aid in a crisis without a written pledge on either side. He also knew that the extremists in Israel had wanted to topple the monarchy in September 1970, and he was anxious to persuade Israel’s leaders that one day he might be able to overcome Arab constraints and make a peace settlement with them. But both he and Rifa’i made it clear to Dayan that neither IDF bases nor civilian settlements could remain on the West Bank once a peace agreement was reached. In response to Dayan’s question about their ideas for a permanent settlement, Rifa’i replied that it must be based on the 4 June 1967 border. The only concession that Rifa’i would consider was not to station Jordan’s army on the West Bank following the Israeli withdrawal.20