Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  A third meeting between the two sides occurred at the same place on 19 November 1972. The suggestion of a defence pact was not raised again. Hussein and Rifa’i made a specific request for a corridor between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Meir suggested leaving the territorial question for negotiations at a later stage and pressed for a clear commitment that the Jordanian Army would not cross the Jordan River. The terms she proposed for a settlement were that the unpopulated part of the West Bank would remain in Israeli hands and the Jewish settlements would stay. ‘I believe that I have a majority in the Knesset and in the government in favour of this principle,’ she said. ‘Gahal [the right-wing opposition party] and the religious parties will be opposed but I have a majority.’ Hussein rejected the proposal out of hand. ‘I understand that you are offering me the Allon Plan,’ he said, ‘maybe more limited in scope, but it is out of the question.’ Meir stressed that she just wanted to keep unpopulated areas and estimated that there were only about 25,000 Arab inhabitants on the western side of the Jordan Valley. Hussein held to his position and explained to Meir that significant border changes would arouse the opposition of the Arab world. He reminded her that after he announced his federal plan Sadat severed diplomatic relations with Jordan.21

  The picture that emerged from the three meetings between Hussein and the Israeli leaders was bleak. Hussein had tried every approach in an effort to stimulate motion, but he reached a dead end. The positions of the two sides as presented at the talks were simply irreconcilable. Hussein’s position was clear and consistent, whereas the Israeli position was vague and evasive. One of the problems was that there was no official Israeli position at all: Meir’s offer, paltry as it was, had not been endorsed by her government. Even if Hussein had been foolhardy enough to accept it, there was no guarantee that the divided government would sanction it. The fact that Meir made this offer at all reflected her preference for land over peace as well as her indifference to Arab sensitivities. Israeli supremacy reinforced her natural intransigence. The truth of the matter was that Israel was in a position of unassailable power and did not therefore have to yield ground; and, because of this power, the only opinions the Israelis had to consider were internal ones. Time and again since the beginning of the secret meetings, Hussein told his Israeli interlocutors that he was ready for a peaceful settlement with them provided he could defend it in front of the Arab world. In Arab eyes land was sacred and inseparable from national honour. If Hussein had agreed to Meir’s terms he would have been instantly denounced by the entire Arab world as a traitor and as a collaborator with the enemy. Her offer was therefore a complete non-starter, just as all previous versions of the Allon Plan had been. Dayan, to his credit, at least recognized the futility of making an offer for a peace settlement that had no chance of being accepted. He therefore offered Hussein a defence pact in return for a pledge not to join an Arab war coalition against Israel. But this approach was no more successful because Hussein could not run the risk of becoming a pariah by relying on Israel for protection against his Arab neighbours. So in his relations with Israel, Hussein reached a stalemate.

  Jordan’s isolation in the Arab world increased its dependence on Anglo-American aid. British aid was small compared to that of America, and this contributed to the spreading of a sense of disillusion in Jordan with its ‘oldest friend.’ There was a belief that the British were losing interest in the Hashemite struggle for survival and that they were content to allow American influence to supplant British influence in the region. The question for the hard-headed policy-makers in Whitehall was whether the stability and survival of Hashemite Jordan mattered to Britain, given that Jordan had no oil or major potential as an export market, and that the Americans were already pouring a lot of money into the country. Glen Balfour-Paul, the new British ambassador, effectively answered these doubts. He argued to the Foreign Office that the Middle East would be a worse place without Hussein’s Jordan and that the Jordanians looked to Britain, indeed their ‘oldest friend’, to help with the development of their state and the stability of their regime. If Britain allowed Hussein to become too dependent on the Americans, his standing could suffer. It was in the interest of regional stability to strengthen the Hashemite regime and to diminish the risk of its replacement by a radical Arab demagogue. Balfour-Paul therefore suggested increasing British economic aid and arms sales to Jordan. Even if the Americans wished Jordan to be regarded as chasse guardée, he did not see why Britain should relinquish all hunting rights. He reminded his superiors that this was a military regime at least to the extent that military considerations played as much a part as any other in policy-making. Consequently, Britain’s standing in Jordan depended very considerably on its readiness to help over the problems of the armed forces.22 These arguments carried the day and resulted in a more supportive British policy towards the regime in Jordan.

  At about this time Prince Hassan, Hussein’s heir designate, was becoming increasingly involved in the affairs of state and taking over the supervision of more and more government business, particularly in the fields of economics and development. Hassan was unusual among the younger generation of Hashemite princes in not going to a military academy. He was the intellectual in the family. At Harrow, Hassan had a notably more distinguished academic career than his elder brother; and he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a degree in Oriental Languages, including Hebrew. Very soon after his return home, Hassan went into the family business. Jordan’s constitution does not assign any specific responsibilities to the crown prince; it was entirely at Hussein’s discretion to decide what duties to assign to his younger brother. From the beginning, the two developed a very good working relationship. In personality and style they were very different, yet they worked harmoniously. Hussein was intuitive, unsystematic and somewhat superficial; Hassan was serious, painstaking and methodical. Hussein relied on the personal touch to solve problems; he was impatient with paperwork, and he was pretty useless at keeping records. Hassan had an infinitely better understanding of the importance of research and record-keeping in the conduct of government business. Hussein was only too happy to delegate to his brother responsibility for overseeing complex projects that required sustained attention, such as the Five-Year plans. Within a short time, Hassan became Hussein’s main adviser. Because the crown prince was without specific powers, tensions sometimes arose between Hassan and the government. But Hussein had full trust in Hassan’s judgement, and he could discuss issues with him in complete confidence. For this reason Hussein could also entrust Hassan with sensitive briefs like preparing the plan for the United Arab Kingdom and holding a secret meeting with the Israeli minister of agriculture, Chaim Givati.

  In his valedictory dispatch from Amman, John Phillips noted that his period of service had seen the Hashemite regime emerge from the shadows into the sunlight. He found the dynastic rulers of Jordan rather more admirable in triumph than his predecessor had found them in the defeat of 1967. ‘King Hussein has some considerable qualifications for his job including physical courage, resilience, a disarming readiness to admit that he had made a nonsense of something… a good deal of personal charm and the capacity to inspire loyalty; also a large slice of luck. Prince Hassan is intelligent and very hard-working but his abrasiveness combined with his suspicious nature has made and may continue to make enemies of some who wish his country well.’ Hassan’s untrusting nature, on the other hand, also enabled him to see through and expose the motives of some of those who used their membership of the king’s inner circle for their own disreputable ends. Phillips therefore hoped that in future they would see less of ‘the slick exploiting the thick’.23

  Glen Balfour-Paul gave an eloquent account of his first impressions of the king and his brother. Their three-fold policy objectives were said to be a modus vivendi with the Israelis, reconciliation with the Palestinians and the development of the economy. Despite the façade of parliament and a ministerial system, he observed, it was in the person of the
king, and increasingly in that of the crown prince, that authority was concentrated: ‘Hussein and Hassan, vicar and curate of this truncated Arab parish who have been ex-communicated by the Bishops of Confrontation but who continue to serve the Mass (or the masses) after their own dissident doctrine.’ The first thing that struck the new ambassador was how harmoniously the two brothers complemented each other, the division of labour between the pair suiting their respective turns of mind. The king concerned himself with external affairs and public relations, the crown prince with internal affairs, planning and the economy. ‘The middle brother Mohammed, having inherited from his hapless father not only his gentle charm but also his less marketable qualities, has been put out to grass, though his functions as the Head of the Tribal Council are not purely honorary.’ As a man to talk to, Balfour-Paul thought that the crown prince outclassed the king: ‘At twenty-six his powers of intellectual concentration… are formidable, his jokes sophisticated, his English distinctly more fluent than mine.’24

  In the personal life of Hussein 1972 was noteworthy for the breakdown of his marriage to his second wife, Princess Muna. Hussein had embarked on this marriage a decade earlier despite opposition from the British ambassador and his own advisers. It was a source of much happiness in its early years and had produced two sons and two daughters. How and why it broke down is not known because both sides maintained a dignified silence. Recurrent rumours of Hussein’s marital infidelity were at least one likely source of strain. In any case, Hussein fell in love with another woman, and it was he who decided to dissolve the marriage.

  The woman who swept Hussein off his feet was Alia Toukan, who came from a prominent Palestinian family from Nablus. Alia was born in Cairo in 1948 to Baha Uddin Toukan, the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt. Young Hussein was a frequent visitor who stayed with the Toukans during school holidays and on his way to and from Victoria College in Alexandria. Alia was one year old when they first met, and he used to play with her. Baha Uddin Toukan subsequently served as Jordan’s ambassador to Ankara, London and the United Nations in New York, where Alia did an MA in Business and Public Relations at Hunter College. She was a beautiful and sophisticated young woman with an appreciation of the arts and a social conscience, very interested in human rights and the welfare of the poor. She was also lively and outward-going, and communicated easily with people from all walks of life. Her ambition was to become an ambassador for her country. When Hussein met her again she was working for Royal Jordanian Airlines, and he was very taken with her. It was he who asked her to oversee the International Water Ski Festival in Aqaba. Their romance flourished, and they got married in Amman on 24 December 1972, when he was thirty-seven and she was twenty-four. The title she assumed was Queen Alia Al-Hussein. Alia was a popular queen not least on account of her Palestinian background. She seemed to embody her husband’s vision of one united Jordanian–Palestinian family.

  16

  The October War

  All diplomatic activity to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict was suspended in the second half of 1972. Israel had no real interest in negotiating with any of its Arab neighbours; the principal aim of its policy was to preserve the territorial status quo on all fronts and make no concessions for the sake of peace. Underlying this was the assumption that the present state of affairs could be perpetuated indefinitely because Israel’s military power would deter the Arabs from going to war. Egypt, as the largest and most powerful of the Arab states, was the main target of the Israeli strategy of attrition. The essence of this strategy was to let President Sadat ‘sweat it out’, with his range of alternatives narrowing all the time, eventually, it was supposed, driving him to settle the conflict on Israel’s terms. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who replaced William Rogers as secretary of state, abandoned the effort to mediate between the Arab states and Israel. They adopted the Israeli belief that the stalemate in the Middle East served American as well as Israeli interests and that it worked against the Soviet Union and her Arab allies. With tacit American backing, Israel was free to pursue the policy that could fairly be described as ‘destination deadlock’.

  In relation to Jordan too Israel’s leaders displayed no diplomatic flexibility and no interest in a peace agreement. Under the influence of Moshe Dayan, the Labour-led government continued to consolidate its military control over the West Bank and to build more and more settlements in the Jordan Valley. Practical cooperation with the Jordanian authorities continued over a wide range of practical issues, including agriculture, the management of water resources, trade, taxation, banking, electricity, the provision of medical services and the repatriation of refugees. Paradoxically, what Simha Dinitz described as the state of de facto peace enjoyed by Israel reduced the incentive to strive for a formal, or de jure, peace: functional cooperation between Jordan and Israel contributed to the diplomatic stalemate in the Middle East.1 Hussein was convinced that if this was not broken, the result would be instability, turbulence and, eventually, war. In early February 1973 he arrived in Washington to share his forebodings with President Nixon and other senior American policy-makers. Kissinger describes the king’s predicament with insight and sympathy:

  Hussein repeated his willingness to make peace with Israel. But despite secret contacts he faced an impasse. Hussein symbolized the fate of Arab moderates. He was caught between his inability to sustain a war with Israel and his unwillingness to make a common cause with the radicals. He was prepared for a diplomatic solution, even a generous one, but Israel saw no incentive for negotiations as long as Hussein stood alone. Any return of conquered territories seemed to it less secure than the status quo. And the West Bank with its historic legacy would unleash violent domestic controversy in Israel – the National Religious Party, without which the governing coalition could not rule, was adamantly opposed to the return of any part of the West Bank.

  When Hussein returned to Washington on 27 February, Kissinger briefed him on the latest Egyptian proposals for resolving the conflict. Hussein’s reaction revealed the depth of his distrust for Sadat. Kissinger thus had indications of two separate approaches from two Arab leaders whose mutual suspicions kept them from combining. Sadat was using the Palestinians to gain a veto over Jordanian actions, while Hussein invoked American fears of Soviet intransigence to slow down a separate peace between Egypt and Israel.2

  Alone among Arab leaders at that time, Hussein was prepared to be specific about peace terms. At his second meeting with Kissinger he handed him a paper that spelled out the elements he had described at the first: ‘Jordan would negotiate directly with Israel over the West Bank. There would be some border changes provided the Gaza Strip was given in return. If Jordanian sovereignty was restored, there could be Israeli outposts along the Jordan River or even Israeli settlements, provided they were isolated enclaves on Jordanian territory; he could not agree to the annexation of the Jordan Valley by Israel. Wryly the King said that all these proposals had already been made directly to Israel and been rejected. What was needed was an American proposal, not another Jordanian one.’ The paper in fact represented an improvement on Hussein’s previous offer to the Israelis. At the secret meeting with Moshe Dayan on 29 June 1972, Hussein had ruled out Israeli bases and settlements on Jordanian territory, whereas the paper to Kissinger allowed for enclaves. The next visitor to Washington was Golda Meir. At a meeting with Nixon on 1 March 1973, she proclaimed that ‘we have never had it so good’ and insisted that the stalemate was safe because the Arabs had no military option. The Americans accepted her argument and stepped up their economic and military aid to Israel.3 No American proposal followed Hussein’s visit, and his conversations with Kissinger led nowhere.

  The complacency and conceit that Meir displayed in Washington also coloured her attitude to Jordan. She and Hussein met secretly on Israeli territory on 9 May 1973, at a time when there were clashes between the Lebanese Army and the PLO forces in southern Lebanon; there were also early signs that Egypt and Syria were preparing for military
action against Israel. Hussein sent warnings to Washington that the Egyptian and Syrian military preparations were too realistic to be considered manoeuvres.4 At the meeting the king asked the prime minister to stop Israeli planes flying over Jordan on their return from surveillance missions in Syria. Meir flatly rejected the request. Syrian threats to attack Israel, she said, made it impossible to accede to the king’s request. Another meeting took place on 6 August, which dealt mainly with economic issues such as Israeli encouragement for foreign investment in Jordan, Jordanian–Israeli cooperation in exploiting the mineral resources of the Dead Sea, measures to relieve the housing shortage in Amman and agricultural development in the Jordan Valley. A peace settlement was no longer on the agenda for the top-level bilateral meetings.5

  Israel’s diplomatic intransigence and Arab threats of war placed Hussein in an awkward position. He did not want to repeat the mistake he had made in 1967 of allowing other Arab leaders to drag Jordan into a war with Israel for which Jordan had been completely unprepared. To do so it was necessary to communicate with the leaders of the other confrontation states, but both Egypt and Syria had broken off diplomatic relations with Jordan: Egypt over the United Arab Kingdom plan and Syria over Black September. So in early December 1972 Hussein sent Zaid Rifa’i on a secret mission to Cairo to meet with Sadat. The meeting lasted six hours, and Sadat was very frank. He told Rifa’i, ‘I know I am not Tarzan. I realize my limitations. I am not good at blitzkrieg. The Israelis are good at blitzkrieg. I will fight a war of political reactivation and not of military liberation. I will wage a limited war: cross the canal, secure a bridgehead and stop. Then I will ask the Security Council to call for a ceasefire. This strategy will ensure my victory in the battle, cut my losses and reactivate the peace process.’ Rifa’i pointed out to his host the risks involved in this strategy, but Sadat was not convinced. On the other hand, Sadat welcomed Rifa’i’s suggestion that the king visit him in Cairo. At first Sadat stipulated conditions for the meeting but later dropped them and invited Hussein to join him and President Asad of Syria for a three-day summit in Cairo, beginning 10 September 1973.6