Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  What distinguished Madrid from previous Arab–Israeli conferences was that there the Palestinians were represented for the first time on a footing of equality with Israel. Madrid registered the arrival of the Palestinians, long the missing party, at the Middle East conference table. The mere presence of official Palestinian representatives in Madrid marked a change, if not a reversal, of Israel’s long-standing refusal to consider the Palestinians as a partner to negotiations, as an interlocuteur valable. The principal outcome of Madrid was, as Baker had intended, to establish a twin-track framework for bilateral negotiations between the parties: an Israeli–Arab track and an Israeli–Palestinian track. Although no progress was made on substantive issues, a framework for ongoing negotiations was established.

  Both parts of the joint delegation considered the Madrid conference a success. The Palestinians took charge of their own diplomatic struggle for independence and kept open the option of an eventual confederation with Jordan. The Jordanians, after more than two decades of futile diplomacy, were finally engaged in a serious international effort to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East on the basis of UN resolutions. In addition, Jordan’s participation at the conference went some way towards repairing the damage caused by its conduct during the Gulf crisis. Most importantly, at Madrid, Jordan succeeded in making a clear distinction between the Jordanian national identity and the Palestinian national identity and in discrediting the notion of al-watan al-badeel, of Jordan as an ‘alternative homeland’ for the Palestinians. From this point, Jordan was free to pursue its own peace diplomacy in conformity with the general Arab consensus rather than in defiance of it, as Sadat had done a decade earlier.19

  In the Jordanian parliament, Islamic opposition to the peace talks with Israel was stepped up in the aftermath of Madrid. The Muslim Brotherhood merged with independent Islamists to form the Islamic Action Front (IAF). The new party conducted a campaign against the government of Taher Masri because he was a secular liberal, because some of his ministers were considered leftists and above all because of the government’s peace policy. Fifty out of the eighty members of parliament voted for a motion of no confidence in the government. The king urged Masri to soldier on regardless of the opposition. But if he had done so, the opposition would have brought down the whole government, forcing the king to dissolve parliament and hold new elections. Masri considered that an internal upheaval would hurt the democratization process and damage Jordan’s relations with the West, so, on 19 November, he tendered his resignation but not that of his government.20 He was replaced by Zaid bin Shaker, the king’s trusted adviser and friend, and a conservative who also had the advantage of being a sharif, a descendant of the Prophet. Shaker’s appointment restored the tacit alliance between the palace and the Islamists against radicals and leftists that had its origins in the 1950s.

  The clandestine contact between the palace and Israel was resumed several weeks after the end of the public gathering in the Spanish capital. Elyakim Rubinstein and Efraim Halevy were conveyed by boat from Eilat to a meeting point in the Gulf of Aqaba one stormy night in December 1991. They moved to a tiny boat driven by Colonel Ali Shukri and Nasser Judeh, Prince Hassan’s son-in-law and a future minister of information. The meeting the next day was positive. It established what Prince Hassan called a ‘safety net’ for the forthcoming bilateral negotiations in Washington. These were to proceed simultaneously on two parallel tracks – one public in Washington and one secret in the region. The safty net was a formula arrived at by the Jordanian and Israeli leadership. Essentially it meant that when deadlock was reached in the official negotiations, another meeting would be held privately to more things along. The Jordanian side of the safety net would consist of Hussein, Prince Hassan and, later, a number of senior advisers. The Israeli side would consist of Itzhak Rabin, sometimes Peres, Rubinstein and Halevy.21

  The public track of the peace process was held under American auspices and American management. As a follow-up to the Madrid conference, the Bush administration invited all the parties to hold substantive bilateral peace talks in Washington starting on 10 December. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians accepted the invitation without any conditions. The Israelis were less enthusiastic. The last thing they wanted was the kind of brisk and concrete down-to-business approach urged by the Americans. The issue used by the Israelis to delay the start of the talks was the status of the Palestinians. On the last day of the Madrid talks an understanding was reached that in the bilateral phase the Israelis would negotiate separately with the Palestinians and the Jordanians. Accordingly, the Americans prepared two rooms in the State Department, one for the Israeli and Palestinian teams, and one for the Israeli and Jordanian teams. But on arrival at the State Department, the Israelis insisted on negotiating with a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation to underline their opposition to a separate Palestinian entity. For six days the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian delegations haggled in the corridor of the State Department, even unable to agree to enter the conference room. The American hosts thoughtfully placed a sofa in the corridor. Rubinstein, the head of the Israeli delegation, felt personally safe sitting between two medical doctors. But the scene was bizarre, and it added a new term to the rich lexicon of the Arab–Israeli conflict – corridor diplomacy. After another round of talks a compromise was reached on the status of the Palestinians that enabled both sides to claim victory. Israel was to negotiate with two separate subcommittees consisting of nine Palestinians and two Jordanians on Palestinian-related issues, and nine Jordanians and two Palestinians on Jordan-related issues. With a sigh of relief Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman, announced that ‘corridor diplomacy’ had ended.

  From this point on the Jordanians and Palestinians operated essentially as two independent delegations, but they continued to consult and to coordinate their activities. Even after the substantive negotiations began, their progress was painfully slow, and often they ground to a complete halt. Caution was the hallmark of the Jordanian approach. On the one hand, the Jordanians did not wish to be separated from the Palestinians; on the other, they were careful not to speak in their name. Jordan followed closely developments on the Palestinian track, which was under its umbrella but not under its control. Everyone recognized that the critical track was the Palestinian one. The Jordanian delegation was the first to acknowledge this, but it was dogged by suspicions that its real aim was to restore Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. Majali sought to dispel these suspicions both in the conference room and in interviews to the media. Jordan, he kept repeating, was not a plenipotentiary for the Palestinians nor did it wish to rule over the Palestinian territories. The one formula Jordan was prepared to consider was a confederation but only if that was the Palestinians’ own choice.

  The Jordanian delegation devoted most of its time and effort in Washington to preparing its position on specific bilateral issues and to defending Jordanian interests in the negotiations with the Israelis. The Washington talks went on from December 1991 until September 1993. The most significant achievement of this period was the drafting of a common agenda for negotiations on a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. The common agenda was completed on 28 October 1992, and its text was published in the Arabic newspapers Al-Ra’i and Al-Dustur two days later. The overarching aim was to reach a state of peace based on UN resolutions 242 and 338. The more specific issues included mutual security, water, refugees, borders and regional cooperation. The agenda spelled out what needed to be discussed in all these different areas and in what contexts. The problem of refugees, for example, was to be dealt with in the context of international law. Regional cooperation covered natural resources, the environment, human resources, transport and tourism. Once the Jordanians had reached this broad agreement on how to go forward with the Israelis, it was essentially a matter of marking time, of waiting for a breakthrough on the Palestinian track. One basic difference in approach, however, was already evident at this early stage. The Jordanian
s wanted to safeguard their national rights first and to move towards regional cooperation later. The Israelis resisted this. Their priority was to achieve mutual recognition and normalization within the existing status quo and only then to address specific Jordanian grievances.22

  At home, illness and fatigue led Hussein to rely increasingly on his younger brother in the conduct of the affairs of state. In his youth, and especially during the civil war, Prince Hassan acquired a reputation for being anti-Palestinian. In fact, he was not anti-Palestinian but anti-fedayeen, as were the rest of the Jordanian political elite. But since then a lot of water had flowed down the Jordan, and his views on relations with the Palestinians and Israel were now scarcely distinguishable from those of his elder brother. There was complete trust between the two brothers and a very close working relationship, despite the wide differences in their ages (Hussein was sixty-three; Hassan was fifty-one), educational backgrounds, temperaments and lifestyles. Hassan had an office in the royal compound, and he visited the royal court or spoke to his brother on the phone almost every day. He also provided an element of continuity against the background of frequent changes of foreign ministers and prime ministers. Decision-making in Amman during the bilateral talks was rather informal. Abdul Salam Majali, the head of the delegation in Washington, reported to Foreign Minister Kamel Abu Jaber; he, in turn, reported to Prime Minister Zaid bin Shaker, sometimes to the Prince Hassan and sometimes to the king. The four men had frequent meetings, often over lunch in the prime minister’s home. Abu Jaber, by his own account, made no important decisions on his own; he acted more like a civil servant than like a minister. Although the king did not involve himself in the details, he remained throughout the leader of the team and the ultimate decision-maker.23

  Hussein’s performance as a policy-maker was increasingly affected by insomnia and ill-health. In August 1992 he displayed symptoms of a urological problem and tests showed some cells that needed further study. His doctors recommended the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Initial tests confirmed that the doctors needed to operate on a partial obstruction to Hussein’s left ureter, the duct by which urine passes from kidney to bladder, and that the obstruction might be malignant. ‘I am stunned,’ wrote Queen Noor in her journal. ‘Sidi is quiet and brave, but I know he must be terrified. He speaks fatalistically of being in the process of putting things in order, having sensed this for some time.’ During the operation the doctors found a few pre-cancerous cells in the ureter leading to the kidney, but they had not spread. The doctors removed the kidney as a precaution, and it contained no signs of abnormality. No further treatment was considered necessary. The days that followed were, in Queen Noor’s view, a turning point in her husband’s life: ‘The cancer scare snapped Hussein out of his depression, and he became once again the eager and engaged person he had been before the Gulf War.’24

  Hussein returned home from the Mayo in late September to a hero’s welcome. Nearly a third of the kingdom’s population poured into the streets to greet him in a spontaneous demonstration of affection and support. Although officials insisted that the king had completely recovered, there was public concern about the recurrence of the illness and his life expectancy. On 5 November, in a remarkably frank speech to the nation, Hussein summed up his own life and the history of the Hashemite dynasty. He said that the life of an enlightened nation is not measured by the life of one individual. He spoke of his grandfather Abdullah, the founder of the kingdom, who ‘told me that he perceived his life as a link in a continuous chain of those who served the nation and that he expected me to be a new and strong link in that chain’. Hussein recalled the moment when he vowed to follow in Abdullah’s footsteps to carry out the Hashemite ambition. The three pillars of the Hashemite project that Hussein listed were pan-Arabism, Islam and democratization. This was the ideological foundation on which Hussein based his claim to leadership both at home and in the Arab world beyond Jordan’s borders.

  In a speech to the staff college on 23 November, Hussein adopted a more aggressive tone, confronting his opponents at home and abroad. He made it clear that, despite the recent bout of ill-health, he had no intention of stepping down. He attacked the extremist groups in Jordan, on the left and on the right, for their opposition to the peace talks with Israel. He warned them not to interpret the process of democratization as a sign of weakness or his magnanimity as a sign of fear. He also attacked Iran for the support it gave to Islamic groups attempting to subvert his regime. He was surprisingly blunt in his criticism of the Gulf states for their undemocratic nature and of their rulers for their reliance on imperialist support to preserve their thrones. Kuwait was attacked for its expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had served it faithfully. Hussein distanced himself from Saddam by calling for the introduction of democracy in Iraq so that the Iraqi people could lead a normal life without international sanctions – a passage that could be interpreted as a call for the removal of Saddam from power. Turning to the Palestine question, Hussein asserted that Jordan would never agree to become an alternative homeland for the Palestinians. Finally, Hussein stressed Jordan’s commitment to continue the peace talks with Israel. The impression created by his earlier speech – that his days on the throne were numbered because there was no cure for his cancer – seemed to be countered in this one.

  While the Likud remained in power very little headway was made on either the Israeli–Palestinian track or on any of the Israeli–Arab track. It was only after the Labour Party’s victory over the Likud in June 1992 that the Israeli position began to be modified, at least on the Arab track. On the Palestinian issue the Israeli position displayed more continuity than change following the rise of the Labour government under the leadership of Rabin. Consequently, the official talks in Washington continued to make slow progress. This led both Israel and the PLO to seek a back channel for communicating, a decision that constituted a diplomatic revolution in Israel’s foreign policy and paved the way to the Oslo Accord.

  The talks between the representatives of the Israeli government and the PLO were held behind a thick veil of secrecy in the Norwegian capital. They proceeded parallel to the bilateral talks in Washington but without the knowledge of the official Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. In fact, Arafat deliberately instructed the official delegation to adopt uncompromising positions in Washington in order to make possible the secret deal in Oslo. The first Oslo Accord was signed in the White House on 13 September 1993 and sealed with a handshake between Arafat and Rabin. It consisted of two parts: the first was mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO; the second was the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements in Gaza and the West Bank city of Jericho. Essentially, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to live in peace and security, and the two sides agreed to resolve all their outstanding differences by peaceful means.

  The Oslo Accord took Hussein, his government and the Jordanian delegation to the Washington talks completely by surprise. Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, admits in his memoirs that PLO Tunis was at fault:

  A few months after Oslo had got under way we began to feel very embarrassed for not having informed Jordan and in particular His Majesty King Hussein personally of this development. Jordan had been our partner in the formal negotiations, had given us the legal cover to go to Madrid, and had helped us during the ‘corridor negotiations’ in the first Washington sessions to separate the Jordanian from the Palestinian track. Furthermore, we had constantly spoken of a confederation with Jordan because of the special relations binding the Jordanian and Palestinian peoples. For these important reasons we shuddered even to contemplate the consequences of King Hussein’s anger if we were to reach an agreement with the Israelis that took him completely by surprise.

  Abu Mazen relates that he made three attempts to speak to the king in private, all unsuccessful. So he visited him on 17 October and explained
the matter from beginning to end. ‘I do not know whether he accepted my excuses or not,’ writes Mahmoud Abbas, ‘but I do say that he had every right to be reproachful.’25

  The Clinton administration was told of the breakthrough only shortly before it was made public. Norway had upstaged them in brokering the Israel–PLO accord, but they quickly turned the accord to their advantage. The accord was made in Oslo, but it was signed in Washington with Clinton basking in the glory. Although it was not he who brought together the lugubrious old soldier and the grinning guerrilla leader, they handed him one of the very few foreign policy successes of his administration. Moreover, the Americans could not fail to understand the opportunities that the breakthrough presented. As one American diplomat put it: ‘First you get an Israeli–Palestinian deal cut, and then the other accounts can be settled more rapidly and more successfully.’26

  The other Arab participants in the peace process were more sceptical. The initial reaction of the neighbouring Arab states to the Israel–PLO accord was one of suspicion and resentment. Syria and Lebanon were as surprised as Jordan by Arafat’s solo diplomacy, fearing that he was making a separate deal with Israel, and they were suspicious of Israel’s intentions. Arafat defended his decision to sign the accord by presenting it as the first step towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East. There was a general feeling, however, that the PLO chairman had broken rank and, like Sadat fifteen years earlier, played into Israel’s hands. The country most directly affected by the Israel–PLO accord was, of course, Jordan, for which it posed acute economic, political, constitutional and security problems. As the Jordanian academic Mustafa Hamarneh explained to a foreign journalist: ‘These are extremely challenging times for Jordan. Yasser Arafat did not pull a rabbit out of his hat but a damned camel.’27

  The Israelis had also kept Hussein in the dark about their secret talks with the PLO representatives in Oslo. Halevy, who held the ‘Jordan file’ in the Mossad and had particularly close relations with Hussein, felt a sense of guilt not unlike that recorded by Mahmoud Abbas. ‘During the months preceding the surprise announcement of the Palestinian Oslo agreement,’ writes Halevy,