by Avi Shlaim
Clinton and Hussein both grossly underestimated the depth of Asad’s opposition to normalization with Israel. A month after their conversation, the CIA station chief in Amman handed the Jordanians an alarming document. It was three pages long and entitled ‘Jordan/Threat to the Life of King Hussein’. The plan to assassinate King Hussein and his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, was said to be part of an overall Syrian strategy. Asad had requested and received a new strategic situation assessment, which included the following reasons for assassinating Hussein:
a. The defection of Hussein Kamel and the role Jordan played by providing him with political asylum, which was viewed by Syria as assistance to the United States and Israel, and the beginning of a move to replace the regime in Iraq.
b. Hussein’s deceiving of Asad, having promised not to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel, and in any event not to do so without Syria.
c. The inclusion of a clause in the peace treaty with Israel leasing it land in the Araba, which was a dangerous precedent from Syria’s point of view.
d. Hussein’s pushing for normalization between Arab countries, particularly the Gulf countries, and Israel.
e. The establishment of a new Syrian opposition organization called ‘17 April Organization’ and the dissemination of anti-Syrian propaganda, particularly anti-Alawite, by Jordanian intelligence. This activity (so said the Syrians) was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
According to the CIA report, President Asad had already given the go-ahead for the assassination of Hussein and his brother. The first phase of the plan, which had been put into effect, consisted of attacks on the king and his brother in the official Syrian media. On the assassination plan itself the CIA source did not have detailed information but nevertheless made the following assessments:
a. The assassination would probably be carried out in Jordan and not abroad, since Syrian intelligence was better able to do the job in Jordan than in a European or other country.
b. Syrian intelligence abroad (Amn al-Harijiyah) would be responsible for perpetrating the attack.
c. The attack would be carried out by someone close to the king, such as a bodyguard.
d. Officials in the Syrian Embassy in Amman probably knew of the plan but it was not clear if they were involved in any way.
Mention was also made by the informer of intentions to attack Arafat but he did not seem to be as major a target as Hussein or Hassan.18 The CIA report was immediately shown to Hussein: he read it and reacted to it very calmly. Stricter security measures were adopted, and his bodyguards were subjected to routine checks every six months.19 Later in the month the CIA station chief in Amman handed the authorities another secret report, this time on Iraqi plans against Jordan. Iraq was planning terrorist attacks against hostile Arab countries. To this end a group had been established and charged with the task of blowing up the United States Embassy in Amman and undermining the security and stability of Jordan. The group received training from intelligence officers, but the whole idea was postponed when one of the members of the group ran away. The CIA, however, had information that Iraq was continuing to train squads to carry out terrorist attacks against Western and Jordanian interests because of the king’s support for the Iraqi opposition and his supposed plan to change the regime in Baghdad.20
Syrian and Iraqi threats did not deter Hussein from rushing forward towards normalization but a change did occur when Peres succeeded Rabin as Labour Party leader and prime minister. Hussein believed that the fact that Peres had been excluded from the negotiations of the peace treaty had alienated him to a degree. Hussein recognized that Peres had served his country, that he had always been a believer in peace, and that he was a fertile source of ideas for progress in every field, ‘but the relationship was different and it cooled down constantly.’21 Hussein suspected that Peres had a preference for progress on the Palestinian track and that Jordan’s interests would suffer as a result. Peres continued to promote his vision of peace as the dawn of a new age in the region. Variations on a theme continued to flow from Peres’s inventive political mind. The New Middle East, in a standard Peres utterance, would be ‘dominated by banks, not tanks, ballots, not bullets, and where the only generals would be General Motors and General Electric’.
Challenges to Israel’s security almost immediately distracted Peres from pursuing his vision of the New Middle East. Having reached the pinnacle of power, he tried to recast himself from Mr Peace to Mr Security. One serious mistake he made was to give the go-ahead for the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas master bomb-maker. The so-called ‘Engineer’ was killed in Gaza on 5 January 1996 by means of a booby-trapped cellular phone. Hamas retaliated with a series of devastating suicide bombs that claimed the lives of sixty Israelis. Peres made an even more serious mistake by ordering a major military operation in Lebanon. Operation Grapes of Wrath was launched on 11 April; its aim was to bring security to the Galilee by bombing the Hizbullah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. But the ultimate target of the operation was Syria. The idea was to put pressure on the civilians of southern Lebanon, for them to put pressure on the government of Lebanon, for it to put pressure on the Syrian government, and, finally, for the Syrian government to curb Hizbullah and grant immunity to the IDF in southern Lebanon. In short, the plan was to compel Syria to act as an Israeli gendarme in Lebanon.
Operation Grapes of Wrath involved the deliberate targeting of civilians. Nearly 400,000 civilians were driven by the IDF from their homes and villages in southern Lebanon and turned into refugees. Israeli brutality was condemned by the entire Arab world. Shortly after the invasion, 2,500 Jordanians took to the streets to demonstrate against Israel’s aggression. The crisis provoked the strongest anti-Israeli sentiments since the signature of the peace treaty. Hussein sent Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kabariti to Israel on 16 April with two letters, one to Peres and one to President Ezer Weizman, urging them to end their military incursion and resume diplomacy. He pointed out that Israel’s actions were undermining popular support for peace.22 One day after Kabariti’s visit, Israeli shells killed 102 refugees sheltering in a UN compound. The massacre in Qana drew fierce international condemnation and brought Operation Grapes of Wrath to its inglorious end on 27 April.
In the lead-up to the 26 May elections Binyamin Netanyahu, the aggressively right-wing leader of the Likud, went on the offensive. He charged that Labour brought peace without security and promised that the Likud would bring peace with security. Because of his immense popularity in Israel, Hussein could influence the outcome, and both candidates competed for his endorsement. Hussein misjudged both of them: he was unreasonably suspicious of Peres and rather naive about Netanyahu. He did not believe that the election of Netanyahu would necessarily herald the end of the peace process in the Middle East. He thought that what had been achieved was irreversible: ‘When the peace treaty with Jordan passed through the Knesset it had an overwhelming majority that we have never had on any other issue. And so it wasn’t a peace between Jordan and Labour, it was a peace with Israel. I respected that and that is why I did not interfere in the elections in any form or way.’23
In fact Hussein did knowingly display a bias in favour of Netanyahu by inviting him to Amman on the eve of the elections while declining to extend an invitation to Peres. Hussein was concerned that a victorious Peres would proceed swiftly to a sweeping agreement with Syria. Netanyahu managed to convince Hussein that he would keep the peace process going at a level and pace suitable to Jordan’s political needs.24 After his visit to Amman, Netanyahu was able to tell the Israeli public that although he headed a right-wing party, he was acceptable as a partner to their favourite Arab leader. Ali Shukri has confirmed that Hussein was not as neutral during the lead-up to the election as he pretended to be: ‘Privately, His Majesty wanted Netanyahu to win because he thought this was a man he could deal with. Netanyahu was young and Hussein did not believe for a moment that he would set out to destroy the peace. At the time everybody was saying that
Netanyahu and his party were extremists, that they would reverse the Labour Party’s peace policy. His Majesty wanted to give Netanyahu a chance.’25
Hussein seriously misjudged the Jordanian stake in the Israeli elections because he attached too much importance to personalities and too little to political parties, their ideologies and their foreign policies. Marwan Muasher understood that whereas Labour leaders preferred to deal with Jordan as a way of escaping the hard choices they had to make with the Palestinians, the Likud had more sinister objectives. The Likud, he believed, wanted to collude with Jordan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, which was implicit in the Oslo Accord. In the summer of 1995 Muasher had a conversation with Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, in the cafeteria of the Knesset. Netanyahu said to him: ‘We have a joint interest. We have Palestinians in Israel, and you have Palestinians in Jordan. A Palestinian state on the West Bank would serve to radicalize the Palestinians in Israel and Jordan. That is not in our interests. We therefore have to work together to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.’ Muasher countered this argument by saying, ‘We look at things differently. We believe that the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will help our own political identity because we have Jordanians of Palestinian origin who are reluctant to say that they are Jordanians so as not to appear to betray the Palestinian cause. But if they feel that the Palestinian political identity has evolved in the West Bank, they will no longer be reluctant to acknowledge their Jordanian identity. This is exactly like the Palestinians in Israel. None of them would want to leave Israel to live in a Palestinian state. But they want equal rights within Israel and they support the establishment of a Palestinian state for the sake of the other Palestinians, not in order to be radicalized.’ Netanyahu looked at Muasher and said, ‘Mr Ambassador, I think I understand the Jordanian position better than you do!’ This encounter told Muasher two things. First, it demonstrated Netanyahu’s arrogance. Second, it showed a refusal to accept that the establishment of an independent and viable Palestinian state was in Jordan’s long-term interests.26
Peres fought a lacklustre campaign, leaving it to Netanyahu to do all the running. It was said that Peres behaved like the Jew in the Jewish joke who was challenged to a duel and sent a telegram to his opponent saying, ‘I am going to be late: start shooting without me.’ In the opinion polls they were running neck and neck, but when the results were out Netanyahu had won by a margin of 30,000 votes, with 50.4 per cent of the vote to Peres’s 49.6 per cent. Labour won 34 seats in the Knesset, whereas the Likud won only 32. But under the new electoral law for the direct election of the prime minister, the task of forming the next government had to be assigned to Netanyahu. Hussein’s not-so-subtle support for Netanyahu probably tipped the balance in his favour. A new chapter was opened in the complex relations between Jordan and the Jewish state.
27
Collision Course
The rise to power of Binyamin Netanyahu in May 1996 marked a break with the pragmatism that characterized Labour’s approach towards the Arab world and the reassertion of an ideological hard line. It was back to the iron-wall strategy, and with a vengeance.1 Netanyahu viewed Israel’s relations with the Arab world as one of permanent conflict, as a never-ending struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. His image of the Arabs was consistently and comprehensively negative, and it did not admit the possibility of diversity or change. Much of Netanyahu’s vehemence and venom was reserved for the Palestinians. He launched a fierce assault on the notion that the Palestinian problem constituted the core and heart of the Middle East conflict. For him the Palestinian problem was not a genuine problem but an artificially manufactured one. He denied that the Palestinians had a right to national self-determination and argued that the primary cause of tension in the Middle East was inter-Arab rivalry.
Netanyahu denounced the Oslo Accord as incompatible with Israel’s security and with the historic right of the Jewish people to the whole Land of Israel. He had led the right-wing opposition to the agreement that was signed on 28 September 1995, popularly known as Oslo II. It provided for further Israeli troop withdrawal beyond the Gaza and Jericho areas and the transfer of legislative authority to a democratically elected Palestinian Council. As soon as he got the chance, Netanyahu set about arresting and derailing the process that the Oslo Accords had set in motion. By making it clear that he remained absolutely opposed to Palestinian statehood, he all but pulled the keystone from the arch of peace. His aim was to preserve direct and indirect Israeli rule over the Palestinian areas by every means at his disposal. The main elements of his strategy were to lower Palestinian expectations, to weaken Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, to suspend the further redeployments stipulated in the Oslo Accords, and to order the construction of 2,000 new homes in the Jordan Valley.
In relation to the Arab states, and especially Syria, Netanyahu was similarly determined not to proceed any further down the path of land for peace. He believed that his tough position would compel the Arab states themselves to compromise further on their rights. He stated openly that he was going to change the rules of the game. But his strategy was fraught with danger because he had no experience in policy-making and no understanding of the limits of military power. The assumption that the Arabs would suddenly abandon their long struggle for the recovery of occupied land was not simply naive but also provocative. It created a dangerous tide in the relations between Israel and the Arab world. The programme of his government, and especially the building of new settlements on the West Bank, was widely interpreted in the Arab world as a declaration of war on the peace process.
Netanyahu did not command much respect even inside his own party. Senior members of the Likud regarded him as an intellectual lightweight, as glib and superficial, as little more than a purveyor of sound bites for American television. Netanyahu had been Israel’s representative to the UN and deputy foreign minister, but in both posts he was more of a PR man than a policy-maker. He was that very rare thing – a genuine charlatan. As prime minister Netanyahu was not as bad as people thought he would be when he was competing for the top post – he was much, much worse. Within a very short time he succeeded in alienating most of his countrymen and all of Israel’s allies abroad. Relations with Jordan became strained soon after his accession to power. At first criticism of the new Israeli prime minister was much more muted in the Jordanian media than in the rest of the Arab world. Hussein counselled his fellow Arabs against pessimism and against pushing Israel into a siege mentality. A flare-up of Israeli–Palestinian violence, he feared, could spill over into the kingdom or even revive the dreaded theory that ‘Jordan is Palestine.’ On the other hand, Netanyahu’s reluctance to negotiate with Arafat inspired speculation about a Likud-sponsored ‘Jordanian option’. Hussein tried to scotch these speculations by stating plainly that Jordan would ‘never be an alternative for the Palestinian leadership under any conditions’. He wanted consultation and coordination with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to protect Jordan’s interest in the West Bank; he was not interested in negotiating instead of the Palestinians or in assuming responsibility for settling the Palestinian problem.2
Netanyahu tried to play off the Jordanians and the Palestinians against one another until one of his moves seriously backfired. The spark that set off the explosion was the opening, on the night of 25 September 1996, of an ancient tunnel close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. Of no great import in itself, the new gate to the second century BC tunnel constituted a symbolic and psychological affront to the Palestinians and a blatant Israeli violation of the pledge to resolve the dispute over Jerusalem through negotiations, not via the fait accompli.3 By giving the order to blast open a new entrance to the 2,000 year-old tunnel, Netanyahu also blasted away the last faint hopes of a peaceful dialogue with the Palestinians. The action set off a massive outburst of Palestinian anger and ignited the flames of confrontation. There wa
s large-scale protest and rioting that got out of hand and provoked the Palestinian police to turn their guns on the Israeli soldiers. The violence intensified and engulfed the entire West Bank and Gaza. In three days of bloody clashes 14 Israeli solders and 54 Palestinians died. It was the most violent confrontation since the worst days of the intifada. The Israeli public was shocked by the scenes of Palestinian policemen opening fire on their Israeli counterparts. But most outside observers regarded Netanyahu’s policy of blocking the peace process as the underlying cause of this costly and bloody conflict.
Hussein was furious. Netanyahu’s action contravened Article 9 of the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, which says that ‘in accordance with the Washington Declaration, Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem.’ The injury was compounded by the fact that, only a few days before, Dore Gold, a senior aide to Netanyahu, had met with Hussein in Amman but said not a word about the tunnel. As a result of the meeting, rumours spread that Hussein had been privy to the plan and had approved it. Hussein followed the recommendation of his advisers and adopted a very tough line with Netanyahu over this issue.4 Attempts by Netanyahu to renew contact were rebuffed by the king. Efraim Halevy was serving at that time as Israel’s ambassador to the European Union in Brussels. At Netanyahu’s request, Halevy paid a secret visit to the Jordanian capital and was able to obtain the consent of the king to receive two envoys of Netanyahu and thus to reactivate the connection between the two principals.5
