Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  A summit meeting in Washington was hastily called by President Clinton on 2 October in an effort to calm the situation and to prevent the complete unravelling of the peace process. President Mubarak declined the invitation. Hussein, Arafat and Netanyahu all responded to the call, but the meeting ended without any agreement being reached. All the Arab leaders expressed their disappointment with the Israeli prime minister, but Hussein’s disappointment was the most poignant because he was the only Arab who had not joined in the chorus of denunciation following Netanyahu’s victory at the polls. There was a personal and a political aspect to the king’s disappointment. His relations with Rabin had been based on mutual trust, and he had hoped to develop a similar relationship with Netanyahu. But he discovered the hard way that Netanyahu was devious, dishonest and completely unreliable. Netanyahu posed a serious threat to the king’s plan to proceed step by step towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East. The king therefore spoke very sternly to Netanyahu at the White House, as the press reported at the time and as he confirmed later: ‘I spoke of the arrogance of power. I spoke of the need to treat people equally. I spoke of the need to make progress.’ Netanyahu said nothing, but, as they were leaving, he went up to Hussein and said: ‘I am determined to surprise you.’6

  Hussein’s list of Israeli transgressions was leaked to Thomas Friedman at the New York Times: the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements; Israeli-imposed curfews on Palestinians that made it nearly impossible for them to work; the lack of a timetable for withdrawing Israeli troops from Hebron and starting negotiations on final status; the travesty of the tunnel; the persistence of Israel’s fortress mentality when the only real security could come from mutual respect. ‘I speak for myself, for Itzhak Rabin, a man whom I had the great pride to call my friend, and for all peoples who benefit from peace,’ Hussein said to Netanyahu. ‘All this good will is being lost. We are at the edge of the abyss, and regardless of our best efforts, we might be just about to fall into it – all of us.’7

  It was heartbreaking for Hussein to watch all that he had built disintegrate so quickly. He was less ready to stick his neck out in defence of normalization with Israel in the aftermath of the bloody clashes in Jerusalem and the unproductive summit meeting in Washington. In Jordan the middle classes joined the Islamists and the Palestinian radicals in opposition to normalization. Thirty-eight groups, representing a wide range of political parties, professional associations and nongovernmental organizations, signed a statement calling for resistance to ‘all forms of normalization with the Zionist enemy’. Opinion polls reflected the deepening disillusion with the peace treaty at all levels of Jordanian society, and not just because of Netanyahu’s actions. In one taken shortly after the Washington Declaration in July 1994, 82 per cent of Jordanians polled believed that the economy would benefit from peace. In another, in January 1996, 47 per cent of those polled felt that the economy had actually deteriorated in the first year of peace.8

  Feeling against Israel was running high throughout the Arab world, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. The third Middle East and North Africa Economic Conference, MENA III, was scheduled to open in Cairo in November. For a while it looked as if the conference would not convene at all. President Mubarak threatened to cancel it if Israel continued to renege on its commitments. He relented only under intense US pressure. MENA III opened in Cairo on 13 November in a climate of palpable hostility to the muharwaluun. The muharwaluun – those who ‘rush’ or ‘scurry’ – had become a key concept in Arab political discourse. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani coined the term after the handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and Arafat that he interpreted as a humiliating act of surrender by the entire Arab nation. Qabbani poured his anger into a poem that he called Al-Muharwaluun:

  We stood in columns

  like sheep before slaughter

  we ran, breathless

  We scrambled to kiss

  the shoes of the killers.

  The rush to normalize relations with the Zionist enemy was now widely derided by those who saw it as a mark of Arab weakness. Business was at the heart of this normalization, as was evident from these annual conferences. The original aim was to forge a regional economic order of which Israel would be an integral part and economic cooperation was expected to consolidate Middle East peace. At the first two MENA conferences, Israel had led the way in fostering Peres’s vision of a new Middle East that incorporated the Jewish state. Hussein repeatedly promised his people that normalization would produce prosperity. Arafat used to say that, given the right economic climate, he would turn Palestine into a new Singapore. Another major argument advanced by the ‘scurriers’ was that Arab conciliation would encourage Israel to complete the peace process on the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese fronts. Arab countries not involved directly in the conflict also accepted this logic. Morocco, Tunisia and Qatar decided to open liaison bureaux in Israel. Qatar even agreed to supply Israel with natural gas.

  The critics of the ‘scurriers’, on the other hand, argued that the Arabs should withhold the economic rewards of normalization as their last remaining means of pressure. Saudi Arabia refused to lift the boycott of Israel until a comprehensive peace had been achieved. Netanyahu’s election tilted the balance in favour of the critics. He was held up as the embodiment of just how wrong the ‘scurriers’ had been. The critics asked: ‘Why should we take part in an international economic gathering supposedly designed to underpin regional peace and security with economic cooperation when Israel rejects peace?’ Jordan and the Palestinian Authority only sent medium-level delegations. Qatar delayed the opening of its liaison office in Tel Aviv and suspended her natural gas deal. Other governments told their delegations to make no deals with the Israelis. The Egyptians made it plain that since Israel was going back on the peace process, the Arabs would go back on the basic objectives of MENA I and II, and turn MENA III into a forum for inter-Arab business alone.9

  Bilateral relations between Jordan and Israel fell after the tunnel crisis to their lowest ebb since the treaty was signed. At the popular level, passive scepticism turned into active opposition. At the official level, patience with Israel gave way to a more assertive articulation of Arab and Palestinian positions. Strong American and Arab reaction to ‘the tunnel uprising’ compelled Netanyahu to give way on Hebron, the West Bank city where a small community of militant Jewish settlers ensconced themselves in the middle of a large Palestinian population. Hussein played a modest role in bringing the two warring sides to an agreement. He shuttled between Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and Arafat in Gaza until a compromise was reached. The Hebron Protocol was signed on 15 January 1997. It was a significant step in the Middle East peace process, the first agreement signed by the Likud government and the Palestinians. The protocol divided Hebron into two zones to be governed by different security arrangements. The Palestinian zone covered about 80 per cent of Hebron, while the Jewish zone covered the other 20 per cent. Palestinian critics pointed out that this formula for coexistence gave the 450 Jewish settlers (who constituted 0.3 per cent of the population) the choicest 20 per cent of the town’s commercial centre, whereas the 160,000 Palestinians got 80 percent subject to numerous restrictions and limitations. The Hebron Protocol, however, also committed Israel to three further redeployments on the West Bank over the next eighteen months.

  The Hebron Protocol averted the complete collapse of the Oslo peace process, but the mild optimism it generated was short-lived. Having been compelled to take a relatively conciliatory line over Hebron, Netanyahu adopted a confrontational approach to Jerusalem. By signing the protocol, Netanyahu had broken the Likud taboo on handing over land for peace. So he vowed to strengthen Israel’s hold over Jerusalem and to resist any compromise or even meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians over the future of the holy city. He knew that no Arab could accept less than Arafat was demanding: shared sovereignty. But he believed that a forceful unilateral Israeli assertion of control over the
city would dispel Arab illusions of recovering the eastern part, illusions that he claimed his Labour predecessors had encouraged. Netanyahu fired the opening shot in the battle for Jerusalem on 19 February with a plan for the construction of 6,500 housing units for 30,000 Israelis at Har Homa in annexed East Jerusalem. Har Homa was a pine-forested hill, south of the city proper, on the road to Bethlehem. Its Arabic name is Jabal Abu Ghunaym. The site was chosen in order to complete the chain of Jewish settlements around Jerusalem and cut off contact between the Arab side of the city and its hinterland in the West Bank. It was a blatant example of the Zionist tactic of creating facts on the ground to pre-empt negotiations. Consequently, every day the Palestinians had less land and Israel had less peace. Jordan joined in the angry Arab chorus of protest at Israel’s actions.

  In less than a year as prime minister, Netanyahu had destroyed Hussein’s trust and driven him to the verge of despair by his arrogance, blatant disregard for written agreements and ceaseless expansionism. At a deeper level, Hussein felt that he could no longer rely on Israel to act as a strategic ally and as a partner on the road to peace. In an unusually strongly worded three-page letter to Netanyahu, Hussein expressed both his concern over the consequences of Israeli actions and his bitter personal disappointment with the man he helped to get elected. The letter is worth quoting at length for the light it sheds on Hussein’s state of mind:

  Prime Minister,

  My distress is genuine and deep over the accumulating tragic actions which you have initiated at the head of the government of Israel, making peace – the worthiest objective of my life – appear more and more like a distant elusive mirage. I could remain aloof if the very lives of all Arabs and Israelis and their future were not fast sliding towards an abyss of bloodshed and disaster, brought about by fear and despair. I frankly cannot accept your repeated excuse of having to act the way you do under great duress and pressure. I cannot believe that the people of Israel seek bloodshed and disaster and oppose peace. Nor can I believe that the most constitutionally powerful prime minister in Israeli history would act on other than his total convictions. The saddest reality that has been dawning on me is that I do not find you by my side in working to fulfil God’s will for the final reconciliation of all the descendants of the children of Abraham. Your course of actions seems bent on destroying all I believe in or have striven to achieve with the Hashemite family since Faisal the First and Abdullah to the present times…

  Mr Prime Minister, if it is your intention to manoeuvre our Palestinian brethren into inevitable violent resistance, then order your bulldozers into the proposed settlement site…

  Why the apparent continued deliberate humiliation of your so called Palestinian partners? Can any worthwhile relationship thrive in the absence of mutual respect and trust? Why are Palestinians confirming that their agricultural products still rot awaiting entry into Israel and export? Why the delay when it is known that unless work is authorized to commence on the Gaza port, before the end of this month, the complete project will suffer a year’s delay? Finally, the Gaza Airport – all of us have addressed the subject numerous times with a view to having a legitimate Palestinian need met and to giving their leaders and people their own free access to the world rather than their present confinement and need to exit and return through other sovereign territories…

  How can I work with you as a partner and true friend in this confused and confusing atmosphere when I sense an intent to destroy all I worked to build between our peoples and states? Stubbornness over real issues is one thing, but for its own sake, I wonder. In any event I have discovered that you have your own mindset and appear in no need for any advice from a friend.

  I deeply regret having to write you this personal message but it is my sense of responsibility and concern which has prompted me for posterity to do so in the face of the unknown.

  Sincerely,

  Hussein10

  Ali Shukri delivered the royal missive by hand to the prime minister in his office in Jerusalem. Dore Gold was with him. Netanyahu was unable or unwilling to understand the Jordanian perspective on the events surrounding Har Homa. He claimed that 75 per cent of the land they wished to build on had already been bought from its Arab owners, but he offered no proof and Shukri did not believe him. Shukri tried to explain that even if some of the land was bought, the whole operation was seen by Arabs as arbitrary and aggressive. Netanyahu dismissed these arguments and refused to budge.11 His reply to the king’s heartbreaking letter was insensitive and impertinent. He refused to accept any share of the responsibility for the setbacks in the peace process. At the time of the last election, he asserted, the peace process was ‘in its death throes’. He went even further and sought credit for his contribution: ‘Instead of letting the Oslo agreement die out after the election, I looked for a way to try to revive it.’

  Netanyahu expressed surprise at the personal tone of the attacks against him. All the specific transgressions listed by the king were brushed aside as the ‘inevitable difficulties that occasionally crop up in the peace process’. Netanyahu made it clear that he remained committed to carrying out the housing construction plan in East Jerusalem. Finally, he urged the king not to allow setbacks on the Palestinian track to affect Jordanian–Israeli relations. ‘It is our duty to understand our joint historic role and not to allow the obstacles on the Palestinian track to overshadow the understandings reached back in the days of my predecessors,’ he wrote.12 It was not clear which particular predecessors or understandings Netanyahu had in mind. But it was difficult to avoid the impression that he was telling the king to mind his own business and not to meddle in Israeli–Palestinian affairs. There was no sign of contrition, no concession to the king’s point of view and no trace of a single constructive idea in Netanyahu’s reply.

  A most tragic event occurred on 13 March when a deranged Jordanian soldier shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls and wounded six others on the ‘Island of Peace’ at the Naharayim crossing point in the north. This area had only recently been restored to Jordanian sovereignty under the terms of the peace treaty, and the girls were on a school outing. The king and the queen, who were in Madrid on an official visit, immediately cancelled their trip and turned back to Jordan. ‘I cannot offer enough condolences or express enough personal sorrow to the mothers, fathers and brothers of these children who fell today,’ he said when he arrived. He was extremely angry about the breakdown of discipline in the army that had allowed this incident to happen. For years he had been telling all the people around him, and especially the military, that their neighbours had a complex about security, that this had to be taken into account, that they needed constant reassurances. Now he felt let down by the army, and he reprimanded those responsible. Shooting children, he said, is something one must not do in wartime, let alone when they were at peace.13

  Three days later Hussein made an unprecedented visit to the Israeli village of Beit Shemesh to offer his personal condolences to the families of the victims. At the homes of the stricken families, he went down on his knees and shared in their grief. Hussein’s simple humanity was deeply appreciated not just by the families but by the entire Israeli nation. In the Arab world, however, Hussein’s gesture was interpreted differently: going down on your knees symbolizes submission and surrender. Hussein insisted that each of his visits be shown on Jordanian television, despite the fury he knew this would arouse among the extremist groups in Jordan. He wanted everyone to take note of the price of violence. ‘If there is any purpose in my life it will be to make sure that all the children do not suffer the way our generation did,’ he said to one of the families.14

  One expression of Hussein’s anguish did not receive any publicity: the offer of compensation to the families of the victims. He wanted to help the families in a material way but in keeping with Jewish traditions and customs. So he asked Lord Mishcon for advice and was told to send the sum of money he wanted to give to the president of Israel. Accordingly, Hussein sent a million do
llars to President Ezer Weizman. A year later he received a letter that said:

  Your Majesty,

  Recently we commemorated the year of the terrible tragedy in Naharayim when seven young girls were killed and others were injured.

  The people of Israel were most impressed by your visit to the bereaved families in Beit Shemesh and also by your humanitarian gesture of a monetary grant.

  I wish to inform you that I invited the families and distributed among them the entire sum you sent. They asked me to convey to you their sincerest thanks and appreciation.15

  Meanwhile, relations between Israel and the Palestinians continued to deteriorate as the bulldozers moved in to level the hillside at Har Homa. The bulldozers had to be given armed guards. Israeli soldiers clashed constantly with stone-throwing Palestinian youths. The violence spread to other parts of the West Bank. Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent suicide bombers into Israel, and the Palestinian Authority was unable to stop them. Was there anything Israel could do to prevent, or at least to limit, the outburst of violence against its citizens? Was there any link between Israel’s backsliding on the Oslo agreements and Yasser Arafat’s reluctance to act more decisively against Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Both the head of the Israeli General Security Service and the director of military intelligence were of the opinion that Arafat had no incentive to cooperate with Israel in the fight against Islamic terror as long as he believed that Israel was not complying with the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu rejected their assessment.16 He regarded terrorist attacks by extremist Palestinian fringe groups as a strategic threat to the State of Israel, and he used these attacks to justify the freezing of the political process.

  Hussein’s natural optimism was sorely tried. The strain of the faltering peace process was beginning to tell. He had difficulty sleeping at night. His wife explained: ‘The short-sighted approach of Netanyahu and the hardliners in his government had put terrific pressure on the King to reverse the peace process. Everything he had worked for all his life, every relationship he had painstakingly built on trust and respect, every dream of peace and prosperity he had had for Jordan’s children, was turning into a nightmare. I really did not know how much more Hussein could take.’17