Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril

by King Abdullah II

  By this time, following two failed cease-fires, it was clear that Jordan could not coexist with Arafat’s guerrillas. At the time, the PLO and its affiliates numbered around 100,000 men: 25,000 full-time fighters and some 75,000 armed militia. And they kept getting bolder. On September 6, 1970, the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three international airliners that had taken off from Frankfurt, Zurich, and Amsterdam en route to New York and diverted two of them to Dawson’s Field, a remote airfield in the desert in the Azraq area in northeast Jordan—the third was diverted to Cairo and blown up. Three days later, a third civilian airliner was hijacked to the same strip. The guerrillas demanded the release of Palestinian militants held in European jails. When their demands were not met, on September 12, under the gaze of the world media, the guerrillas blew up the three planes after releasing all the passengers. Two days later the PLO called for the establishment of a “national authority” in Jordan.

  For my father, this was the final straw. Eight days later, on September 17, he ordered the army to move aggressively against the fedayeen in Amman and other cities. It would be a mistake to characterize this confrontation as a civil war between Jordanians and Palestinians. Many Jordanians of Palestinian origin fought bravely in the army. And some Jordanians from the East Bank had joined the guerrilla forces fighting against the army. As chief of staff of the army, Sharif Nasser led the struggle. A powerful man and a fierce warrior, he looked like he could punch a horse and knock it out cold. One of his favorite tricks was to grab an onion in one hand and crush it into a pulp, squeezing it over his dinner plate to add a little spice to a bland meal.

  The fighting between the Jordanian forces and the fedayeen was fierce. Before long, we were not only contending with internal enemies. In the fall of 1970, Syria attacked northern Jordan with three armored brigades, a brigade of commandos, and a brigade of Palestinian guerrillas, seeking to help Arafat’s men. Although heavily outnumbered, the Jordanian soldiers of the 40th Armoured Brigade, who were responsible for defending the border, fought back fiercely and held their ground. Syria’s invasion threatened to create an international crisis out of a domestic conflict. On September 23, the Syrians were driven back. But while we had defended our northern border, inside Jordan the conflict with the fedayeen continued to rage.

  In the end, the Jordanian Armed Forces, with their superior professionalism, training, and equipment, prevailed. The fighting with the guerrillas continued off and on until the summer of 1971, but Jordan won. The army regained control of the country and legitimacy prevailed. My father and Sharif Nasser learned that Arafat was hiding in the Egyptian embassy in Amman, which was hosting a visiting delegation from the Arab League. As the delegation members were leaving, they appeared to have gained an extra member: a stocky woman covered from head to toe in a black abayah and head scarf. My father’s intelligence service reported that the mystery woman was likely Arafat trying to escape.

  Sharif Nasser wanted to capture and kill Arafat and argued that he did not deserve to live. But my father told his men to let Arafat leave Jordan. He always believed that it was important to leave open the possibility of reconciliation.

  Twenty years later my father would save Arafat’s life for a second time. In April 1992, Arafat’s plane crashed in the Libyan desert during a sandstorm, killing three of the passengers. By then, much had changed in their relationship. My father would have been a doctor had life not led him into politics, and when he saw Arafat two months later he noticed that he seemed unwell. He sent him to the King Hussein Medical Center. It turned out that Arafat had a blood clot in his brain, which the doctors safely removed in an emergency operation.

  When the Palestinian guerrillas were chased out of Jordan, many of them made their way to Lebanon, which would become the next arena of an even more bloody war. Meanwhile, back home, a handful of radical guerrillas formed a sophisticated new internationally funded terrorist organization. Calling themselves Black September, after the month in which the conflict between Jordan and the PLO began, they vowed to take revenge for their defeat. One of their first acts was to assassinate the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi Tal, on a visit to Cairo in November 1971.

  The following month Zaid Rifai, who had recently become Jordan’s ambassador to the UK, received an urgent telegram from my father saying that a Black September assassination squad had been dispatched to London to attack a Jordanian target. Rifai arranged for extra security at the embassy and drew up a list of potential targets, including me and my brother Feisal, who had recently joined me at school in England. Although I was almost ten, I quickly got the sense something was wrong when policemen with guard dogs came to my school and stayed with me around the clock.

  The next day, Rifai left his home in Regent’s Park later than usual. The car drove past Christmas shoppers on Kensington High Street, and as it slowed to make a sharp turn, a gunman sprang into the road, pulled out a Sten gun, and started spraying bullets. Realizing that he was the target, Rifai threw himself on the floor of the car while the gunman kept firing at the backseat. After the shooting stopped, Zaid Rifai yelled at the driver to take him to a hospital. The car sped away; then, after a few minutes, it stopped. “What’s the matter?” Zaid asked. “Your Excellency,” said the driver, who was an Englishman, “we have a red light.”

  Rifai survived, but his wounds were quite extensive, and he required eleven operations on his hand and arm. There was little doubt as to who was responsible: Black September. My parents came to the conclusion that England was no longer safe. They decided to send Feisal and me even farther away: to America.

  Chapter 4

  Arriving in America

  Nineteen seventy-two was a difficult year for my family, and not just because of threats from terrorists. That was when my parents decided, after ten years of marriage and four children (my twin sisters Aisha and Zein were born in 1968), to divorce. The fact that my brother and I were away at boarding school did not shield us from the uncertainty that all children from divorced families must face. But we were fortunate that our parents always remained very close and were united in their concern and support for us.

  In September 1972, Black September carried out another attack, taking hostages and subsequently killing eleven Israeli athletes at the summer Olympic Games in Munich. The attack took place in the spotlight of the assembled media from across the globe, and now the whole world had witnessed their brutality.

  In October my brother Feisal and I went to America. On our first trip to the United States a few years earlier we had been to Florida with our parents and little sisters and had visited Cypress Gardens and the recently opened Disney World. So I was excited at the thought of returning to the States—in my mind, it was one big theme park. But New England in the fall was not quite Disney World.

  My new school, Eaglebrook, a prep school in western Massachusetts, was perched on a hill in the Pocumtuck range overlooking the town of Deerfield. The school had the feeling of a Swiss mountain resort, complete with chalets and its own ski run. Feisal and I shared a dorm room, and he went to school at Bement, just down the hill. Another change that took a bit of getting used to was the food. One of my favorite snacks in Jordan was bread and zeit ou zatar, olive oil mixed with dried thyme. But here I was introduced to the delights of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

  I did not like St. Edmund’s in the UK, but I never got into a fight there. Eaglebrook was different. I was the first Arab the school had ever seen, and there were several Jewish students. Pretty soon, some of them let me know I was not welcome. I did not understand their animosity and was too young to have encountered the concept of irrational prejudice. In later years I would become all too familiar with people who judge individuals on the basis of their identity, but to a child it made no sense. I knew that Jordanians and Israelis were enemies, but we were now in the United States, and these were Americans. In my mind there was no connection between an Israeli and a Jew. But even in western Massachu
setts, it seemed, I could not escape the conflicts of the Middle East.

  I got into a number of scrapes. Although I had security guards who accompanied me everywhere, their instructions were to protect me from terrorists and assassins, not from aggressive ten-year-olds. Sometimes I did not help my case. In one confrontation, my antagonist said, “Yeah, you and whose army?” I replied, “Me and my dad’s army!”

  One afternoon one of the proctors—older students who were responsible for keeping discipline—kicked my brother out of our dorm room, brought in an older boy from down the hallway, and said, “You and he will fight.” I was enthusiastic, but I did not know how to fight and neither did he, so we locked arms and pounded each other on the back. The proctors let us go at it until we were out of breath, separated us, and then made us go at it again. I jumped onto a bed and leaped at my antagonist, knocking him over. He fell and hit his head hard on the floor. We were all scared something had happened to him, and the proctors hauled him away. It was completely by chance, but because I had taken down a much bigger boy, the others began to show me a little more respect.

  I had just arrived at Eaglebrook when my father married Alia Toukan, the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat from a prominent family of Palestinian origin. Tragically, Queen Alia was killed in a helicopter crash in 1977, when she was just twenty-eight years old. The following year my father married Lisa Halaby, the daughter of an Arab-American businessman and senior U.S. Defense Department official, and she took the name Queen Noor.

  I have quite a large family. In addition to my older sister Alia, from my father’s first marriage in the 1950s to Sharifa Dina Abdel Hamid, there were my brother Feisal and my twin sisters Aisha and Zein. My father’s marriage to Queen Alia produced another sister, Haya, and another brother, Ali, and they adopted an orphan girl, Abir. Later on, after my father married Queen Noor, we were joined by two more brothers, Hamzah and Hashim, and two more sisters, Iman and Raiyah. In all we were twelve children, five boys and seven girls, but very much one family. My four brothers and I like to say we are like five fingers on a hand. If you are well-meaning, we extend the hand of friendship, but when outsiders try to harm the family, we band together and become a fist.

  Nineteen seventy-two was as turbulent a year for the region as it was at home. The United States under President Nixon, preoccupied with its overtures to China, ceased most diplomatic activity aimed at mediating a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Egypt and Syria, impatience over the stalemate was growing. Anwar Sadat, who had succeeded Nasser as president of Egypt in 1970, declared in a speech in late March, “War is inevitable.” In September 1973, Sadat and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad agreed to coordinate a simultaneous attack on Israel so both could regain territory they had lost in the 1967 war.

  On October 6, 1973, Egyptian troops attacked the Sinai while Syrian forces targeted the Golan Heights. After recovering from the surprise attack, three weeks into the war the Israeli forces gained the upper hand. Though neither Sadat nor Assad had informed my father of their war plan, Jordan was drawn into the fray as the whole Arab world supported the war. My father’s priority was Jordan’s safety. He put Jordanian forces on high alert, and sent the 40th Armoured Brigade to support the Syrian army in the Golan Heights rather than risk opening a third front by crossing the border into the West Bank. Three days later Jordanian forces briefly engaged Israeli forces and one company suffered heavy losses. A cease-fire was declared on October 22. The war did not change the status quo; if anything, it cemented it. That would be the last war between Israel and its neighbors for nearly a decade. Four years later, in November 1977, President Sadat would become the first Arab leader to visit Israel. In September 1978, Egypt and Israel signed the historic Camp David Accords, which were partly brokered by President Jimmy Carter. A year later, the two countries signed a peace treaty. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. In exchange, Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel.

  Although the conflict was five thousand miles away, its reverberations managed to reach as far as the hills of western Massachusetts. One of Eaglebrook’s cherished traditions was for the younger students to help out at mealtimes. Shortly after the war began, I was in the dining hall when the headwaiter, one of the older students, stared at me and told me to come over. As I walked up, he hit me. The dining hall was bustling with students, and I stared at him in disbelief. He said, “You’re an Arab, and I hate you!” and then turned and walked away. When I returned to Amman for the holidays, my mother asked me about my time at school, and although I would sometimes say I was not enjoying it that much, I never got into the specifics. I had been brought up to believe that you never told tales, and that you should fight your own battles.

  While back in Jordan on holiday, I hurt my wrist in a boating accident. After the local doctor patched me up, putting my arm in a sling, I walked into the house feeling sorry for myself. I saw my father and was about to tell him all about the accident, when he gave me a look that said, “What are you whining about?” He was from that generation that believed in being personally tough. Not wishing to appear weak, I took the sling off, which caused my arm to swell up badly. Three days later I got it X-rayed and discovered that it was fractured and required a cast.

  That accident finally established me at Eaglebrook. With my broken wrist I could not take part in ski classes. When the cast came off there were about three weeks left to the term, and I was thrown in with the wrestling team. My father, a physical fitness buff, had given me some exercises to do called Commando 7, based on a Canadian army training program. I took to wrestling and discovered that I could be good at it. The next year, as I began to get stronger and fitter, I joined the wrestling team. While they may not have respected titles, my fellow students greatly respected sporting ability. In addition to wrestling, I took up track and field. In those days I was a pretty good sprinter, and I would eventually become captain of both my high school track and wrestling teams. Sport provided me with a way to escape the narrow prejudices of some of my classmates and gave me an early opportunity for leadership.

  Though I may have had bumpy times with my fellow students at Eaglebrook, the same was not true with my teachers, who were excellent. I thrived under their care and still have fond memories of many of them, especially the dorm masters, my French teacher, and my wrestling coaches. They taught me a lot and helped me acclimatize to the United States.

  When it came time to go to high school, I went down the hill, to Deerfield Academy, while Feisal, who was a year and a half younger than me, stayed behind at Eaglebrook. Although only about a mile away, it was a different world. With two hundred years of tradition behind it, Deerfield was dedicated to high academic standards but also to personal development. There was an atmosphere of genuine respect and tolerance and a strong sense of community among the students. I can truly say that the years I spent at Deerfield were some of the happiest of my life.

  I had good sports credentials for a new boy and made it onto the school wrestling team in my sophomore year. But not without a struggle. In those days, wrestling was very regimented by weight. The coach told me that if I could get down to 118 pounds, I would make the team. The problem was, I weighed 130 pounds and was in good shape. I realized that the only way I could lose all that weight was to stop eating, so for three weeks I ate nothing but wafer crackers and diet Jell-O. I made the team, won all my matches, and in the third match pulled off a victory by pinning my opponent in a record eleven seconds. But my success was short-lived. Because I had been undereating, I could not concentrate in class and my grades took a sudden turn for the worse. Also, I started passing out and went on sick leave for a time. As a result, they took me off the team and put me on the backup squad.

  Although it was hard being so far away from home and from my family, the egalitarian spirit of America was refreshing. Back in Jordan I would always be the eldest son of the King, and this would bear on all my interactions, whether with teachers or fellow classmates. Bu
t at Deerfield it did not matter whether you were the son of a chief executive officer, a scholarship kid from Chicago’s South Side, or one of the Rockefellers—everyone had the same tasks to perform and the same opportunity to shine. Each day at mealtimes some students acted as waiters, serving their classmates. At one point, when it was my turn to serve, I was not doing a very good job. Jim Smith, who ran the dining hall and was also the football coach, good naturedly yelled, “Abdullah, I don’t care if your father is the King of Jordan, I am the king in this dining hall!” I got the message and my performance improved. Smith was quite popular with the students. He had a large family himself, several boys and a girl, and looked on the school as an extension of his family. He would frequently break out into song in the dining hall—and although he had a fine voice, the students enjoyed pretending that it reminded them of the sound of fingernails on a blackboard.

  At Deerfield I made my first close American friends: George “Gig” Faux, from outside Boston; Chip Smith, a preppy New Englander; and Perry Vella, who had come on a scholarship from Queens, New York. My classmates knew my background, but they did not stand on ceremony. To them, I was just Abdullah or, as they more often called me, “Ab.” Deerfield allowed me to have a normal childhood and gave me the tools to turn into the man I needed to become. To this day, some of my closest friends are my old Deerfield classmates.