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

by King Abdullah II

  My brothers and I carried my father’s coffin from the Royal Guards Mosque to his grave in the palace burial ground, next to the graves of his father, King Talal, and his grandfather, King Abdullah I. My brothers and I stood at attention while a trumpeter played the last post. The Royal Guard fired a fifteen-gun salute as my father was lowered to his final resting place.

  Although it was a day of great sadness, Jordanians felt a sense of pride that the whole world had come to pay its respects to their king. There was also a sense of determination as many realized that they needed to be strong to keep the country together. Many Jordanians fondly referred to their king as Abu Abdullah, “father of Abdullah,” as is common in the Arab world. In the weeks and months to come, I would benefit more times than I could count from Jordanians’ love for my father and from their determination to help his son succeed.

  After the funeral I headed to Parliament, to be sworn in as king. I had asked the chief of protocol to get a portrait of my father for the ceremony. As I walked in, I saw a huge picture of my father on the podium, dominating the room. I stood to attention. I felt his kind gaze looking down on me, and my eyes began to mist. Struggling to keep control, I stood motionless for several seconds, maintaining my salute. Then I went to swear the constitutional oath: “I swear by God that I will respect the Constitution and remain faithful to the nation.” The president of the senate replied, “May God protect His Majesty King Abdullah and give him success. May Jordan live long, as His Majesty King Hussein intended.”

  After the ceremony was finished, an aide came up to me and said, “Your Majesty, this way.” Out of habit, I looked around for my father, and saw his portrait looking down at me. For nearly half a century my father had ruled Jordan, sometimes fighting wars, sometimes negotiating peace treaties, and always encouraging others to lay down their weapons and place hope above fear. Now it would be my job to manage these conflicts and warring parties on Jordan’s borders, and to honor my father’s memory by continuing his ceaseless quest for peace.

  Chapter 13

  Becoming King

  The days and weeks after my father’s death were an extraordinarily sad time. The nation mourned its king, the only leader most Jordanians had ever known, and I grappled with the loss of my father, who had always been such a firm and guiding presence in my life. But I had little time for personal grief. The night before his funeral I went to bed with a family of four, and I woke up the next morning with a family of five million. If there was one thing that my father had taught me, it was that a king must not command so much as watch over his people.

  After being sworn in, one of my first acts as king was to issue a decree naming my brother Hamzah the crown prince. Five years later, I relieved him of this responsibility. Although the months before my father’s death had been tense, our family gathered together to support one another, and our shared grief brought many of us closer. I was very grateful for their love and support, but I knew that there were many outside the country, and some inside, who were watching and waiting for me to falter. As the rumors continued to circulate in the salons of West Amman, I heard that some people whom I had thought of as good friends were saying, “He won’t last more than three months.”

  While I was awed by the task before me, it slowly dawned on me that my father had been preparing me for this all along. Although for most of my life I was not the crown prince, my father had taken me along with him on countless state visits, important foreign policy missions, and on trips to every corner of Jordan. Without the public scrutiny of being the heir apparent, I was given a golden opportunity to watch him as he navigated the perilous waters of international diplomacy. Plucked from my army postings for short trips with my father, I sometimes felt that I was present when history was being made.

  Just three weeks after my father’s funeral, I received one of my first official visitors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, accompanied by his foreign minister, Ariel Sharon. Interactions between our countries were tense at that time, and this particular prime minister had sometimes stretched the relationship to the breaking point.

  In 1996, the year after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel on the heels of a wave of suicide bombings, believed to be the work of Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement), which killed some sixty Israelis. On September 25 the following year he hit back at a Hamas leader then residing in Jordan.

  Hamas had agreed that they would not conduct any political or military activity from Jordan and would only establish a media relations office. Over time, they went back on their commitment. Khaled Meshaal, a senior member of the political wing of Hamas, was walking toward his office in Amman one morning when Israeli intelligence agents leaped out of their car and squirted a mysterious substance into his ear. Meshaal suddenly became deathly ill. Two of the Mossad agents were chased across Amman by one of Meshaal’s bodyguards and eventually captured by police. Four other members of the assassination squad made a dash for the Israeli embassy, while two others hid out at the InterContinental Hotel.

  At this point Netanyahu called my father to say, “We have a problem.” He sent his chief of intelligence, Danni Yatom, to explain what had happened and to ask that the Mossad agents be released. Although Yatom did not say so, we later learned that the assassination attempt had been personally approved by Netanyahu. In a déjà vu, a Hamas leader was assassinated in Dubai in January 2010, in what is believed to have been a Mossad operation that involved agents traveling with fake passports. And Netanyahu is again prime minister of Israel.

  My father was livid. He had been working night and day to try to advance the cause of peace in the region. The previous January he had played an important role in facilitating the Hebron agreement, whereby Israel agreed to redeploy its soldiers from the city of Hebron in implementation of the Oslo process. A few days before the assassination attempt, he had discreetly passed to the Israelis a proposal from Hamas for a thirty-year cease-fire. And here Netanyahu was trying to assassinate one of Hamas’s leaders on the streets of our capital!

  Jordanian doctors struggled to save Meshaal’s life. They were fighting a losing battle, because they could not identify the poison that had been used. My father demanded that the Israelis identify the poison at once and provide its antidote.

  Yatom said Meshaal had been injected with a complex chemical compound, and that he would die within twenty-four hours. My father told him that if Meshaal died, he would cancel the peace treaty and break off diplomatic relations with Israel. Finally, after stepping out of the meeting to call Netanyahu, Yatom told my father that there was another member of the Mossad team, a female doctor, staying at the InterContinental Hotel, and she had the antidote with her.

  The Jordanian and Palestinian people were outraged at Israel’s brazen act. Even if we managed to save Meshaal’s life, we still had the dilemma of what to do about the two detained Mossad agents and those holed up in the Israeli embassy in Amman. All had entered our country using fake Canadian passports and had been involved in an assassination attempt. They did not have diplomatic immunity, but the Israelis refused to turn over the four accomplices who had sought refuge in the embassy. Jordanian security forces surrounded the embassy to make sure that they did not slip away. At the time, I was commander of Special Operations, and I can say it was a very tense period.

  That evening, Meshaal, whose medical condition was rapidly deteriorating, was taken to King Hussein Medical Center and tended to in the Queen Alia Heart Institute, one of the country’s leading medical facilities. The Mossad doctor, who had by then moved to another hotel, was found and brought to the hospital, carrying a vial of the antidote with her. But senior members of Hamas were suspicious and refused to let anyone inject anything further into the sleeping Meshaal without knowing what it was. They demanded the chemical formula for the antidote.

  My father called President Clinton, urgently seeking his help. He asked Clinton to demand that America’
s close ally undo the damage it had done. Clinton complied, and finally Netanyahu relented and told us that the antidote was naloxone, a drug used to counter the effects of an opiate overdose.

  We later learned that the poison was a chemically enhanced version of the painkiller fentanyl, which would kill without a trace in forty-eight hours. It had been hidden in a modified camera that had a long, retractable needle instead of a lens, which one of the assassins had jabbed into Meshaal’s ear. Once they knew the antidote, a team of Jordanian doctors was able to administer it and save his life.

  Khaled Meshaal’s life was spared, but relations between Jordan and Israel were in critical condition. My father insisted that the Israelis pay a high political price for their actions, and that they release from jail Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the blind and wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of Hamas, who was one of the organization’s founders. Yassin had served eight years of a life sentence for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Eventually, a negotiated solution was reached: the Mossad agents were allowed to leave the country in exchange for the release of scores of Palestinians held in Israeli jails—including Sheikh Yassin. At 1:30 a.m. on September 29, 1997, as part of the agreement, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu flew to Amman to make a formal public apology.

  Fast forward two years. I unexpectedly find myself as my father’s successor, the new King of Jordan. Benjamin Netanyahu is still prime minister of Israel, and Khaled Meshaal, now fully recovered, has broken his agreement to restrict Hamas’s activities in Jordan to media outreach. In the last year of his life, my father told me that he was very unhappy with Meshaal’s continued political activity in Jordan—trying to smuggle weapons across the border into the West Bank and interfering in Jordanian politics. He felt that Meshaal, and the rest of the Hamas leaders in Amman, were taking advantage of Jordan’s hospitality.

  In countless negotiations and meetings Meshaal and other Hamas leaders residing in Jordan were repeatedly asked to stop activities that violated the conditions they had accepted for their stay in the country. But to no avail. They were obstinate, and wanted to operate with impunity. The government finally asked Meshaal to leave Jordan in August 1999. The Qatari government stepped forward and seemed eager to host him, so Meshaal and other Hamas leaders left for Doha.

  A few days before our scheduled meeting, Benjamin Netanyahu made an inflammatory speech at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. In his remarks he accused my father of siding with Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, implied that Jordan might ally with Saddam Hussein in the future, and conjured the image of the Iraqi menace reaching the Israeli border through Jordan.

  The speech was widely criticized in the region, and even inside Israel. Ehud Barak, the Israeli opposition leader, said, “There is no pit into which the prime minister has not fallen. The problem is he drags along the entire country into the pit with him. Even during the mourning period for King Hussein, Netanyahu found it fitting to endanger the few achievements of peace left.”

  Our meeting was not memorable. In a two-hour session over lunch we discussed the peace process and water rights. But Netanyahu’s mischaracterization of my father’s role in the Gulf War in order to score a few political points had left a bad taste in my mouth. My father did not side with Saddam—he tried to prevent a war that he saw as serving no one’s interests. I came away from the meeting with the sense that getting the peace process back on track was going to be a long, hard slog.

  In a country like Jordan, outside pressures force you to focus on foreign policy, but I had some critical domestic issues on my plate. One of my first decisions as king was whether to appoint a new prime minister. Jordan has a parliamentary system of government with a hereditary monarchy. Under the Constitution, Parliament’s upper house, the Senate, is appointed by the king and made up of Jordanians who have distinguished themselves through public service, such as former prime ministers, ambassadors, and senior military officers. The lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, is chosen by a general election every four years. The king, as head of state, appoints the prime minister, who then selects cabinet ministers to form a government. Cabinet ministers could be selected from among members of Parliament or from outside it. This government must then win a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies. If it does not, the government is disbanded and the process begins again.

  Separate from the parliamentary system is the Royal Court, or Diwan. Every Jordanian citizen has the right to petition the king directly, on any matter of concern, and these petitions are presented to the Diwan, which people refer to as “the house for all Jordanians.”

  A petition can be on any topic, ranging from “I’m broke” or “I have a loan I can’t pay” to “I can’t educate my children,” “I have a health issue,” or “I can’t find a job.” Part of the role of the chief of the Royal Court is to meet everyone, listen to their petitions, and transmit their requests to the king. This system, based on tradition, was created when Jordan was a much smaller country. Now, with a population of nearly six million, it is not possible for the chief of the Royal Court to meet everybody personally, so various departments have been set up to address different topics. People of prominence, however, still see the chief of the Royal Court in person. And when I visit rural areas of the country, people will frequently come up to me directly and hand me a piece of paper with their petition written on it.

  Although it is not formally called for in the Constitution, in Jordan it is traditional for the existing government to resign following the proclamation of a new king. Of course, this tradition had not been exercised in some time, since my father had ruled for nearly half a century. In my early dealings with government officials, they would tell me of their grand plans for improvements. But when I asked the simple question “When?” I rarely got a satisfactory answer. This was my first indication that a government does not run like an army.

  When changes are made at a high level, Jordanians often assume that it is personal and that the official being replaced somehow got into my bad books. But that has never been the case. What I look for in all my advisers is the ability to implement my program and to get things done expeditiously. If the advisers do not get results, they will be replaced. In the end, we are all working for the people of Jordan, and they deserve the very best.

  In early March 1999, I requested and received the existing government’s resignation and asked Abdul Raouf Rawabdeh, an experienced parliamentarian and administrator, to be the new prime minister, and Abdul Karim Kabariti, a loyal confidant of my father’s who had been prime minister from 1996 to 1997, to be the new chief of the Royal Court. That first decision, to change the government, was one of the most stressful that I have ever had to make. It does not really get any easier, but the first time was particularly difficult. I remember being in Basman Palace, in the Royal Court compound, preparing to retire the old government and to bring the new one in, wondering whether I was doing the right thing. Abdul Raouf was not somebody widely expected to be nominated as prime minister, and I knew I would come in for criticism whatever decision I made.

  I was standing in a room off the main hall in the Diwan, when, deep in thought, I glanced up and saw a picture of my father in military uniform, looking down at me and smiling. I took that as a sign that I was doing the right thing. My father trusted me enough to make me king; now I had to trust my own instincts. I announced the changes and held my breath.

  A couple of weeks later, as the forty-day mourning period for my father came to an end, I had to make another sensitive decision. I knew that Jordan would benefit from my wife’s energy, intelligence, and compassion, and so I decided to give her the title of queen. But I was also sensitive to the impact that this might have on Noor, my father’s widow, who had been queen for two decades. So I went to meet with her in private. She was understanding, and said that it was time for a new generation to take over. She also said that, although he may have been reserved at times, my father would constantly tell her how much he loved me, how proud he
was of my achievements in the army, and how he thought that I would be the best person to lead the country when he was gone. I thanked her for her kindness and said I appreciated her support.

  On March 21, 1999, Rania was proclaimed queen. I sent her a public letter announcing that fact, saying, “Over the past years, you shared with me the blessings bestowed upon us under the great father, my father, and the father of all Jordanians. . . . Now that I have been destined by God to shoulder the number one responsibility in Jordan, I decided, especially since you are my life companion and mother of Hussein, that you will become Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah as of today.” As we were all still mourning the loss of my father, we postponed the formal enthronement ceremony, which took place a few months later. The following day, Queen Noor was heading to the United States with her children Hashim, Iman, and Raiyah to take them back to school in America. Rania and I offered to drive her to the airport. In the days following my father’s death, our relationship had been stronger than ever, but as we drove I could sense that something had changed. Noor was polite but very formal and reserved, and it was an uncomfortable trip. Our relationship has been cold since then.