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King of the shifting sands
Published 29 November 2007
Caught at the volatile crossroads of the Middle East, Hussein of Jordan kept his desert kingdom together with charm, courage and guile.
Shortly before he died in 1999, King Hussein of Jordan had a long conversation with Avi Shlaim in which he filled the author in about his clandestine meetings with top Israelis. It was clever of the king to confide in the professor. Shlaim - who was born in Baghdad, grew up in Israel and is now a professor of international relations at Oxford - not only has the twists and turns of the Arab-Israeli conflict at his fingertips but understands better than most why it has twisted or turned.
His biography of Hussein, Lion of Jordan, a lot of it garnered from interviews, is superb. He plainly liked the king, enjoying him for his courage, steadfastness, decency and zest. He does not conceal the enormity of Hussein's mistakes, or the other, less likable sides to his character. But even here his approach is sympathetic.
Hussein, who ruled Jordan as an absolute monarch from 1953 until his death, succeeded in his overarching aim. This was to maintain the small patch of mainly desert land called Jordan (Transjordan in the early years) as an independent kingdom under the Hashemite dynasty established by his grandfather and the British after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
No prudent betting man would have risked a penny on the future of this rickety little state. It had meagre resources, a population painfully divided between tribesmen and Palestinian refugees (with Palestinians soon to become the majority) and an economy dependent on handouts from neighbours or big powers, all of which had their own agendas. Its survival, in a region torn by war, civil war and conspiracy, was unlikely.
Yet Hussein, who when he was 15 saw his grandfather assassinated, kept it all going. A quiet master of realpolitik, he shifted back and forth with the region's unruly tides. When subsidies from one country dried up, he turned to another: at one point the CIA station chief was bringing him the cash personally, in a briefcase. From their beginnings in the office of a London eye doctor, there were at least 55 secret meetings with Israel's leaders. He made Arab friends where he could, including a long, unwise friendship with Saddam Hussein: the Americans used the Jordanian, during the Iran-Iraq War, as a secret conduit for selling arms to Iraq, but then turned on the king savagely when he tried, before the first Gulf war, to manufacture a peaceful "Arab solution".
A high-handed autocrat, Hussein hired and fired his governments like so much confetti; he purged the army to keep it loyal; the press had to behave itself. And, when the time came, he did what many Jordanian nationalists had wanted him to do in the first place: he shed his responsibility for the lost West Bank to concentrate on the survival of the East Bank, the original Transjordan.
That is the other side of the story: Hussein's "betrayal" of the Palestinians. His grandfather acquired the West Bank and East Jerusalem after Israel had fought its way to independence and Palestine was broken up; Hussein lost both the West Bank and Jerusalem to Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. That loss, Shlaim argues, was not inevitable: it was a mistake of epic and tragic proportions by the king.
Before 1967, Hussein had been talking regularly, but in secret, to the Israelis about matters of common concern, such as keeping the borders calm. A brutal reprisal raid by Israel shattered this calm; Hussein impulsively, and it turned out madly, linked himself to Gamal Abdel Nasser's brinkmanship; Israeli expansionists saw their chance - and the rest is history.
Hussein accepted responsibility for the loss of the West Bank. He tried to win it back for the Palestinians in the only way he knew - by talking across the battle lines - but now he was the petitioner rather than the petitioned. With Nasser's encouragement, he offered complete peace in return for Israel's complete withdrawal from the land seized in the 1967 war. But the Israelis, who had once said that they wanted peace more than anything else, began to waver after their 1967 conquests: some of them now wanted more land. Expansionists had huge influence and the settlement of land began. Israel strung Hussein along, letting him have his meetings but giving him nothing.
Then, after a bit, there was a change on the Arab side, too: the Palestinians found their own voice in Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The question arose whether it was Hussein or Arafat who spoke for the dispossessed Palestinians. In 1970, the two clashed in a short, ruthless civil war: the PLO had crudely abused Jordan's hospitality and the king threw it and its fighters out of the country. Thus began the slow, uncertain process of Hussein disengaging himself from the West Bank. In 1974, the Arab League declared the PLO to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. But it was not until 1988, during the first Palestinian intifada, that Jordan cut all its remaining administrative and legal links with the occupied West Bank.
That was that. The king was in effect no longer directly concerned with ending Israel's occupation (though he did provide the Palestinians with an umbrella, respectable to Israel, during the Madrid negotiations in the early 1990s). Instead, he concentrated on the much easier job of getting an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. This was achieved in 1994, though it didn't help Jordan much. Hussein had been determined that his peace with Israel would be "warm", not "cold" like Egypt's. But in the end, as Shlaim writes, he got no more than a "king's peace", not the "people's peace" he had wanted: the political and economic benefits were marginal, at best.
Warmth was crucial. Hussein understood that the Israelis, for all their military prowess, remained psychologically vulnerable, still believing at some level that they were under threat. And there were side benefits to Jordan from those endless meetings with top Israelis. For instance, Shlaim reveals that, during the crackdown on the PLO in 1970, the king got Israel to agree tacitly that it would come to his aid if Syria joined forces with the Palestinians. Much later, after Yitzhak Rabin and Hussein had signed their peace treaty, Rabin was the king's advocate in asking the US Congress to forgive Jordan's debt - a twist that shows the extraordinary power of Israel's lobby in Washington.
Hussein got on well with Rabin - they were, he felt, two blunt military men who understood each other - but his relations with Israel's leaders deteriorated sharply after Rabin's assassination in 1995. He distrusted Shimon Peres and during Israel's 1996 election showed his preference for Binyamin Netanyahu. It was this, writes Shlaim, that "probably tipped the balance in [Netan yahu's] favour." If so, it was a heinous mistake by the king, with cruel results.
He, too, could be cruel. When he was very young, he banished his first wife, refusing to let her see her baby daughter for many years (he married, in succession, four times and was devoted to his other wives and dozen children). When he was very old, he was brutal to his brother Crown Prince Hassan, a clever and honourable man (Shlaim calls him an "unsung hero"), but without his brother's magic, who had served him loyally for 34 years and had always believed he would succeed him. Almost on his deathbed, Hussein changed his mind without warning, appointing his eldest son, Abdullah, his successor. The cruelty was compounded by the vile letter he sent Hassan, accusing him quite falsely of many ill deeds.
Hussein let corruption flourish among his ministers and advisers, and enjoyed high living himself. His zest for life was expressed in fast cars and planes. He was a fearless pilot. During Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the 1970s, the king flew out in his helicopter to welcome his American guests. Out of joie de vivre, he performed acrobatics near the incoming plane. "Had there been a Jordanian official aboard our plane," wrote Kissinger, "he could have easily got us to sign any document as the price of getting his monarch to return to earth."
So what is the verdict: was King Hussein an Arab peace hero, worthy of his nomination for the Nobel Prize, or a Jordanian nationalist who let down the Palestinian cause? Shlaim in this admirable account shows how, in a sense, both can be true. Hussein struggled long and in vain for a wider peace; that he failed was due more to Israeli deviousness and American indifference than to any shortcoming on his part.
The misjudgement that led to the loss of the West Bank to Israel was unforgivable, but he gave up trying to get the territory back only when the West Bankers made it clear that he should no longer speak in their name. He believed irrepressibly in peace, he behaved decently most of the time and he enjoyed himself. Not a bad epitaph for an autocrat.
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