King Hussein of Jordan negotiated the dangerous shoals of Arab politics, escaped a succession of assassination attempts, fought a civil war with the Palestinians, and maintained a covert dialogue with Israel until he finally signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state in 1994.
He has been the subject of a torrent of biographies, some of which have been published since his death a decade ago. But King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (Yale University Press), by British historian Nigel Ashton, is the first to draw on his private papers. Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has used the opportunity to write an accessible and generally sympathetic account of King Hussein’s turbulent reign, which ended in the winter of 1999 with his death.
The king, who ascended to the Hashemite throne at the age of 17 after his mentally ill father was deemed unfit to hold office, was often confronted by issues relating to Israel, his much more powerful neighbour shunned by the Arab world. Citing an example, Ashton refers to an Israeli raid that he correctly describes as “a key landmark on the road to war.”
In the autumn of 1966, less than a year before the Six Day War, Syria stepped up its campaign to destabilize Jordan by backing Palestinian raids against Israel. Six of those attacks were launched from Jordanian soil, and one of them claimed the lives of three Israeli soldiers. By way of retaliation, Israel sent an infantry brigade, backed by tanks, artillery and air cover, into the Jordanian village of Samu.
King Hussein, having had started secret contacts with Israel in the early 1960s, felt betrayed by the raid. He told Israeli interlocutors that he could not “absorb” such a “serious” retaliatory blow. Ashton sympathizes with the king, but fails to explain why Israel should have exercised restraint in the face of blatant aggression.
Ashton believes that King Hussein’s decision to attack Israel in the Six Day War was “the greatest calamity of his reign.” As he points out, the king was misled by his ally, Egypt, which claimed that three-quarters of Israel’s army in the Sinai Peninsula had been destroyed. As a result of its colossal error, Jordan lost much of its armoured force, as well as the West Bank, which had accounted for about 40 per cent of its gross domestic product.
King Hussein was prepared to make peace with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, but Israel was only ready only for a partial pullback.
During the postwar period, when Jordan became one of the front lines in Israel’s military struggle with the Arabs, King Hussein was caught in the middle. As Ashton puts it, “The more Israel punished Jordan for incursions on the part of Palestinian guerrilla groups, the weaker the foundations of his rule became. And the weaker these foundations became, the weaker was his ability to rein in the fedayeen…”
He has a point, but only to a degree. At the end of the day, what should Israel have done as the PLO pounded Israel? Sit on its hands? Besides, as events in 1970 and 1971 showed, Jordan was strong enough to eject the PLO from its territory. In defeating the PLO, King Hussein restored his authority, but damaged his relations with his fellow Arabs.
Ashton’s interpretation of King Hussein’s startling disclosure to Israel on Sept. 25, 1973, that Egypt and Syria intended to launch the Yom Kippur War seems plausible. The king apparently hoped to forestall a new round of fighting and persuade Israel to make genuine concessions for the sake of peace. But by late September, the die for war was already cast. He adds that King Hussein tried to fend off Egyptian and Syrian requests for Jordanian participation in the Yom Kippur War, but when he could stall no longer, he limited Jordan’s involvement.
Ashton discloses that, in a step toward peace in 1974, Jordan offered Israel a proposal in which both sides would pull back eight kilometres from the Jordan River and Jordan would reestablish its rule in the area vacated by the Israelis. Israel rejected that idea.
According to Ashton, King Hussein publicly welcome Anwar Sadat’s 1977 rapprochement with Israel but privately condemned it because he had not been notified in advance. Nor did he like Israel’s 1978 Camp David accord with Egypt. From his perspective, it was too vague on the Palestinian issue.
Ashton is skeptical that King Hussein’s 1987 agreement with Shimon Peres – then Israel’s foreign minister – was “a great missed opportunity” to advance peace. Since Israel’s prime minister of the day, Yitzhak Shamir, was scathing of Peres’ approach, it was effectively a still-born agreement.
His assessment of the king’s alliance with Saddam Hussein on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait is harsh: “The king’s faith in Saddam was probably the biggest character misjudgment of his reign.”
Having refused to join Egypt in the peace process, King Hussein entered the Arab rejectionist camp, led by Iraq. Why? Jordan was dependent on its lucrative commercial relationship with Iraq and Iraq’s generous subsidies, totalling more than $1 billion per annum. Further, he believed that Saddam’s leadership could restore Arab pride and dignity. What a miscalculation!
Prior to the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War, Shamir asked the king for permission to use Jordan’s airspace in case Israel had to respond to Iraqi aggression. The answer was a resounding no. The king said he could not be seen colluding with Israel.
King Hussein’s reaction to Israel’s 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization was one of anger and betrayal because he had not been consulted. But eventually, he regarded Oslo as a cover to reach a peace agreement with Israel. As he wrote Bill Clinton, the president of the United States: “We shall now move on our own on the Jordanian-Israeli agenda.”
Ashton’s chapter on this topic, and his treatment of Israel’s bilateral relations with Jordan after the signing of the peace treaty, is comprehensive.
King Hussein was of the view that, in Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, he had a reliable and trustworthy partner who had internalized the need for peace.
Yet the king was not prepared to take the risk of officially recognizing Israel until he was given certain economic and military benefits by the United States. Rabin appointed Efraim Halevy, a top-ranking Mossad official who was close to the king, to act on Jordan’s behalf in Washington. He convinced the White House to cancel Jordan’s $700-million debt and sell Jordan a squadron of F-16 jets. Israel’s position prompted Dennis Ross, the U.S. envoy to the Mideast, to exclaim, “Tell me, Efraim, who are you representing here? Israel or Jordan?” Halevy said, “Both.”
As Ashton tells it, King Hussein was genuinely grief-stricken by Rabin’s assassination. In a eulogy at his funeral, he called Rabin “a brother” and “a friend.” Yet King Hussein’s relationship with his successors, Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, was cool by comparison. He claimed that Peres had used disproportionate force in the 1996 Grapes of Wrath operation in southern Lebanon. As for Netanyahu, he accused him of undermining peace talks with the Palestinian Authority and of violating Jordan’s sovereignty by sending a Mossad hit team to Amman in 1997 to kill a Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal.
Perhaps Ashton’s most astonishing revelation turns on a short-lived initiative undertaken by Rabin in the year he was killed. Rabin asked King Hussein to wangle an invitation from Saddam to visit Baghdad and establish relations with Iraq. Saddam did not rule out Rabin’s overture, but an Iraqi internal crisis rendered it impossible.
