Lion of Jordan (2 page)

The present book examines the Arab–Israeli conflict and many of the same attempts to resolve it peacefully, but this time not from an Israeli perspective but from a Jordanian one, or, more specifically, from the perspective of Jordan's principal decision-maker: Hussein bin Talal. It explores the four main circles of Hussein's foreign policy: Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world and the Great Powers. Special attention is devoted to the persistent tension in Hussein's foreign policy between the commitment to Arab nationalism and the desire to reach a modus vivendi with Israel. The key to understanding all four strands of his foreign policy, it will be argued, was the survival of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. This was the overarching aim; everything else flowed from it.

The first part covers the colonial context for the emergence of modern Jordan, the Hashemite legacy, Hussein's childhood, the making of a king and the early years of his reign. But the bulk of the book deals with the period after 1967, and, more specifically, with Hussein's efforts to recover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It was in this context that Hussein repeatedly offered full peace in return for full withdrawal but encountered relentless Israeli expansionism. This is where the covert
contacts with Israel's leaders fitted into the broader framework of his foreign policy. The first meeting across the battle lines was in fact held as early as 1963. The initiative for the meeting came from the Jordanian monarch, who followed in the footsteps of his grandfather. Each sought a peaceful solution to the conflict, each broke the Arab taboo on direct contact with the enemy, and each was described by his own supporters as the king of realism. But for Hussein the great watershed was 1967. It was only after the loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that his back channel to Tel Aviv assumed critical importance.

The list of prominent Israeli politicians who met secretly with Hussein before 1994 included Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, Itzhak Rabin and Itzhak Shamir. The list of Hussein's secret meetings with Israeli officials printed at the end of this book is probably incomplete, but it gives an idea of the scope and intensity of the extraordinary dialogue between two parties that remained formally at war with one another, and lends substance to the description ‘the best of enemies'. It captures the essence of a unique adversarial partnership.

My primary aim in writing this book has been to provide an account of Hussein's long reign and to make it as detailed, accurate, readable and interesting as possible. I hope it will also help the reader make sense of nearly half a century of tangled and tortuous Middle Eastern history. It attempts to break new ground in a number of ways. First, it provides information that is not currently available on a crucial aspect of the diplomacy surrounding the Arab–Israeli conflict. Second, and more importantly, it challenges the conventional view that Israel faced a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world and the related myth of Arab intransigence. Third, whereas much of the literature on the Middle East peace process is written by American and Israeli scholars and focuses on the roles of the United States and Israel, this book focuses on the role of one of the major Arab actors. Like Britain in the post-war era, King Hussein constantly strove to ‘punch above his weight'. His influence in regional affairs was much greater than one might reasonably expect from the ruler of an impecunious and insignificant desert kingdom. He was also a master of the art of political survival. Against all odds, he remained on the Hashemite throne for forty-six years, from 1953 until his death from natural causes in 1999.

Historians of the recent past need lucky breaks; mine was that Hussein very trustingly gave me an interview on the most sensitive of subjects:
his clandestine relationship with Israel. The interview took place on 3 December 1996 at Hussein's residence in Britain, Buckhurst Park. It lasted two hours, was recorded and later transcribed. This was one of the rare occasions when Hussein spoke on the record about his meetings with Israeli leaders prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The interview explains a good deal of his thinking about Israel and individual Israeli leaders, about his troubled relations with the PLO and with other Arab rulers, and about the major stages in his struggle for peace. After the king's death, I published an edited version of this interview: ‘His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel' (
New York Review of Books
, 15 July 1999). The complete transcript of this interview runs to thirty-six pages, and it served as a major source for this biography.

At the meeting at Buckhurst Park, I indicated to King Hussein that after finishing the book on Israel's foreign policy, I planned to write a book about him, and he gave me every encouragement. He invited me to visit him in Amman and volunteered to share with me his notes on the meetings that I found so fascinating. But I was too slow: he fell ill, and I lost my chance. Despite missing the opportunity for further privileged access to Hussein and his papers, I did not abandon the idea of writing a book about him. But, as with any contemporary history project, this one presented me with problems as well as opportunities. The main problem has been that of access to the relevant official documents; it is particularly acute in this case because Jordan has no proper national archive. My answer has been to make the most of the primary sources I could access rather than lament the ones I could not, on the principle that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The main opportunity has been to get the first-hand testimony of people who were involved in the events that I have written about. Interviews are, of course, notoriously fallible in some respects, but for a project such as this one they are also indispensable.

Because King Hussein had allowed me to interview him and told me so much, many members of his family and of his inner circle helped me with this book after his death. At the end is a list of seventy-six interviews that I conducted with Jordanians who served Hussein in one capacity or another; it includes his younger brother Hassan, his sister Basma, his eldest son and heir, Abdullah II, his cousin Zaid bin Shaker, Talal bin Muhammad, his nephew and national security adviser, prime ministers,
senior officials, diplomats and soldiers. These interviews with policymakers of the Hussein era are often revealing and illuminating; they provide much colour, they help to bring the story to life, and they fill in many gaps. They are used here not as a substitute for the written sources but as a supplement to them. I have found that conducting so many interviews has enabled me to take some kind of meta-position, to balance different narratives, and to make allowances for personal and political agendas.

One interviewee deserves a special mention: General Ali Shukri, who served as the director of King Hussein's Private Office from 1976 until 1999. General Shukri was one of the king's closest aides and confidants: he was entrusted with many sensitive missions; he set up and attended many of the secret meetings with the Israelis; and he accompanied Hussein on sixty-one visits to Baghdad between 1980 and the Gulf crisis of 1990. General Shukri's help to me included sixteen long interviews, countless conversations, the checking of facts and introductions to other key officials. The interviews contain detailed information, deep insight into the late king and his policies, and a number of startling revelations, including an attempt by Hussein to arrange a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Itzhak Rabin, a secret meeting he sponsored on a Jordanian air base between Saddam Hussein and Hafiz al-Asad of Syria, the attempt to broker an ‘Arab solution' to the Gulf crisis, a crucial meeting with Itzhak Shamir in Britain twelve days before the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War, and a Syrian plan to assassinate the king and his brother after he signed the peace treaty with Israel.

Any biography is bound to raise the question of the biographer's attitude towards his subject. It seems to me that a certain degree of sympathy for one's subject is essential to a successful biography. As will become clear to any perceptive reader of this book, I certainly felt such sympathy towards Hussein, who appeared to combine humility with humanity and exceptionally gracious manners. I knew him only slightly, but, on the few occasions when we did meet, he invariably came across as an open-minded and sincere individual, and as a decent human being. My sympathy with him as a person was enhanced by the discovery that his efforts to work out a peaceful solution to the conflict in the Middle East met, for the most part, with ignorance and indifference on the part of the top American policy-makers and dishonesty and deviousness on the part of the Israeli ones.

On the other hand, it was much more difficult to reconcile my sympathy for the king with a similar sense of solidarity with the Palestinians, the real victims of the Zionist project. Although I admired Hussein, I did not adopt his perspective on the Palestinians who made up more than half of the population of his kingdom. Nevertheless, concentration on the king has inevitably been at the expense of providing a richer account of the Palestinian struggle for independence and statehood. In dealing with Hussein, I had to maintain a delicate balance: I valued the personal contact with my subject and the help he extended to me, but at the same time I had to be careful that my work did not topple over into hagiography. I set out to write an honest, scholarly and critical book on the life and times of Hussein bin Talal. Whether I have been successful is not for me but for the reader to judge.

At various stages in the long journey that will end with the publication of this book, I received support from institutions and individuals that it is my pleasure to acknowledge. My greatest debt is to the British Academy for awarding me a three-year research professorship in 2003–6 and for the research grant that accompanied it. The professorship freed me from my teaching and administrative duties at the University of Oxford, while the grant enabled me to travel, to visit archives and to employ research assistants. Without the generous support of the British Academy this book could not have been written. My other debt is to the United States Institute of Peace for a generous research grant in 2001–2 that enabled me to employ Adiba Mango as a full-time research assistant and to make several extended visits to Jordan.

The Middle East Centre at St Antony's College provided a most congenial work environment. My greatest debt is to Eugene Rogan, the director of the centre and one of my closest friends, for his advice, support and encouragement since the inception of this project. Eugene is working on a history of the Arabs, and our regular meetings to read and critique each other's work provided a welcome break from the isolation chamber of book-writing. His expertise in Jordanian history was an added bonus. Mastan Ebtehaj, the librarian, and Debbie Usher, the archivist, dealt with all my requests promptly, efficiently and with good cheer.

A number of friends read the first draft of this book, corrected mistakes and gave me the benefit of their opinion. Adiba Mango, Christopher
Prentice and Charles Tripp went over the entire manuscript with great care and made extremely helpful suggestions for improving it. Sir Mark Allen read and suggested revisions to the chapter on the Gulf War. Randa Habib commented on the final chapter and contributed additional information on the change of the succession, on which she is a leading expert. I am very much in the debt of all these friends.

During different phases of work on this project, I enjoyed the support of three very able and dedicated research assistants: Adiba Mango, Shachar Nativ and Noa Schonmann. In addition to collecting material and transcribing tapes, they rendered invaluable assistance as IT advisers, administrators, editors and proofreaders. Nezam Bagherzade, while still at school, volunteered to help me with research in the Public Record Office in Kew, with very fruitful results. Zehavit Ohana helped me with the archival research in Israel.

Two collections of private papers merit a special mention. Philip Geyelin, a distinguished American journalist, worked for many years on a biography of King Hussein but sadly died without completing it. My colleagues and I are grateful to his wife, Sherry Geyelin, and to his daughter, Mary-Sherman Willis, for depositing his papers and his unfinished manuscript in the Middle East Centre Archive. Dr Yaacov Herzog was the Israeli official most intimately involved in setting up and maintaining the back channel to Amman. I am grateful to his daughter Shira Herzog for giving me access to the meticulous and copious records he kept of the secret meetings from 1963 to 1970. This is the first time a writer has drawn upon these papers as a source for a book in English, and they are a real treasure trove.

A large number of friends have helped me in various ways. They include, in alphabetical order, Ze'ev Drory, Miriam Eshkol, Randa Habib, Foulath Hadid, Mustafa Hamarneh, Donald Lamm, Roger Louis, Avi Raz, Tom Segev, Avraham Sela, Moshe Shemesh, Asher Susser, the late Mreiwad Tall and Tariq Tall. The individuals I interviewed, both Jordanians and others, are listed at the end of the book. Some of these interviews go back to 1981–2, when I spent a sabbatical year in Israel doing research for
Collusion across the Jordan.
Other interviews are with British and American officials who served in Jordan. I am grateful to all the people on this long list for sparing the time to see me, for answering my questions and for putting up with what sometimes turned into vigorous cross-examination.

My thanks go to the staff at Penguin Books and especially to Stuart Proffitt for his wise direction, superb editing and unfailing support and encouragement. His assistant, Phillip Birch, was very helpful in many different ways. Donna Poppy edited the typescript intelligently, imaginatively and with meticulous attention to detail. Cecilia Mackay was a dynamic, resourceful and inspired picture researcher. Mike Shand drew the maps; Auriol Griffith-Jones compiled the index; and Richard Duguid skilfully supervised the entire production process.