Lion of Jordan (45 page)

The losses sustained by Jordan in the course of the June War were extremely heavy, and the regime's prospects of survival were correspondingly poor. The government was bewildered and impotent. The army was defeated and dispirited. Seven hundred Jordanian soldiers had died in the war and over 6,000 were wounded or missing. Jordan lost its entire air force, 80 per cent of its armour and a great deal of other equipment. At the end of the war only four out of the army's eleven brigades remained operational.
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The Iraqi troops in Jordan were a destabilizing force. Having arrived too late to take much of a part in battle,

they now struck a heroic posture, defying the call for a ceasefire and spoiling for a fight. Hussein wrote to President Arif politely to say that since a military solution to Jordan's difficulties with Israel was not practicable, the Iraqi troops could be withdrawn from Jordan. Syria posed a much more serious threat. The Syrian Army emerged relatively unscathed from the war compared with the Jordanian Army. Jordan was defenceless against Syria, particularly without an air force. Hussein also heard indirectly that the Syrians were well aware that he alone held Jordan together and that they had plans prepared that they would not hesitate to put into effect should Jordan step out of line. He interpreted this to mean that if he embarked on any action that the Syrians considered improper, they would attempt to assassinate him and take over parts of his country.
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The economic consequences of the war were also crippling. The Old City of Jerusalem was not just a prize possession but a major source of revenue from tourism, as were some of the West Bank towns like Bethlehem. The West Bank comprised roughly half of the kingdom's inhabited territory, half of its industrial capacity, a quarter of its arable land. It contained valuable water resources and it contributed nearly 40 per cent of Jordan's Gross Domestic Product.
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Israel's occupation of the West Bank resulted in the creation of a new wave of refugees. The influx from the West Bank to the East Bank was estimated at 175,000 by Israel, 250,000 by Jordan and around 200,000 by independent agencies. Many of these were second-time refugees, having first been displaced from their homes in 1948. Israel made it easy for them to cross to the East Bank of the Jordan River but refused to allow them to go back to their homes after the dust had settled. The total number of refugees in Jordan's care increased as a result from about half a million to nearly three quarters of a million. Quite apart from the human suffering involved and the burning sense of injustice, it was a heavy material burden for the truncated and impoverished kingdom to bear.

Hussein's primary aim in the aftermath of the war was to recover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He knew that this could not be achieved by military means and that diplomacy offered the only hope. His strategy for recovering the West Bank rested on two pillars: Nasser and the United States. The war transformed Nasser from Hussein's worst enemy to his closest ally in the Arab world. Mahmoud Riad, Egypt's foreign minister at the time, has described how impressed Nasser was that
Hussein stood shoulder to shoulder with him during the war. On 22 June, Nasser wrote to Hussein, paying tribute to his heroic struggle and offering ‘to put all we have in the service of the common destiny of our two peoples'. He later received Hussein in Cairo and told him that Egypt was ready to share everything it had with Jordan, even if it meant sharing the last loaf of bread between them. ‘We have entered this war together, lost it together and we must win it together,' said Nasser. Nasser also felt that the United States might be more inclined to accommodate Hussein because he was an old friend of theirs, and so he urged him to negotiate with the Americans in any way he wanted to and for as long as he wanted to for a peaceful settlement in the West Bank as long as he refrained from signing a separate peace treaty with Israel.
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The importance for Hussein of the new alliance with Nasser cannot be overestimated. Together the two leaders built up an axis of moderation in the Arab world that others were encouraged to join. After their defeat the Arabs faced a fork in the road: one way led to another appeal to arms; the other involved a fundamental change in the Arab policy towards Israel, an official end to the state of belligerency and an attempt to recover the occupied territories by peaceful means. By himself Hussein had no chance of persuading his fellow Arab rulers to follow him down the moderate path; with Nasser's support there was at least a chance. Nasser's support provided Hussein with political cover for working with the Americans, for negotiating with the Israelis, for standing up to the Syrians and for countering the PLO's call for renewing the armed struggle against Israel. It was also crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the Hashemite regime inside Jordan following the defeat on the battlefield.

The second pillar of Hussein's post-war foreign policy was the alliance with the United States. Hussein's relations with the US were characterized by many ups and downs. After the 1967 war, however, Hussein believed that Jordan could remain a viable state, and the Hashemites could remain at the head of Jordan, only in the context of a close relationship with the Americans. Moreover, the US was the only country with the capacity to lean on Israel to relinquish the West Bank. These two considerations led Hussein to put all his eggs in the American basket. The Americans for their part had a clear if not vital interest in preserving Jordan as a viable state with the Hashemite dynasty at its head. America's credibility was tied to the continuation of the moderate
and stable regime that it had helped to sustain in Jordan over the previous decade. America was just as committed to the territorial integrity of Jordan as it was to that of Israel. After the war America supported a peace settlement between Jordan and Israel based on a return to the previous borders with only minor modifications. But it gradually drifted away from this principled position, leaving Hussein in the lurch. Hussein's two-pronged strategy ultimately proved unequal to the task of recovering the West Bank. Nasser gave Hussein solid and unswerving support until his death in 1970. By contrast, the Americans turned out to be the most inconstant and unreliable of allies.

Israel's resounding military victory in the war transformed the national mood from deep anxiety to unrestrained triumphalism. It also unleashed a powerful current of opinion in favour of retaining the West Bank, the core of the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. This convergence of religious and secular nationalism constrained the government's room for manoeuvre. The national unity government headed by Levi Eshkol consisted of seven parties and a wide range of ideological positions. It included the right-wing Gahal Party, headed by Menahem Begin, which regarded the West Bank as an integral part of the Land of Israel. The ruling Labour Party was split down the middle. At the dovish end was Abba Eban, the eloquent but politically impotent foreign minister, who wanted to negotiate peace agreements with all of Israel's neighbours based on the pre-war borders with only modest territorial modifications. At the other end was Moshe Dayan, the hardline defence minister, who wanted to keep most of the occupied territories for either security or ideological reasons or a mixture of the two. Levi Eshkol did not like to make irrevocable choices. He was a man of consensus and compromise. His preference for compromise is illustrated by the anecdote of the waiter who asked Eshkol whether he wanted coffee or tea. ‘Half and half,' was the reply. At interminable internal party discussions on the future of the West Bank, Eshkol often taunted his colleagues by pointing out that they liked the dowry but not the bride, meaning that they coveted the land but were less keen on the Arabs who lived there.

Control of the West Bank gave the Israeli government two main alternatives: one was to reach an agreement with Hussein; the other was to give the inhabitants of the West Bank political autonomy under overall Israeli control. The former was called the Jordanian option; the latter the Palestinian option. The conventional view of Israel's post-war
policy is that it was based on the Jordanian option, on solving the Palestinian problem by restoring to Hussein most of the territory of the West Bank. According to this view, Israel's leaders were so wedded to the Jordanian option that they failed to consider the alternative. Reuven Pedatzur has challenged this view, arguing that the Palestinian option was the first choice of the Israeli policy-makers and that they only adopted the Jordanian option after attempts to realize the Palestinian option had failed.
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The truth of the matter is that divisions within the government made it impossible to pursue any clear or consistent policy. It was like a see-saw, veering back and forth between the king and the West Bank notables.
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The Israelis no longer regarded Hussein as a reliably moderate figure after he joined the Arab radicals in the run-up to the June War. In the mid 1960s Israel had settled on a policy of cooperating with the king to contain the challenge posed to both of them by the Palestinian national movement. After the war the Israeli policy-makers were indifferent to Hussein and willing to discuss plans for Palestinian self-rule on the West Bank, provided Israel controlled both the western and the eastern borders of the Palestinian entity. This meant that Israel's security border, and possibly also its
de jure
border, would lie along the Jordan River. It also meant that Hussein was no longer necessarily the preferred ruler of the West Bank. For some ministers he was, while for others he was not, and this became evident immediately after the war. On 15 June, Eban reported to a ministerial committee that the British prime minister Harold Wilson had sent a suggestion through an intermediary for direct contact between Israel and Hussein. Eban and Eshkol were in favour but Dayan was against. Dayan argued that since they wanted the Jordan River to be their eastern border, there was no point in entering into negotiations with the king, because he could not possibly accede to their demands. Eshkol's characteristically opaque summing up was that they would agree to negotiate but on condition that the river would be the border.
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Like his choice of a hot drink, it was half and half.

The deliberations of the cabinet culminated in the decision on 19 June in favour of peace agreements with Egypt and Syria based on the international border and the security needs of Israel. This formula allowed Israel to retain some of the territories it occupied, especially the Gaza Strip and the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it demanded the demilitarization of the rest. It was a reasonable offer, but unfortunately
it was never conveyed to the governments of Egypt and Syria. As there was no consensus over the West Bank, the cabinet decided to defer decision on the position to be taken up with regard to Jordan. Thus, from the very start, the Israeli cabinet had nothing to offer Jordan.
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Its initially flexible position on the other fronts gradually hardened with the passage of time. As early as mid July the politicians approved plans for building Jewish settlements on the Golan Heights. In doing so, they reversed their own policy and embarked on the road towards creeping annexation. The decision of 19 June became null even before its formal cancellation in October.
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In the Israeli–Jordanian context the most sensitive and intractable issue was the future of Jerusalem. For both sides this was a highly emotive issue. Jerusalem is the third holiest site of Islam after Mecca and Medina, and so was of paramount importance not just to Jordan but to Arabs and Muslims everywhere. It was also the jewel in the Hashemite crown, and a vital symbol of Hussein's legitimacy as an Arab ruler. Hussein was a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, who, according to Muslim tradition, ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem. For Jews, Jerusalem has equally powerful symbolic and religious resonance. It was the city of David and the site of the ‘Wailing Wall', the Western Wall of the Second Temple that was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. The capture of Jerusalem stirred passionate feelings about the historic rights of the Jewish people and of continuity with the past. At noon on 7 June, Moshe Dayan went to the Western Wall and declared that Jerusalem had been ‘liberated': ‘We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our Holy Places, never to part from it again.' The Zionist movement's moderate position on Jerusalem disappeared overnight. Suddenly life in the Jewish state without Zion, one of the biblical names for Jerusalem, became difficult to imagine. The Israelis considered that they were sovereign in the unified city and proceeded to act accordingly. On 27 June, in a remarkable display of national unity, the Knesset enacted legislation to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration to Greater Jerusalem, which included the whole of the Old City. This amounted to annexation in all but name, an irreversible step that virtually doomed to failure all the post-war attempts at accommodation between Israel and Jordan.