Lion of Jordan (60 page)

Hussein issued his manifesto for a United Arab Kingdom for several reasons. It offered a rallying point for the Palestinians, and especially the West Bankers: maintaining a Palestinian identity with a fellow Arab state would, he thought, always be preferable to maintaining it with Israel, which would inevitably dominate any Palestinian ‘independence'. Also, the plan staked a claim for the Jordanian monarch, and not the multi-vocal fedayeen leaders, to represent the Palestinians and to find a solution for the West Bank that could bring long-term security to his kingdom. Finally, by asserting himself as the champion of the Palestinians, Hussein hoped to regain respectability in the eyes of moderate Arab opinion and to create the conditions for the resumption of the subsidies from the oil-producing Arab states that were cut off following the repression of the fedayeen in Jordan.

Hussien's plan was an unmitigated failure that fell between every conceivable stool. It was greeted with a unanimous chorus of condemnation in the Arab world. Hussein was personally attacked in unusually strong language and his plan rejected out of hand. It was as if he were trying to steal something that did not belong to him: the land of the Palestinians. The general Arab view seemed to be that the whole thing was a plot between the Americans, the Israelis and the king. Hussein had succeeded in uniting all the Palestinian guerrilla organizations but, ironically, in total opposition to his proposals. Rejection, especially by the radical factions, was immediate, vehement, vitriolic and even violent. On the day after Hussein spoke, the PLO's Executive Committee issued a statement that said the people of Palestine alone had the right to decide their own future and the future of their cause. The Jordanian regime was denounced for its cooperation with world imperialism and for ‘offering itself as an accomplice to the Zionist enemy'. The conflict was said to be not between Jordanian and Palestinian but ‘between a subservient and collusive regime and a people who have adopted armed struggle as a way to achieve their wishes and to recover their rights'. Hussein was charged with going against the Arab consensus ‘by breaking the isolation of the Israeli wild beast and unleashing it on the Arab nation' through the United Arab Kingdom plan. The plan itself was said to be Arab only in name, ‘while its mind and will would be Israeli'. The statement ended with a rousing call on all patriotic Arabs to frustrate
the plot by the ‘feudalist' Hashemite regime to liquidate the Palestinian resistance.
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Fatah, the largest commando organization, went further in its reply and called for the overthrow of Hussein. Fatah's statement said that ‘the centre of the dispute is the king, the Hashemite dynasty and the regime.' The dynasty was denounced for its history of conspiracy against the Palestinian people and for its role in serving imperialist objectives in the region. Hussein's plan was described as an ‘artificial and fake structure with reactionary contents designed to consecrate subjugation to imperialism and Zionism'. Accordingly, the statement called for ‘getting rid of the dynasty and overthrowing the monarchy in Jordan'.
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The Arab press generally sided with the Palestinians against the regime. Its comments were either negative or lukewarm about the plan, and there was the familiar preoccupation with restating Palestinian ‘rights' rather than with any realistic discussion of how these might be realized.
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Reactions of the mayors on the West Bank were largely unenthusiastic or negative, although a few welcomed the plan. The mayor of Hebron captured the prevalent mood of scepticism when he remarked, using an old Arab saying, that the king was selling fish in the sea.
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The Arab leaders, with very few exceptions, none of them heroic, joined in the chorus of condemnation. The PLO claimed to be the only party with the right to represent the Palestinians, and most Arab leaders found it convenient to placate the PLO by endorsing this claim. Some may have been motivated by genuine commitment to the Palestinian cause, while others played the Palestinian card for cynical reasons of their own. Foremost among the latter was Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor. For Hussein the death of Nasser removed his most weighty supporter in the Arab world and caused the collapse of the Amman–Cairo alliance. Sadat would reverse Nasser's foreign policy by moving from pan-Arabism to an Egypt-first attitude, by changing from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation and by abandoning the commitment to a comprehensive settlement in favour of a separate deal with Israel. The change and the camouflage are illustrated by a popular story about Sadat and his driver. As they were approaching a crossroads, the driver asked Sadat which way to turn. Sadat asked which way Nasser used to go and the driver replied that Nasser used to turn left. Sadat's instruction was ‘In that case, indicate left and turn right!'

Sadat's attitude towards Hussein was hostile from the beginning. Soon after Sadat became president, Hussein suggested a visit to Cairo in the hope of establishing a good working relationship. Against the background of rumours that Hussein had met with Yigal Allon, Sadat thought that a meeting with the Jordanian king would look like giving a blessing to his clandestine contacts with the Israelis. So, on 23 November, Sadat sent his chief of staff, General Muhammad Sadiq, to Amman to ask Hussein bluntly whether he had seen any Israeli leader recently. Although Hussein was evasive, Sadiq got the firm impression that Hussein had seen Allon, and the proposed visit was delayed.
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Another unfriendly act by Sadat was the release from prison of the assassins of Wasfi Tall. Sadat suspected Hussein of planning to make a separate deal with Israel over the West Bank, while Hussein suspected Sadat of planning to make a separate deal with Israel over Sinai. Sadat came under attack from the PLO for his own overtures towards Israel, and specifically for the offer of 4 February 1971 of an interim settlement based on the reopening of the Suez Canal and the withdrawal of the Israeli forces to the Sinai Passes. By posing as the champion of the Palestinians, Sadat sought to deflect their anger from himself to the Jordanian monarch. Sadat's response to the launching of the United Arab Kingdom scheme was a dramatic announcement, at the Palestine Peoples Conference in Cairo, of his decision to sever diplomatic relations with Jordan. Objection to a hypothetical plan that had next to nothing to do with Egypt was a bizarre reason for breaking off diplomatic relations, but the decision was well received by the conference and the radical Arab states.

Syria, Algeria and Libya had already broken off diplomatic relations with Jordan in September 1970. The Algerian press saw Hussein's plan as proof of a Zionist–imperialist plot aimed at putting a double seal on the fate of the whole of Palestine, with one part administered from Amman and the other from Tel Aviv. A leading article in the government-controlled daily
El Moudjahid
labelled the Jordanian initiative as the Allon Plan under a different guise and found in it further evidence of the permanent collusion between Jordan and Israel.
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The Algerian article was typical of the entire Arab reaction to the UAK plan. Arab politicians and the Arab media worked themselves into a state of frenzy – over a plan that had no chance of being realized for the obvious reason that the area in question was under Israeli occupation. The
sensible response would have been to let the whole thing drift into oblivion. The greatest irony of all was that on this occasion there was no consultation, let alone collusion, between Hussein and Israel prior to his speech.

The initial Israeli reaction to Hussein's announcement was overtly hostile. Israel rejected the king's federal plan on the grounds that the king was presuming to regulate the future of Israeli-controlled territory before negotiating its return. If he wanted to recover the West Bank, he first had to negotiate with them and find out their conditions.
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But although Golda Meir's rejection of the plan was swift, it was not absolute. She did not reject the federal idea, only the territorial conception behind the plan. In a speech to the Knesset on 16 March, she said that Israel never interfered in the internal structure or form of an Arab regime. If the King of Jordan had seen fit to change the name of his kingdom to ‘Palestine' and modify its internal structure, she would have raised no objections. But she had strong objections to the king's initiative because it affected Israel's borders and security. She criticized Hussein's speech for ignoring Israel's presence on the West Bank; for making no mention of willingness to negotiate with Israel or to make peace with it before making changes to the status quo; and for treating the State of Israel as nothing but ‘a Zionist plot to gain control over Palestine'. The plan itself, according to Meir, was ‘a pretentious and one-sided statement which not only does not serve the interest of peace, but is liable to spur on all the extremist elements whose aim is war against Israel'. Meir's strident rejection of Hussein's federal plan was music to the ears of Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah and chairman of the PLO. Arafat and his colleagues regarded the king's move as ‘an attempt to put the PLO out of business'. Arafat told his biographer that if Israel had agreed to withdraw from the West Bank, Hussein would have made peace with it immediately ‘and the PLO would have been finished. Absolutely finished. Sometimes I think we are lucky to have the Israelis as our enemies. They have saved us many times!'
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Nothing could have been further removed from Meir's intention than helping the PLO. Her rejection of it was absolute and unconditional. She had never shown any interest in the Palestinian option because she regarded the Palestinians as the irreconcilable enemy of Israel. Her views about the Palestinians had been formed in the pre-independence period and had hardly changed. In November 1947 she and King Abdullah
had reached an agreement to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians, and that policy held until early June 1967. After June 1967 she remained unremittingly hostile towards Palestinian nationalism; in fact, she refused to acknowledge that the Palestinians were a nation or that they had any right to national self-determination. As prime minister she was well known for her anachronistic and hardline views about the Palestinian problem, and she achieved notoriety for her statement that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. ‘It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,' she told journalists in June 1969. ‘They did not exist.'
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Simha Dinitz, who served as director-general of the prime minister's office from 1969 to 1973, explained: ‘For Golda the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, from the demographic and the geographic point of view, was to place them under Jordan's jurisdiction. An attempt to deal with the Palestinian question without linking it to Jordan, in other words, an attempt to create an additional state between Israel and Jordan, would not succeed because such a state would not have an adequate geographic or demographic base. This was the foundation of her thinking. Consequently, in order to arrive at a solution to the Palestinian problem, a link with Jordan had to be forged. Hence all the meetings and discussions with Hussein.' Dinitz also argued that, although a peace agreement was not achieved, Israel's dealings with Jordan were successful in a number of different ways:

First, the dialogue with Jordan prevented the rise of the PLO as a central force in the Palestinian arena. As long as the dialogue continued, the PLO was prevented from becoming the main spokesman of the Palestinians or the most important spokesman.

Second, the contact yielded all sorts of agreements, ranging from the fight against terrorists to the fight against mosquitoes. These practical and security agreements between Israel and Hussein created a situation of
de facto
peace, though not
de jure
peace. On the one hand, there was the policy of open bridges across the Jordan River; on the other hand, there was a coordinated effort to suppress the terrorists who threatened both Jordan and us. There was also cooperation in practical matters such as the division of land, farming, pest control and irrigation.

Third, the contacts with Hussein created a precedent for a direct dialogue with
an Arab leader. They made Sadat's trip to Jerusalem seem less revolutionary and less incredible than it would have otherwise.
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Unlike Meir, Allon changed his position on the preferred partner for a settlement after 1967, largely as a result of the personal relationship he had formed with Hussein. Whereas the meetings with Hussein merely reinforced Meir's basic pro-Hashemite views, in Allon's case they brought about a change of orientation. Having been a proponent of the Palestinian option after the June War, Allon became the most fervent proponent of the Jordanian option. In an interview to the daily newspaper
Ma'ariv,
Allon tried to soften the impression created by Meir's speech in the Knesset. He said that there was no absolute conflict between the Allon Plan and Hussein's plan as far as the political structure of the Jordanian-Palestinian entity was concerned; the difference related to the borders with Israel. Hussein's premise of a return to the pre-1967 borders was totally unacceptable to the Israeli deputy prime minister.
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Allon's favourable comments about Hussein's plan fed the rumours of collusion across the Jordan. But there had been no collusion and no prior agreement.

Discussion between Hussein and the Israeli prime minister about the United Arab Kingdom plan took place after, not before, its public announcement. The meeting took place in an air-conditioned caravan in the Araba Desert, south of the Dead Sea, on 21 March 1972. By that time defence minister Moshe Dayan had established his ascendancy in the cabinet over his rival Allon. The exclusion of Allon from the meeting with his ‘old friend' heralded a hardening of the Israeli position. Allon advocated peace with Jordan based on territorial compromise over the West Bank. Dayan wanted to maintain Israeli control over the whole of the West Bank even if it meant no peace treaty with Jordan. He advocated a functional solution, the essence of which was that the Palestinians would run their own affairs on the West Bank with open bridges to the East Bank, while Israel remained in charge of security and continued to build Jewish settlements there. This, too, was unacceptable to the king.
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Dayan's position was dictated by internal politics and made no sense in terms of foreign policy. In her speech in the Knesset, Meir was prepared to go along with it and rebuked the king for ignoring the need to negotiate with Israel. But she offered no realistic alternative basis for negotiations.