Lion of Jordan (95 page)

After the funeral, Hussein and his wife returned to the King David Hotel, where they met Randa Habib, a French journalist of Lebanese origins who had headed the office of the Agence France Presse in Jordan since 1987. She enjoyed privileged access to the king and was the only journalist who accompanied him in his private plane on the flight to the funeral. Seeing the tears rolling down his cheeks, she asked him about his feelings. Cigarette in hand, the king said to her, ‘I had to come to West Jerusalem for the first time in my life in order to bury a friend.' There was a brief silence and then he added: ‘I have the impression that today I have also, in some way, buried the peace.'
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Hussein had a private meeting after the funeral with Clinton, who was also staying in the King David Hotel. Just before Hussein came in, Clinton was briefed by Dennis Ross, who urged him to applaud the
king's speech: ‘It was extraordinary, eloquent, emotional, and tinged with history. In contrast to Mubarak's, Hussein's showed what peace is supposed to be about in terms of empathy and connecting as people.' The king, Ross went on, had some concern about Shimon Peres, fearing that he was too partial towards Arafat. Hussein, suggested Ross, needed to hear from the president that he understood that Jordan's interests would be heavily affected by the permanent status talks, that America would coordinate closely with the Jordanians as these progressed, perhaps even suggesting four-way talks between the Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and themselves.

Clinton opened the meeting by telling the king that his speech had deeply touched the Israelis and the Americans who were there. The king remarked that he had hoped to find the right words and that he had been unsure whether he was up to the task. Clinton assured him that no one could have been more so. Clinton had heard that the king had taken his delegation on to the terrace of the King David Hotel to look over at the Old City. The king said this was the first time he had seen Jerusalem since 1967, and that it was a magnificent and memorable sight. Turning to business, Hussein said he could not figure out why Asad was not moving on peace. Was it because Asad hoped to create a coalition with Iran and Iraq? He was not certain. Clinton thought Asad wanted to move but found it difficult to act, that there were psychological barriers he had to overcome, and that they needed to push him to overcome them. Dennis Ross added, ‘He sees himself as the last Arab nationalist and he wants a process of reaching an agreement that sets him apart from all others. Similarly, he also wants the substance of his agreement to set him apart.' The king concluded that movement from Asad would benefit the entire region, but Jordan would press on regardless.
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Clinton and Hussein both grossly underestimated the depth of Asad's opposition to normalization with Israel. A month after their conversation, the CIA station chief in Amman handed the Jordanians an alarming document. It was three pages long and entitled ‘Jordan/Threat to the Life of King Hussein'. The plan to assassinate King Hussein and his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, was said to be part of an overall Syrian strategy. Asad had requested and received a new strategic situation assessment, which included the following reasons for assassinating Hussein:

a. The defection of Hussein Kamel and the role Jordan played by providing him with political asylum, which was viewed by Syria as assistance to the United States and Israel, and the beginning of a move to replace the regime in Iraq.

b. Hussein's deceiving of Asad, having promised not to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel, and in any event not to do so without Syria.

c. The inclusion of a clause in the peace treaty with Israel leasing it land in the Araba, which was a dangerous precedent from Syria's point of view.

d. Hussein's pushing for normalization between Arab countries, particularly the Gulf countries, and Israel.

e. The establishment of a new Syrian opposition organization called ‘17 April Organization' and the dissemination of anti-Syrian propaganda, particularly anti-Alawite, by Jordanian intelligence. This activity (so said the Syrians) was the straw that broke the camel's back.

According to the CIA report, President Asad had already given the go-ahead for the assassination of Hussein and his brother. The first phase of the plan, which had been put into effect, consisted of attacks on the king and his brother in the official Syrian media. On the assassination plan itself the CIA source did not have detailed information but nevertheless made the following assessments:

a. The assassination would probably be carried out in Jordan and not abroad, since Syrian intelligence was better able to do the job in Jordan than in a European or other country.

b. Syrian intelligence abroad (Amn al-Harijiyah) would be responsible for perpetrating the attack.

c. The attack would be carried out by someone close to the king, such as a bodyguard.

d. Officials in the Syrian Embassy in Amman probably knew of the plan but it was not clear if they were involved in any way.

Mention was also made by the informer of intentions to attack Arafat but he did not seem to be as major a target as Hussein or Hassan.
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The CIA report was immediately shown to Hussein: he read it and reacted to it very calmly. Stricter security measures were adopted, and his bodyguards were subjected to routine checks every six months.
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Later in the month the CIA station chief in Amman handed the authorities another secret report, this time on Iraqi plans against Jordan. Iraq was planning terrorist attacks against hostile Arab countries. To this end a group had
been established and charged with the task of blowing up the United States Embassy in Amman and undermining the security and stability of Jordan. The group received training from intelligence officers, but the whole idea was postponed when one of the members of the group ran away. The CIA, however, had information that Iraq was continuing to train squads to carry out terrorist attacks against Western and Jordanian interests because of the king's support for the Iraqi opposition and his supposed plan to change the regime in Baghdad.
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Syrian and Iraqi threats did not deter Hussein from rushing forward towards normalization but a change did occur when Peres succeeded Rabin as Labour Party leader and prime minister. Hussein believed that the fact that Peres had been excluded from the negotiations of the peace treaty had alienated him to a degree. Hussein recognized that Peres had served his country, that he had always been a believer in peace, and that he was a fertile source of ideas for progress in every field, ‘but the relationship was different and it cooled down constantly.'
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Hussein suspected that Peres had a preference for progress on the Palestinian track and that Jordan's interests would suffer as a result. Peres continued to promote his vision of peace as the dawn of a new age in the region. Variations on a theme continued to flow from Peres's inventive political mind. The New Middle East, in a standard Peres utterance, would be ‘dominated by banks, not tanks, ballots, not bullets, and where the only generals would be General Motors and General Electric'.

Challenges to Israel's security almost immediately distracted Peres from pursuing his vision of the New Middle East. Having reached the pinnacle of power, he tried to recast himself from Mr Peace to Mr Security. One serious mistake he made was to give the go-ahead for the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas master bomb-maker. The so-called ‘Engineer' was killed in Gaza on 5 January 1996 by means of a booby-trapped cellular phone. Hamas retaliated with a series of devastating suicide bombs that claimed the lives of sixty Israelis. Peres made an even more serious mistake by ordering a major military operation in Lebanon. Operation Grapes of Wrath was launched on 11 April; its aim was to bring security to the Galilee by bombing the Hizbullah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. But the ultimate target of the operation was Syria. The idea was to put pressure on the civilians of southern Lebanon, for them to put pressure on the government of Lebanon, for it to put pressure on the Syrian government, and, finally, for the Syrian
government to curb Hizbullah and grant immunity to the IDF in southern Lebanon. In short, the plan was to compel Syria to act as an Israeli
gendarme
in Lebanon.

Operation Grapes of Wrath involved the deliberate targeting of civilians. Nearly 400,000 civilians were driven by the IDF from their homes and villages in southern Lebanon and turned into refugees. Israeli brutality was condemned by the entire Arab world. Shortly after the invasion, 2,500 Jordanians took to the streets to demonstrate against Israel's aggression. The crisis provoked the strongest anti-Israeli sentiments since the signature of the peace treaty. Hussein sent Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kabariti to Israel on 16 April with two letters, one to Peres and one to President Ezer Weizman, urging them to end their military incursion and resume diplomacy. He pointed out that Israel's actions were undermining popular support for peace.
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One day after Kabariti's visit, Israeli shells killed 102 refugees sheltering in a UN compound. The massacre in Qana drew fierce international condemnation and brought Operation Grapes of Wrath to its inglorious end on 27 April.

In the lead-up to the 26 May elections Binyamin Netanyahu, the aggressively right-wing leader of the Likud, went on the offensive. He charged that Labour brought peace without security and promised that the Likud would bring peace with security. Because of his immense popularity in Israel, Hussein could influence the outcome, and both candidates competed for his endorsement. Hussein misjudged both of them: he was unreasonably suspicious of Peres and rather naive about Netanyahu. He did not believe that the election of Netanyahu would necessarily herald the end of the peace process in the Middle East. He thought that what had been achieved was irreversible: ‘When the peace treaty with Jordan passed through the Knesset it had an overwhelming majority that we have never had on any other issue. And so it wasn't a peace between Jordan and Labour, it was a peace with Israel. I respected that and that is why I did not interfere in the elections in any form or way.'
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In fact Hussein did knowingly display a bias in favour of Netanyahu by inviting him to Amman on the eve of the elections while declining to extend an invitation to Peres. Hussein was concerned that a victorious Peres would proceed swiftly to a sweeping agreement with Syria. Netanyahu managed to convince Hussein that he would keep the peace process going at a level and pace suitable to Jordan's political needs.
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After his
visit to Amman, Netanyahu was able to tell the Israeli public that although he headed a right-wing party, he was acceptable as a partner to their favourite Arab leader. Ali Shukri has confirmed that Hussein was not as neutral during the lead-up to the election as he pretended to be: ‘Privately, His Majesty wanted Netanyahu to win because he thought this was a man he could deal with. Netanyahu was young and Hussein did not believe for a moment that he would set out to destroy the peace. At the time everybody was saying that Netanyahu and his party were extremists, that they would reverse the Labour Party's peace policy. His Majesty wanted to give Netanyahu a chance.'
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Hussein seriously misjudged the Jordanian stake in the Israeli elections because he attached too much importance to personalities and too little to political parties, their ideologies and their foreign policies. Marwan Muasher understood that whereas Labour leaders preferred to deal with Jordan as a way of escaping the hard choices they had to make with the Palestinians, the Likud had more sinister objectives. The Likud, he believed, wanted to collude with Jordan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, which was implicit in the Oslo Accord. In the summer of 1995 Muasher had a conversation with Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, in the cafeteria of the Knesset. Netanyahu said to him: ‘We have a joint interest. We have Palestinians in Israel, and you have Palestinians in Jordan. A Palestinian state on the West Bank would serve to radicalize the Palestinians in Israel and Jordan. That is not in our interests. We therefore have to work together to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.' Muasher countered this argument by saying, ‘We look at things differently. We believe that the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will help our own political identity because we have Jordanians of Palestinian origin who are reluctant to say that they are Jordanians so as not to appear to betray the Palestinian cause. But if they feel that the Palestinian political identity has evolved in the West Bank, they will no longer be reluctant to acknowledge their Jordanian identity. This is exactly like the Palestinians in Israel. None of them would want to leave Israel to live in a Palestinian state. But they want equal rights within Israel and they support the establishment of a Palestinian state for the sake of the other Palestinians, not in order to be radicalized.' Netanyahu looked at Muasher and said, ‘Mr Ambassador, I think I understand the Jordanian position better than you do!' This encounter told Muasher two things. First, it demonstrated
Netanyahu's arrogance. Second, it showed a refusal to accept that the establishment of an independent and viable Palestinian state was in Jordan's long-term interests.
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Peres fought a lacklustre campaign, leaving it to Netanyahu to do all the running. It was said that Peres behaved like the Jew in the Jewish joke who was challenged to a duel and sent a telegram to his opponent saying, ‘I am going to be late: start shooting without me.' In the opinion polls they were running neck and neck, but when the results were out Netanyahu had won by a margin of 30,000 votes, with 50.4 per cent of the vote to Peres's 49.6 per cent. Labour won 34 seats in the Knesset, whereas the Likud won only 32. But under the new electoral law for the direct election of the prime minister, the task of forming the next government had to be assigned to Netanyahu. Hussein's not-so-subtle support for Netanyahu probably tipped the balance in his favour. A new chapter was opened in the complex relations between Jordan and the Jewish state.