Lion of Jordan (97 page)

The Hebron Protocol averted the complete collapse of the Oslo peace process, but the mild optimism it generated was short-lived. Having been compelled to take a relatively conciliatory line over Hebron, Netanyahu adopted a confrontational approach to Jerusalem. By signing the protocol, Netanyahu had broken the Likud taboo on handing over land for peace. So he vowed to strengthen Israel's hold over Jerusalem and to resist any compromise or even meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians over the future of the holy city. He knew that no Arab could accept less than Arafat was demanding: shared sovereignty. But he believed that a forceful unilateral Israeli assertion of control over the city would dispel Arab illusions of recovering the eastern part, illusions that he claimed his Labour predecessors had encouraged. Netanyahu fired the opening shot in the battle for Jerusalem on 19 February with a plan for the construction of 6,500 housing units for 30,000 Israelis at Har Homa in annexed East Jerusalem. Har Homa was a pine-forested hill, south of the city proper, on the road to Bethlehem. Its Arabic name is Jabal Abu Ghunaym. The site was chosen in order to complete the chain of Jewish settlements around Jerusalem and cut off contact between the Arab side of the city and its hinterland in the West Bank. It was a blatant example of the Zionist tactic of creating facts on the ground to pre-empt negotiations. Consequently, every day the Palestinians had less land and Israel had less peace. Jordan joined in the angry Arab chorus of protest at Israel's actions.

In less than a year as prime minister, Netanyahu had destroyed Hussein's trust and driven him to the verge of despair by his arrogance, blatant disregard for written agreements and ceaseless expansionism. At a deeper level, Hussein felt that he could no longer rely on Israel to act as a strategic ally and as a partner on the road to peace. In an unusually
strongly worded three-page letter to Netanyahu, Hussein expressed both his concern over the consequences of Israeli actions and his bitter personal disappointment with the man he helped to get elected. The letter is worth quoting at length for the light it sheds on Hussein's state of mind:

Prime Minister,

My distress is genuine and deep over the accumulating tragic actions which you have initiated at the head of the government of Israel, making peace – the worthiest objective of my life – appear more and more like a distant elusive mirage. I could remain aloof if the very lives of all Arabs and Israelis and their future were not fast sliding towards an abyss of bloodshed and disaster, brought about by fear and despair. I frankly cannot accept your repeated excuse of having to act the way you do under great duress and pressure. I cannot believe that the people of Israel seek bloodshed and disaster and oppose peace. Nor can I believe that the most constitutionally powerful prime minister in Israeli history would act on other than his total convictions. The saddest reality that has been dawning on me is that I do not find you by my side in working to fulfil God's will for the final reconciliation of all the descendants of the children of Abraham. Your course of actions seems bent on destroying all I believe in or have striven to achieve with the Hashemite family since Faisal the First and Abdullah to the present times…

Mr Prime Minister, if it is your intention to manoeuvre our Palestinian brethren into inevitable violent resistance, then order your bulldozers into the proposed settlement site…

Why the apparent continued deliberate humiliation of your so called Palestinian partners? Can any worthwhile relationship thrive in the absence of mutual respect and trust? Why are Palestinians confirming that their agricultural products still rot awaiting entry into Israel and export? Why the delay when it is known that unless work is authorized to commence on the Gaza port, before the end of this month, the complete project will suffer a year's delay? Finally, the Gaza Airport – all of us have addressed the subject numerous times with a view to having a legitimate Palestinian need met and to giving their leaders and people their own free access to the world rather than their present confinement and need to exit and return through other sovereign territories…

How can I work with you as a partner and true friend in this confused and confusing atmosphere when I sense an intent to destroy all I worked to build between our peoples and states? Stubbornness over real issues is one thing, but
for its own sake, I wonder. In any event I have discovered that you have your own mindset and appear in no need for any advice from a friend.

I deeply regret having to write you this personal message but it is my sense of responsibility and concern which has prompted me for posterity to do so in the face of the unknown.

Sincerely,
Hussein
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Ali Shukri delivered the royal missive by hand to the prime minister in his office in Jerusalem. Dore Gold was with him. Netanyahu was unable or unwilling to understand the Jordanian perspective on the events surrounding Har Homa. He claimed that 75 per cent of the land they wished to build on had already been bought from its Arab owners, but he offered no proof and Shukri did not believe him. Shukri tried to explain that even if some of the land was bought, the whole operation was seen by Arabs as arbitrary and aggressive. Netanyahu dismissed these arguments and refused to budge.
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His reply to the king's heartbreaking letter was insensitive and impertinent. He refused to accept any share of the responsibility for the setbacks in the peace process. At the time of the last election, he asserted, the peace process was ‘in its death throes'. He went even further and sought credit for his contribution: ‘Instead of letting the Oslo agreement die out after the election, I looked for a way to try to revive it.'

Netanyahu expressed surprise at the personal tone of the attacks against him. All the specific transgressions listed by the king were brushed aside as the ‘inevitable difficulties that occasionally crop up in the peace process'. Netanyahu made it clear that he remained committed to carrying out the housing construction plan in East Jerusalem. Finally, he urged the king not to allow setbacks on the Palestinian track to affect Jordanian–Israeli relations. ‘It is our duty to understand our joint historic role and not to allow the obstacles on the Palestinian track to overshadow the understandings reached back in the days of my predecessors,' he wrote.
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It was not clear which particular predecessors or understandings Netanyahu had in mind. But it was difficult to avoid the impression that he was telling the king to mind his own business and not to meddle in Israeli–Palestinian affairs. There was no sign of contrition, no concession to the king's point of view and no trace of a single constructive idea in Netanyahu's reply.

A most tragic event occurred on 13 March when a deranged Jordanian soldier shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls and wounded six others on the ‘Island of Peace' at the Naharayim crossing point in the north. This area had only recently been restored to Jordanian sovereignty under the terms of the peace treaty, and the girls were on a school outing. The king and the queen, who were in Madrid on an official visit, immediately cancelled their trip and turned back to Jordan. ‘I cannot offer enough condolences or express enough personal sorrow to the mothers, fathers and brothers of these children who fell today,' he said when he arrived. He was extremely angry about the breakdown of discipline in the army that had allowed this incident to happen. For years he had been telling all the people around him, and especially the military, that their neighbours had a complex about security, that this had to be taken into account, that they needed constant reassurances. Now he felt let down by the army, and he reprimanded those responsible. Shooting children, he said, is something one must not do in wartime, let alone when they were at peace.
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Three days later Hussein made an unprecedented visit to the Israeli village of Beit Shemesh to offer his personal condolences to the families of the victims. At the homes of the stricken families, he went down on his knees and shared in their grief. Hussein's simple humanity was deeply appreciated not just by the families but by the entire Israeli nation. In the Arab world, however, Hussein's gesture was interpreted differently: going down on your knees symbolizes submission and surrender. Hussein insisted that each of his visits be shown on Jordanian television, despite the fury he knew this would arouse among the extremist groups in Jordan. He wanted everyone to take note of the price of violence. ‘If there is any purpose in my life it will be to make sure that all the children do not suffer the way our generation did,' he said to one of the families.
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One expression of Hussein's anguish did not receive any publicity: the offer of compensation to the families of the victims. He wanted to help the families in a material way but in keeping with Jewish traditions and customs. So he asked Lord Mishcon for advice and was told to send the sum of money he wanted to give to the president of Israel. Accordingly, Hussein sent a million dollars to President Ezer Weizman. A year later he received a letter that said:

Your Majesty,

Recently we commemorated the year of the terrible tragedy in Naharayim when seven young girls were killed and others were injured.

The people of Israel were most impressed by your visit to the bereaved families in Beit Shemesh and also by your humanitarian gesture of a monetary grant.

I wish to inform you that I invited the families and distributed among them the entire sum you sent. They asked me to convey to you their sincerest thanks and appreciation.
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Meanwhile, relations between Israel and the Palestinians continued to deteriorate as the bulldozers moved in to level the hillside at Har Homa. The bulldozers had to be given armed guards. Israeli soldiers clashed constantly with stone-throwing Palestinian youths. The violence spread to other parts of the West Bank. Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent suicide bombers into Israel, and the Palestinian Authority was unable to stop them. Was there anything Israel could do to prevent, or at least to limit, the outburst of violence against its citizens? Was there any link between Israel's backsliding on the Oslo agreements and Yasser Arafat's reluctance to act more decisively against Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Both the head of the Israeli General Security Service and the director of military intelligence were of the opinion that Arafat had no incentive to cooperate with Israel in the fight against Islamic terror as long as he believed that Israel was not complying with the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu rejected their assessment.
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He regarded terrorist attacks by extremist Palestinian fringe groups as a strategic threat to the State of Israel, and he used these attacks to justify the freezing of the political process.

Hussein's natural optimism was sorely tried. The strain of the faltering peace process was beginning to tell. He had difficulty sleeping at night. His wife explained: ‘The short-sighted approach of Netanyahu and the hardliners in his government had put terrific pressure on the King to reverse the peace process. Everything he had worked for all his life, every relationship he had painstakingly built on trust and respect, every dream of peace and prosperity he had had for Jordan's children, was turning into a nightmare. I really did not know how much more Hussein could take.'
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Just as things looked as if they could not get any worse, they did. On Thursday, 25 September 1997, two Mossad agents, carrying forged
Canadian passports, tried to assassinate a Jordanian citizen in broad daylight on the streets of the Jordanian capital. The target of the operation was Khalid Mishal, political bureau chief of Hamas in Amman. Prior to the operation, Hamas claimed responsibility for two consecutive suicide bombs in Jerusalem. It was decided to assassinate Hamas leaders in retaliation, and Mishal was chosen as the first target. The high-tech method chosen was to inject a slow-acting poison into his ear as he entered his office in Amman. The drug used was a synthetic opiate called Fentanyl that leaves no traces in the blood stream. The plan went disastrously wrong. Mishal was injected but not killed, and his bodyguard captured the two Mossad agents. The IDF chief of staff and its director of military intelligence claimed they were unaware of the mission until they heard reports that two Mossad agents had been apprehended by the police and the Mossad station chief in Amman had apparently opposed the mission for fear of damaging relations between Israel and Jordan. But the prime minister gave the go-ahead for this egregious act of political folly regardless. A hit-team of no fewer than eight people had been sent to Amman: two were apprehended by the Jordanian authorities; four others took refuge in the Israeli Embassy after their mission was aborted; a woman doctor and another Mossad agent checked into the Inter-Continental Hotel as a married couple, which they were not.

Hussein, Israel's best friend in the Arab world, said after the failed assassination bid that he felt as if somebody ‘had spat in his face'. His sense of betrayal was all the more acute because three days before the attempt Israeli and Jordanian officials had considered together the problem of Islamic terror. The meeting took place in Amman within the framework of regular security cooperation between the two sides. At the meeting the Jordanian representatives reiterated their commitment to work closely with Mossad in the fight against terror. The king intervened in the dialogue personally to report an offer of a truce from Hamas. The offer was for a thirty-year truce between Israel and the Palestinians that included Hamas. He requested that this offer should be conveyed directly to the prime minister. He was thus all the more surprised and angry when he learned about the bizarre operation in Jordan's capital.

Netanyahu called Hussein as soon as he heard of the failure of the mission. He had apparently not taken into account the possibility
that something could go wrong. Netanyahu asked Hussein to receive General Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, as soon as possible. He did not indicate the reason for the meeting, and Hussein assumed that it was connected with the Hamas truce proposal. By the time Yatom arrived, Hussein had been fully briefed about the incident. Yatom went by himself in a private aircraft and received a very frosty reception. General Ali Shukri and General Samih Batikhi, the head of the General Intelligence Department, were also there. Yatom and his family had spent the weekend before the operation on holiday in Aqaba and had been entertained by the king in person. How someone he treated as a friend could be involved in such a dastardly act was beyond the king's comprehension. Yatom explained that the two men in police custody were in fact Mossad agents and that their unit was called ‘Caesaria'. Hussein told him that this kind of behaviour could not be tolerated and walked out of the meeting. Batikhi proceeded to lambaste Yatom for betraying their trust. Yatom replied that Mishal was in charge of the terrorist operations of Hamas. The Jordanians retorted that even if this were true, Israel could not take such liberties in their country. Batikhi got very angry and walked out. Yatom had been roundly rebuked and was forced to leave without having obtained any access to, or information on, the perpetrators of the crime. It was one of the shortest meetings in the annals of Israeli–Jordanian relations.