Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (27 page)

In June 2010, I was full of pride as I handed out graduation certificates to the eighty-four students of King’s first class of seniors. All of them were going on to university. Fourteen would be pursuing their education at some of the best schools in the Middle East, ten would be attending universities in the UK, and nine would be studying in Canada. A full forty-four graduates had enrolled in American universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown.

I know that every one of them will be well equipped to go out into the world and do remarkable things. I can only hope that they built the same strong bonds of friendship as I did at Deerfield, and that the seeds planted there in the desert will blossom into a new generation of leaders who will spread the message of hard work, intellectual curiosity, and tolerance throughout the region.

Sadly, one of my scholars was not among the graduating class. Ahmad Tarawneh was a young man from Kerak, who had never studied in English before. He was one of the best students in his class and was planning to apply to a top university in the West to study engineering, until he died in a tragic car accident only two months before his graduation. I felt as if I had lost one of my own sons.

We remembered Ahmad at the graduation ceremony. My fellow Deerfield classmates had offered King’s a trophy to be presented as the King Abdullah II Award to the student who most embodies King’s guiding principles of respect, love of learning, responsibility, an integrated life, and global citizenship. The award was given posthumously to Ahmad.

The school remains one of my proudest achievements. The copyright for the English-language edition of this book has been transferred to King’s Academy and the proceeds from the sale of the book will support its scholarship fund for needy students.

O
n May 17, 1999, as I was about to embark on my first visit to the United States as king, Israelis went to the polls. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the peace process had stalled badly, and we all hoped that a new Israeli leader would bring new momentum. The previous year in Washington, Netanyahu and Arafat had signed what was intended to be a framework to advance the peace process, the Wye River Memorandum. Supported by my ailing father in the last months of his life, the Wye Accords, which provided for further Israeli withdrawals, in stages, from the West Bank, seemed to represent a breakthrough. But seven months later, after completing only one of the three stages of withdrawal, Netanyahu was stalling, twisting, and turning, and any further progress based on Wye was essentially halted. In Jordan and across the Arab world, we hoped that a change of prime minister might revive the peace efforts.

A former chief of staff of the Israeli army and Israel’s most decorated officer, Ehud Barak was riding high in the polls. He had been in the Special Forces, and when he left the army and went into politics, he took on the challenge of peacemaking. Barak won a landslide electoral victory. The results were announced as I was meeting with President Clinton in the White House. We were both optimistic that he would succeed where Netanyahu had failed and take bold action to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

In April 2000, I went to Israel for my first official visit. I had been scheduled to go two months earlier but postponed the trip when Israel arbitrarily struck targets in southern Lebanon. My delegation went by boat from Aqaba to Eilat, where we were met by Barak, who led us on a tour of a fishery and then took us for a working lunch at a local hotel. We discussed the final status talks that, under the Sharm El Sheikh Accord of September 1999, were to lead to a comprehensive agreement. I told Barak that if he wanted relations to improve between Israel and Jordan, he would have to make substantial progress with the Palestinians.

As the Clinton administration neared the end of its term, the Israeli prime minister was seriously engaged in efforts to create an atmosphere that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to develop a lasting peace. The summer of 2000 was a period of intense diplomatic activity surrounding the peace process. In May, Ehud Barak withdrew Israel’s forces from southern Lebanon, which they had occupied for almost two decades. But the withdrawal was not complete; Israel maintained its hold on the area of Shebaa Farms and a few other small Lebanese territories. Had Israeli troops withdrawn completely from Lebanon, we might not have seen further conflict later on. The decision to stop just one step short of total withdrawal was an unfortunate and costly hedge.

In a nod to the famous negotiations between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978, President Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to a summit at Camp David in July. The aim was to accelerate progress on the peace talks, which were faltering, and to strive to reach a final agreement. Shortly before they left for America, I met separately with each leader.

I reminded both men of how hard my father had worked with President Clinton and how much he had sacrificed to move the peace process forward. Clinton had decided to go for the great prize. He wanted to cut out the remaining intermediary steps in Israel’s phased withdrawal from the West Bank and to hammer out terms that both Israelis and Palestinians could accept for the creation of a Palestinian state. I told them that we should not miss this historic opportunity.

As Arafat and Barak headed to Camp David on July 11, they carried with them the hopes of all the peoples of the region for a peaceful settlement to a conflict that has defined our part of the world for more than sixty years. Unfortunately, those hopes were not realized. Over fourteen days of negotiations at Camp David, the two sides came closer than they ever have, before or since, to a lasting peace. But they could not take the final step. Of the four final status issues that they addressed, Jerusalem and the status of Palestinian refugees were the most difficult and contentious.

Barak presented a package that represented an advance on any previous Israeli proposal, but for the Palestinian negotiators it fell short. Under his proposals, Israel would permanently retain over 10 percent of the West Bank and would control a further 10 percent for a period of twenty years. The return of refugees was treated in the context of a family reunification program and excluded the issue of the Palestinian right of return (the right of Palestinians who were evicted or fled in 1948 and 1967 to return to their homes). On the critical issue of Jerusalem, the Palestinians were offered only administrative authority over the holy sites in the Old City, far less than the full sovereignty that they sought over East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians wanted a breakthrough, but Arafat felt he could not sign an agreement that would sacrifice the rights of over five million Palestinian refugees and give Israel control over East Jerusalem.

Although Barak and Arafat showed great courage, the finger-pointing started almost immediately after that. In the end their negotiations broke down and the summit ended in failure on July 25. In subsequent months Palestinian frustrations would grow, as the Israelis’ interest in coming to terms with the Palestinians waned. Ehud Barak would soon be up for election again, and his willingness to give back territories in the West Bank was not well received by the Israeli public. Then Ariel Sharon lit a match that would set the region ablaze. In a sense it was to be expected that Jerusalem would be the flashpoint for the incident that triggered a second Palestinian uprising and finally dashed the hopes of peace.

Jerusalem has always had a special place in the Arab heart. It is a city holy to the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in part because of this it has often been the cause of conflict. It has been conquered many times in its history. Some of its occupiers brought great bloodshed. But Islam came to the city with great dignity.

In the seventh century, the forces of the Muslim Caliph, who was then based in Mecca, laid siege to Jerusalem, which was under the control of the Byzantine Empire. When the city finally surrendered, Caliph Omar bin al-Khattab entered on foot, accompanied by his servant and a single camel, in recognition of Jerusalem’s status as a city of peace. He was invited by the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but he refused, fearing that if he did Muslims would turn the church into a mosque. Instead, he went to visit Al Aqsa, then in ruins, from which the Prophet Mohammad had alighted into the heavens on the night of Ascension. Omar ordered a mosque to be built over this site, and signed a treaty that guaranteed Christians protection and the right of worship. The Pact of Omar, as quoted by Abdul Latif Tibawi in his book
Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History
, reads:

Not all rulers of Jerusalem have been quite so compassionate. In the late eleventh century, Pope Urban II called for the recapture of Jerusalem. Knights and their followers gathered from all over Europe and marched toward the Holy Land, in what came to be known as the First Crusade. In 1099, when Jerusalem finally fell, the Crusaders entered the city and slaughtered thousands of its Jewish, Muslim, and Orthodox Christian defenders, including many Muslims who had taken shelter in the Al Aqsa Mosque.

The Crusaders didn’t last long and were kicked out of Jerusalem less than a hundred years later. After that, the city remained in Muslim hands for more than seven hundred years. When the Ottoman Turks were pushed out, after World War I, responsibility for the city fell upon my family, the Hashemites, and the people of Jerusalem pronounced their allegiance to my great-great-grandfather, Al Hussein bin Ali. In 1948 Jordanian forces under my great-grandfather, King Abdullah I, managed to protect the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from the new state of Israel. Later, in 1950, the West Bank became part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan under the Act of Union in accordance with the declaration of the Jericho Conference. One year later, my great-grandfather was assassinated on a visit to Jerusalem, with my father standing next to him. When my father became king, he inherited both the Hashemite family’s responsibility as guardians of the holy city of Jerusalem and his great-grandfather’s legacy of a unified West Bank. My father was emotionally attached to Jerusalem for religious and family reasons. He did his utmost to fulfill his responsibility as guardian and protector of the city and its holy shrines. Even after the Israelis seized East Jerusalem in 1967, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister, agreed that the holy sites should continue to be administered by the Jordanian government, through a religious trust called the waqf.

It is difficult to overstate Jerusalem’s significance to Muslims. Chapter Seventeen of the Holy Quran describes the miracle of Isra and Miraj, when the angel Gabriel took the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem. The Foundation Stone, housed under the Dome of the Rock, marks the place from which the Prophet ascended to the heavens on that night to be shown the signs of God. There he met the prophets who had come before him, led them in prayer, and was returned to Mecca.

In the early days of Islam, all Muslims faced Jerusalem when they prayed. In time, the Prophet Mohammad was instructed by God to shift the direction to Mecca. The Prophet Mohammad proclaimed that religious pilgrimages should be restricted to the mosques in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and that a prayer in Jerusalem was worth hundreds elsewhere. The area around Al Aqsa Mosque that includes the Dome of the Rock came to be known as Al Haram Al Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.

In Arabic, we call Jerusalem Al Quds, “The Holy One.” The city’s loss to Israel in 1967 shocked Arabs and Muslims around the world. The anger and sadness over the occupation of Jerusalem by Israel was expressed in angry demonstrations as well as poetic and artistic expressions. The famous Lebanese singer Fairouz captured the hearts of millions of Arabs when she mourned the loss of the “flower of cities” in a song that continues to mesmerize audiences today. For Arabs, Jerusalem is also a symbol of the Arab nationalist uprising led by my great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein.

My father always retained a special place in his heart for Jerusalem. He sold his house in London in the early 1990s so that he could repair the gold covering on the Dome of the Rock. I am proud, too, of the work done by Jordanian engineers and craftsmen in constructing and installing in Al Aqsa Mosque in 2007 a replica of the Salaheddin Minbar, a decorated pulpit from which imams have delivered their sermons for centuries. The minbar was burned down in 1969 when a radical Zionist planted a firebomb in the mosque.

I take very seriously my responsibility to preserve the Arab identity of Jerusalem and protect its holy sites. But Jerusalem’s identity is being threatened by Israeli unilateral measures, which aim to drive Muslims and Christians out of the city. Jerusalem is a tinderbox that could ignite the whole region and inflame passions around the globe. We have repeatedly warned Israelis that terrible consequences will come from their actions in Jerusalem, which include excavation works that threaten Muslim and Christian holy sites, the building of settlements, and the demolition of Palestinians’ houses, in addition to trying to push Muslim and Christian Jerusalemites out of the city. In every meeting with Israeli officials I warn that Jerusalem is a critically sensitive issue. Unilateral and illegal actions can only deepen the conflict and inflict more suffering on the Palestinians and the Israelis alike. But nothing seems to stop Israeli governments from taking these actions that risk derailing Israel’s relations with Jordan and destroying all of our efforts to seek a lasting regional peace.