Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (4 page)

My great-grandfather’s tragic murder was mourned across the region and the world. My grandfather, Talal bin Abdullah, who had attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom and served in the Arab Legion as a cavalry officer, became king, and in accordance with the Constitution, which states that succession passes to the king’s eldest son, my father became crown prince.

At the time, Egypt was publicly antagonistic toward the Jordanian government, and it was felt that it was too risky for my father to continue his schooling in Alexandria. So he was sent to Harrow in England. Although my father knew that he would someday assume official duties, his personal hope was that he would be able to finish his education and begin a career, living an ordinary life for a time. But my grandfather, who suffered from schizophrenia, was unable to rule for long due to poor health, and he abdicated a year after he assumed office. On August 12, 1952, my father was on summer holiday from Harrow in Switzerland with his mother, Queen Zein Al Sharaf. He was staying at the Beau Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva when he received a telegram addressed to “His Majesty King Hussein.”

Back in Amman, my father discussed with his uncle Sharif Nasser bin Jamil how best to fill his time, as it would be six months before he would reach the legal age to accede to the throne. Their conversation turned to Sandhurst, which was famous for educating leaders in all walks of life. His uncle said, “Your father went to Sandhurst. I remember him telling me that Sandhurst was the greatest military academy in the world and the finest place for a man to learn to be a king.”

My father’s mind flashed back to when he was a child playing toy soldiers, and he remembered my grandfather saying, “No man can rule a country without discipline. No man can be a good soldier without discipline. And nowhere in the world do they teach men discipline like they do at Sandhurst.”

So on September 9, 1952, Officer Cadet King Hussein arrived at Sandhurst and joined Inkerman Company. The regular yearlong course was compressed into six months. Although my father had a demanding schedule, with extra drills and marching, that time was one of the happiest and most formative periods of his life. For a brief moment longer, he would be a cadet among other cadets.

On May 2, 1953, when he reached the age of eighteen, my father assumed his responsibilities as king. He would rule Jordan for forty-six years and would see four major wars between Israel and the Arab states. He would eventually reach a peace treaty with Israel, and would see his Israeli partner assassinated for seeking peace, but he would not live to see the end of the conflict he had so yearned to help settle.

 

My father’s first test, three years after he assumed the throne, was the Suez crisis. Following the Egyptian revolution of 1952, which toppled King Farouk and led to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalist sentiment was running high in Egypt. In 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which until then had been controlled by Britain and France. In reaction, the two countries cooked up a secret plan with Israel. Israel would attack Egypt, and in response Britain and France would send “peacekeeping troops” that would retake control of the canal.

The Israelis kept their side of the bargain, advancing into the Sinai Peninsula in October 1956. An Anglo-French task force deployed shortly afterward and seized the canal. While militarily successful, the operation became a political fiasco as news of the plot leaked. Under pressure from the United States, Britain and France were forced to remove their troops, and British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned. The Suez crisis strengthened Nasser’s Arab nationalist credentials and heightened tensions between Israel and the Arab world. It also suggested the usefulness of a crisis as a pretext for intervention by Western powers. Thankfully, Jordan avoided being drawn into the Suez affair. But we were not so fortunate the next time Egypt and Israel fought each other, in the spring of 1967.

F
rom my room, I heard a muffled bang, followed by several others. Grabbing my telescope, I ran down the corridor to the window. I could see a black column of smoke in the distance and heard another explosion, this time louder. Israeli jets were attacking Palestinian guerrillas outside Salt, a town fifteen miles northwest of Amman. My father rushed up and took the telescope from me. After twisting it and realizing that it was a toy, he impatiently threw it to the floor and ran off to change into his military uniform.

I was five years old and this was my first experience of war. About forty minutes later I heard the staccato cough of anti-aircraft guns as the Jordanian army fired at the Israeli planes.

When my father returned that evening, he looked distraught and went straight into his bedroom. Although I was young, I could sense something was terribly wrong. I followed him and found him sitting on the bed with his face in his hands. He looked up as I entered, and I could see that his eyes were damp. That was one of the very few times I ever saw my father cry. I asked him what was wrong and why there was so much noise and so many airplanes flying overhead.

He patiently explained that the Israelis were trying to hit Palestinian guerrilla fighters who were living in Jordan. I had no understanding at that time as to what guerrillas were or why the Israelis were trying to kill them. All I knew was that things were bad. Rather than selecting specific military targets, the Israelis were bombing communities full of families, devastating the roads and houses.

Many of their munitions did not explode immediately. My father told me about a little girl who, thinking the danger was over, had approached one of the bombs; it then exploded. He rushed to free her from the rubble, but when he dug her out he found that she was badly injured. She had lost one of her legs. Gently cradling her, he ran to a nearby ambulance, but it was too late. She died in his arms.

We lived in a small, tree-lined compound in a district called Hummar, twenty minutes up into the hills outside of Amman. The relative seclusion provided some protection from those who wanted to hurt us, but not from Israeli planes: for that we had to rely on four .50 caliber quad guns mounted on turrets in the garden. The soldiers manning the guns kindly allowed my four-year-old brother, Feisal, and me to think we were part of the defensive effort. Our job was to carry oil cans and lubricate the guns if they started firing. We enjoyed our role as the most junior members of the military unit—an association that came to an abrupt halt when someone showed my mother a photo of us posing by the guns with cigarettes dangling from our mouths. My mother still lives in that house, but the area where the anti-aircraft guns were is now a vegetable garden; one gun was mounted on what is now a compost heap.

Although as a child I could perceive the emotional impact of the war, at that time I had little idea of its meaning and implications.

 

In the spring of 1967 it was already clear to many in the region that Israel and its Arab neighbors were racing headlong toward a collision. In November 1966 Israeli forces launched a devastating attack on Samu, a village near Hebron, as a reprisal for the killing by landmine of three soldiers, raising concerns in Amman about Israeli intentions. In early May, President Nasser deployed troops in the Sinai Peninsula and requested that the UN remove its peacekeeping troops (the United Nations Emergency Force, UNEF) from the Sinai, where they had been positioned since the Suez crisis more than a decade earlier. Not long after that, he closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only access to the Red Sea, to Israeli shipping.

The Arab forces were not a cohesive army but a collection of separate national armies that had recently joined together. Following a series of failed attempts at closer political union among the Arab states during the 1960s, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Iraqis had joined their militaries together to form the United Arab Command in 1964. Egypt and Syria then signed a defense treaty in November 1966.

In late May 1967, sensing the looming possibility of a conflict, and given the highly charged Arab nationalist sentiment at the time, my father felt he had no choice but to announce his support for Arab leaders in the face of Israeli aggression. He went to Cairo and, in a fateful decision, committed Jordan to a mutual defense treaty with Egypt. From then on, the Jordanian Armed Forces would be under the command of an Egyptian officer, General Abdul Monim Riad. The Israelis decided on a preemptive strike, claiming that Nasser was planning to attack. They had already prepared the way.

At that time, the Middle East was a focus of intense competition between the rival superpowers locked in a cold war. The region was divided into two broad areas of influence: a pro-Soviet camp, led by Nasser and the Egyptians, and a pro-Western camp, to which my father belonged. According to declassified U.S. documents, on June 1, 1967, General Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, visited Washington, D.C., and met with Richard Helms, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Drawing upon American fears of Soviet expansionism, Amit portrayed Egypt and Nasser as a threat not just to Israel but to the whole region. According to Helms, Amit’s view was that the Egyptian president would, if left unimpeded, draw the entire Middle East into the Soviet sphere of influence. Jordan’s forced accommodation with Egypt was by this logic a sign of things to come. Saudi Arabia and Lebanon would be next, after which it would be the turn of Turkey and Iran. Even Tunisia and Morocco would eventually topple to Nasser. Summarizing their conversation in a memo to U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, Helms said, “Amit thinks the Israelis’ decision will be to strike.”

General Amit’s visit was a warning from Israel to America. Unless President Johnson told them not to do so, Israel would attack Egypt. On June 3, President Johnson wrote to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of Israel, saying, “I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities.” Then Johnson added, “We have completely and fully exchanged views with General Amit.” The next day Amit returned to Israel, and Johnson’s letter was delivered to the Israeli government.

One of Israel’s greatest talents has been exaggerating the threat posed by countries it considers strategic enemies, perpetuating the story of it being a tiny nation surrounded by hostile powers. This myth has allowed the Israelis to portray their own calculated acts of aggression as self-defense and, in some cases, to persuade other nations to attack its enemies in its stead.

In 1967, in military terms, Israel was certainly a match for its Arab adversaries. The Israeli army was some 300,000 strong, with 800 tanks and 197 fighter aircraft. The combined Arab armies had some 240,000 men, 900 tanks, and 385 aircraft of all types. But simply comparing combat strength is misleading. For one thing, the largest Arab army, the Egyptian army, at over 100,000 strong, had around one-fifth of its men in Yemen at the time, supporting the Republican forces in the ongoing civil war. By telling the Americans that Egypt posed a threat to the entire region, Israel had at best misled and at worst purposefully lied to a nation that was and still is one of its closest allies.

Learning of the impending conflict from NATO intelligence, Turkey’s ambassador to Jordan warned my father of an imminent Israeli attack. My father immediately told Nasser, who refused to heed the warning.

In implementation of the defense pact Jordan had entered with Egypt, General Riad assumed command of our armed forces. He was at a severe disadvantage, as he did not know the terrain in Jordan or Palestine well, nor did he have a good sense of the capabilities of the men under his command. In addition, he took his orders from Cairo, not Amman. If Israel were to attack Egypt, Riad would order Jordanian troops into battle, and we would be at war with Israel.

On June 5, 1967, Israeli jets flew into Egypt and struck at the Egyptian air force. Egyptian planes were not their only targets. That same day two Israeli Mystère jets attacked the royal palace in Amman, targeting my father’s private office with rockets and machine-gun fire. Thankfully, he was at army headquarters at the time. If he had been at the palace, he would have been killed.

 

Our whole extended family, including my uncle Prince Muhammad and his two sons, Talal and Ghazi, lived in our house during the war, camping out in sleeping bags in the basement. My uncle Muhammad, who was in charge of my father’s security, slept on the floor with a machine gun outside my father’s bedroom. To a five-year-old it all seemed like a great adventure; I was too young to understand the tragic events that were unfolding.

One afternoon my brother Feisal and I were hiding in the basement with assorted aunts, cousins, and other relatives. It was another Israeli air raid, and we could hear the explosions outside. My brother dared me to run across the lawn, touch the fence, and return. With Feisal goading me on, I dashed onto the lawn and ran as fast as my legs would carry me. There was a huge explosion. I burst into tears and ran back into the house.

Throughout the day of June 5, 1967, the Israeli air force attacked our bases in Amman and Mafraq, destroying our landing fields and our fleet of Hawker Hunter aircraft. For the next two days Jordanian forces fought bravely to defend the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but, outmanned and outgunned, and with no air cover, they were overwhelmed by the Israelis. The Royal Jordanian Air Force also did an amazing job considering its limited resources and the superiority of Israeli airpower, shooting down eight Israeli planes and launching two attacks on central Israeli cities. It was the only Arab air force that downed Israeli planes during this war.

Pressing on, the Israeli armed forces, commanded by Yitzhak Rabin, attempted to seize control of the whole of the West Bank. Determined to be on the front line, my father headed down to the Jordan Valley to be with his men. When he got there, a terrible sight awaited him, which he later described: “Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps, and all kinds of vehicles twisted, disemboweled, dented, still smoking, giving off that particular smell of metal and paint burned by exploding bombs—a stink that only powder can make.”