Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (6 page)

The situation in Jordan was especially dispiriting because the country had welcomed Yasser Arafat and his men with open arms after the 1967 war and had allowed the PLO to enjoy freedom of movement. But Arafat failed to repay this generosity. His forces started to undermine the state. They levied taxes and ignored the laws. Many guerrilla groups under the PLO acted with impunity. If they were hungry, guerrilla fighters would break into a house while the owner was at work and force his wife to cook lunch for them at gunpoint. They would kidnap people for ransom, kill people at random, confiscate cars, occupy homes, and attack hotels, hoping to take foreign nationals hostage.

I was six years old at the time and my parents decided to send me out of the country to escape the mounting violence and chaos inside Jordan. Since my father had gone to Harrow, England was a natural choice. I still remember arriving in the evening at St. Edmund’s School, a large country house in Surrey set in extensive grounds. Driving from Heathrow Airport through the green fields and tightly packed hedgerows, I felt a long way from the dusty desert roads of Jordan.

Although the teachers were friendly and welcoming, I was not happy at St. Edmund’s. Part of my dislike was due to leaving my parents at such a young age and part of it was due to the language. Arabic is my first language, and since we had a Swiss nanny I spoke a fair amount of French at home. English was the weakest of the three languages I grew up speaking. And yet before too long I had mastered English and picked up a British accent that has stayed with me. A year and a half later my brother Feisal joined me, but we were not going to stay in England for long.

Tensions had been growing between my father and the guerrilla forces. As Arafat stepped up his efforts to seize control of Jordan, his men began to turn their attention to its king.

In September 1970, as my father headed into Amman accompanied by Zaid Rifai, the stately Harvard-educated chief of the Royal Court, and Sharif Nasser bin Jamil, a heavy, barrel-chested man who at that time was chief of staff of the Jordanian army, he was stopped at a crossroads by a roadblock. When one of his men got out to move the roadblock, guerrillas who had been hiding in the hills opened fire with a variety of weapons, including a Russian-made Dushka heavy machine gun. The soldier trying to remove the barricade was killed, and my father saw the bullets coming closer, hitting the ground like hail. Everybody piled out and began to return fire. My father shouted, “Shame on them!”—which may seem like an odd thing to say when you are being attacked, but he had a strong sense of personal honor and believed that his assailants were nothing more than cowardly bandits. Zaid Rifai and Sharif Nasser pleaded with him to take shelter in a nearby ditch. When the attackers saw my father take cover, they swung the heavy machine gun around to target him. Zaid Rifai and the commander of the Royal Guard dove to protect him, colliding in midair, and both fell on top of him. My father felt his back buckle under the weight.

Once they had beaten back the attackers, my father and his men jumped back into their cars. My father was in the front seat when he realized his beret had fallen off and was lying in the dirt. He was so furious about being ambushed that he got out and, with bullets flying, strode over to pick it up. He placed it on his head, then calmly got back into his car and drove off. As they headed back to our house in Hummar he turned to Zaid Rifai and said, “Next time, I’ll take my chances with the fedayeen. You two did more damage than they did!” From that point on, he often complained of a bad back.

 

By this time, following two failed cease-fires, it was clear that Jordan could not coexist with Arafat’s guerrillas. At the time, the PLO and its affiliates numbered around 100,000 men: 25,000 full-time fighters and some 75,000 armed militia. And they kept getting bolder. On September 6, 1970, the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three international airliners that had taken off from Frankfurt, Zurich, and Amsterdam en route to New York and diverted two of them to Dawson’s Field, a remote airfield in the desert in the Azraq area in northeast Jordan—the third was diverted to Cairo and blown up. Three days later, a third civilian airliner was hijacked to the same strip. The guerrillas demanded the release of Palestinian militants held in European jails. When their demands were not met, on September 12, under the gaze of the world media, the guerrillas blew up the three planes after releasing all the passengers. Two days later the PLO called for the establishment of a “national authority” in Jordan.

For my father, this was the final straw. Eight days later, on September 17, he ordered the army to move aggressively against the fedayeen in Amman and other cities. It would be a mistake to characterize this confrontation as a civil war between Jordanians and Palestinians. Many Jordanians of Palestinian origin fought bravely in the army. And some Jordanians from the East Bank had joined the guerrilla forces fighting against the army. As chief of staff of the army, Sharif Nasser led the struggle. A powerful man and a fierce warrior, he looked like he could punch a horse and knock it out cold. One of his favorite tricks was to grab an onion in one hand and crush it into a pulp, squeezing it over his dinner plate to add a little spice to a bland meal.

The fighting between the Jordanian forces and the fedayeen was fierce. Before long, we were not only contending with internal enemies. In the fall of 1970, Syria attacked northern Jordan with three armored brigades, a brigade of commandos, and a brigade of Palestinian guerrillas, seeking to help Arafat’s men. Although heavily outnumbered, the Jordanian soldiers of the 40th Armoured Brigade, who were responsible for defending the border, fought back fiercely and held their ground. Syria’s invasion threatened to create an international crisis out of a domestic conflict. On September 23, the Syrians were driven back. But while we had defended our northern border, inside Jordan the conflict with the fedayeen continued to rage.

In the end, the Jordanian Armed Forces, with their superior professionalism, training, and equipment, prevailed. The fighting with the guerrillas continued off and on until the summer of 1971, but Jordan won. The army regained control of the country and legitimacy prevailed. My father and Sharif Nasser learned that Arafat was hiding in the Egyptian embassy in Amman, which was hosting a visiting delegation from the Arab League. As the delegation members were leaving, they appeared to have gained an extra member: a stocky woman covered from head to toe in a black
abayah
and head scarf. My father’s intelligence service reported that the mystery woman was likely Arafat trying to escape.

Sharif Nasser wanted to capture and kill Arafat and argued that he did not deserve to live. But my father told his men to let Arafat leave Jordan. He always believed that it was important to leave open the possibility of reconciliation.

Twenty years later my father would save Arafat’s life for a second time. In April 1992, Arafat’s plane crashed in the Libyan desert during a sandstorm, killing three of the passengers. By then, much had changed in their relationship. My father would have been a doctor had life not led him into politics, and when he saw Arafat two months later he noticed that he seemed unwell. He sent him to the King Hussein Medical Center. It turned out that Arafat had a blood clot in his brain, which the doctors safely removed in an emergency operation.

 

When the Palestinian guerrillas were chased out of Jordan, many of them made their way to Lebanon, which would become the next arena of an even more bloody war. Meanwhile, back home, a handful of radical guerrillas formed a sophisticated new internationally funded terrorist organization. Calling themselves Black September, after the month in which the conflict between Jordan and the PLO began, they vowed to take revenge for their defeat. One of their first acts was to assassinate the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi Tal, on a visit to Cairo in November 1971.

The following month Zaid Rifai, who had recently become Jordan’s ambassador to the UK, received an urgent telegram from my father saying that a Black September assassination squad had been dispatched to London to attack a Jordanian target. Rifai arranged for extra security at the embassy and drew up a list of potential targets, including me and my brother Feisal, who had recently joined me at school in England. Although I was almost ten, I quickly got the sense something was wrong when policemen with guard dogs came to my school and stayed with me around the clock.

The next day, Rifai left his home in Regent’s Park later than usual. The car drove past Christmas shoppers on Kensington High Street, and as it slowed to make a sharp turn, a gunman sprang into the road, pulled out a Sten gun, and started spraying bullets. Realizing that he was the target, Rifai threw himself on the floor of the car while the gunman kept firing at the backseat. After the shooting stopped, Zaid Rifai yelled at the driver to take him to a hospital. The car sped away; then, after a few minutes, it stopped. “What’s the matter?” Zaid asked. “Your Excellency,” said the driver, who was an Englishman, “we have a red light.”

Rifai survived, but his wounds were quite extensive, and he required eleven operations on his hand and arm. There was little doubt as to who was responsible: Black September. My parents came to the conclusion that England was no longer safe. They decided to send Feisal and me even farther away: to America.

N
ineteen seventy-two was a difficult year for my family, and not just because of threats from terrorists. That was when my parents decided, after ten years of marriage and four children (my twin sisters Aisha and Zein were born in 1968), to divorce. The fact that my brother and I were away at boarding school did not shield us from the uncertainty that all children from divorced families must face. But we were fortunate that our parents always remained very close and were united in their concern and support for us.

In September 1972, Black September carried out another attack, taking hostages and subsequently killing eleven Israeli athletes at the summer Olympic Games in Munich. The attack took place in the spotlight of the assembled media from across the globe, and now the whole world had witnessed their brutality.

In October my brother Feisal and I went to America. On our first trip to the United States a few years earlier we had been to Florida with our parents and little sisters and had visited Cypress Gardens and the recently opened Disney World. So I was excited at the thought of returning to the States—in my mind, it was one big theme park. But New England in the fall was not quite Disney World.

My new school, Eaglebrook, a prep school in western Massachusetts, was perched on a hill in the Pocumtuck range overlooking the town of Deerfield. The school had the feeling of a Swiss mountain resort, complete with chalets and its own ski run. Feisal and I shared a dorm room, and he went to school at Bement, just down the hill. Another change that took a bit of getting used to was the food. One of my favorite snacks in Jordan was bread and
zeit ou zatar
, olive oil mixed with dried thyme. But here I was introduced to the delights of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I did not like St. Edmund’s in the UK, but I never got into a fight there. Eaglebrook was different. I was the first Arab the school had ever seen, and there were several Jewish students. Pretty soon, some of them let me know I was not welcome. I did not understand their animosity and was too young to have encountered the concept of irrational prejudice. In later years I would become all too familiar with people who judge individuals on the basis of their identity, but to a child it made no sense. I knew that Jordanians and Israelis were enemies, but we were now in the United States, and these were Americans. In my mind there was no connection between an Israeli and a Jew. But even in western Massachusetts, it seemed, I could not escape the conflicts of the Middle East.

I got into a number of scrapes. Although I had security guards who accompanied me everywhere, their instructions were to protect me from terrorists and assassins, not from aggressive ten-year-olds. Sometimes I did not help my case. In one confrontation, my antagonist said, “Yeah, you and whose army?” I replied, “Me and my dad’s army!”

One afternoon one of the proctors—older students who were responsible for keeping discipline—kicked my brother out of our dorm room, brought in an older boy from down the hallway, and said, “You and he will fight.” I was enthusiastic, but I did not know how to fight and neither did he, so we locked arms and pounded each other on the back. The proctors let us go at it until we were out of breath, separated us, and then made us go at it again. I jumped onto a bed and leaped at my antagonist, knocking him over. He fell and hit his head hard on the floor. We were all scared something had happened to him, and the proctors hauled him away. It was completely by chance, but because I had taken down a much bigger boy, the others began to show me a little more respect.

I had just arrived at Eaglebrook when my father married Alia Toukan, the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat from a prominent family of Palestinian origin. Tragically, Queen Alia was killed in a helicopter crash in 1977, when she was just twenty-eight years old. The following year my father married Lisa Halaby, the daughter of an Arab-American businessman and senior U.S. Defense Department official, and she took the name Queen Noor.

I have quite a large family. In addition to my older sister Alia, from my father’s first marriage in the 1950s to Sharifa Dina Abdel Hamid, there were my brother Feisal and my twin sisters Aisha and Zein. My father’s marriage to Queen Alia produced another sister, Haya, and another brother, Ali, and they adopted an orphan girl, Abir. Later on, after my father married Queen Noor, we were joined by two more brothers, Hamzah and Hashim, and two more sisters, Iman and Raiyah. In all we were twelve children, five boys and seven girls, but very much one family. My four brothers and I like to say we are like five fingers on a hand. If you are well-meaning, we extend the hand of friendship, but when outsiders try to harm the family, we band together and become a fist.