Lion of Jordan

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

British Foreign Secretaries since 1945
(with Peter Jones and Keith Sainsbury, 1977)

The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:
A Study in Crisis-Decision Making
(1983)

The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:
A Study in Crisis-Decision Making
(1983)

Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah,
The Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine
(1988)

The Politics of Partition
(1990)

War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History
(1995)

The Cold War and the Middle East
(co-editor with Yezid Sayigh, 1997)

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
(2000)

The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948
(co-editor with Eugene L. Rogan, 2001)

AVI SHLAIM

The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2007
1

Copyright © Avi Shlaim, 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 978–0–141–90635–5

To Gwyn

List of Maps

List of Illustrations

Preface

1    The Hashemite Heritage

2    Murder of a Mentor

3    The Making of a King

4    The Baghdad Pact Fiasco

5    The Dismissal of Glubb

6    The Liberal Experiment

7    A Royal Coup

8    The Year of Revolution

9    Arab Foes and Jewish Friends

10    The Palestinian Challenge

11    The Road to War

12    Picking up the Pieces

13    Dialogue across the Battle Lines

14    Civil War

15    The United Arab Kingdom Plan

16    The October War

17    The Road to Rabat

18    The Camp David Accords

19    Lebanon and the Reagan Plan

20    Peace Partnership with the PLO

21    The London Agreement

22    Intifada and Disengagement

23    The Gulf Crisis and War

24    From Madrid to Oslo

25    Peace Treaty

26    The King's Peace

27    Collision Course

28    The Last Journey

    
Epilogue: The Life and Legacy

Notes

Jordanian Secret Meetings with Israeli Officials

The Hashemite Dynasty

Chronology

List of Interviews

Bibliography

Index

1. Jordan and the Arab World

2. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

3. The 1949 Armistice Lines

4. The Middle East after the June 1967 War

5. The Allon Plan for the West Bank, 1967

6. Jordan 1970

1 King Hussein ibn Ali, King of the Hijaz
(Corbis/Bettman)

2 King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan
(Corbis/Bettman)

3 Sir John Glubb
(Getty Images)

4 Prince Hussein with his parents
(Hashemite Archives)

5 Burial of King Abdullah
(Corbis/Bettman)

6 Hussein before the Accession to the Throne Ceremony
(Hashemite Archives)

7 Hussein at Sandhurst
(Topfoto)

8 Hussein and Princess Dina
(Topfoto)

9 Hussein and Faisal II of Iraq
(Corbis/Bettman)

10 Hussein and Toni Gardiner
(Topfoto)

11 Hussein at the wheel of his Mercedes
(Hashemite Archives/Flouti)

12 Crown Prince Abdullah
(Corbis/Bettman)

13 Hussein with the Royal Family
(Albert Flouti/Camera Press)

14 Hussein visits the trenches
(AP/PA Photos)

15 Hussein with Sharif Zaid bin Shaker and Sharif Nasser bin Jamil
(Hashemite Archives)

16 Hussein during 1967 Press Conference
(AP/PA Photos)

17 Hussein with Wasfi al-Tall
(Corbis/Sygma/Geneviève Chauvel)

18 Arab heads of state at the Nile Hilton
(Corbis/Gamma/UPI)

19 Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan and Efraim Halevy
(Israel Govt Press Office/Sa'ar Ya'acov)

20 Hussein with Herzog Yaacov
(Private Collection)

21 Golda Meir
(Penny Tweedie/Camera Press)

22 Hussein with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
(Hulton Archives/Getty Images)

23 Zaid al-Rifa'i
(UPPA/Topfoto)

24 Hussein with Queen Alia, Princess Haya, Prince Ali and Abir
(Camera Press)

25 Hussein with Lisa Halaby
(Hashemite Archives/Zohrab)

26 Jimmy Carter, Hussein and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran
(Popperfoto)

27 Hussein with Saddam Hussein
(Jean-Claude Francolon/Gamma/ Camera Press)

28 Hussein with Hafiz al-Asad of Syria
(Corbis/Sygma/Bernard Bisson)

29 Hussein on Independence Day
(Camera Press)

30 Itzhak Rabin, Hussein and Bill Clinton
(Israel Government Press Office/Sa'ar Ya'acov)

31 Hussein during the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty signing ceremony
(Israel Government Press Office/Avi Ohayon)

32 Itzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Hussein, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat
(Corbis/CNP/Barbara Kinney)

33 Hussein and Queen Noor with family
(Hashemite Archives)

34 Hussein with Princes Abdullah and Hamzah
(Hashemite Archives/ Meldos)

35 Hussein returns home
(Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)

36 Hussein appointing Abdullah Crown Prince
(Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)

37 Hussein's funeral
(Corbis/Sygma/Neuhaus Nadav)

38 King Abdullah takes oath of office
(Corbis/Sygma/Stephane Cardinale)

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

This preface is written with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness: satisfaction at having completed a big book; but a tinge of sadness at having to put it to bed and losing the chance to further revise or add to it. Gibbon compared the finishing of a book to saying the final farewell to a very old and dear friend. I feel somewhat the same way about this one, a much more modest book than his. I have been working on it for the last seven years, and it is difficult to imagine life without it.

This is not the book I set out to write, and it is three times longer than I had envisaged. As I was on leave for three out of the past seven years, I cannot plead that I did not have the time to write a short book. My original plan was to write a monograph,
King Hussein and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East
, with the emphasis on his diplomacy in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. But, as I did the research for this study in diplomatic history, I became fascinated by the personality of the PLK, or ‘plucky little king', as he was often referred to in the West. The book acquired a life of its own and gradually developed, almost without my making a conscious decision, into a full-scale biography.

A. J. P. Taylor once said that every historian should write a biography, if only to discover how different this is from the writing of history. My own academic discipline is International Relations, and I am well aware that writing with reference to one individual is not in the best tradition of social science research. Yet, in this particular instance, given the king's dominant position within his own country and his highly personalized, not to say idiosyncratic, style of conducting foreign policy, it is the only sensible approach. International Relations is primarily the study of conflict and conflict resolution, of war and peace, and King Hussein's entire career, as the subtitle to this biography indicates, revolved round waging war and making peace.

One makes peace with one's enemies, not with one's friends. With Jordan and Israel, however, the dichotomy between war and peace is less clear-cut than in most other cases. They have been aptly described as ‘the best of enemies'. The triangular relationship between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians is difficult to analyse. But it is as vital to understanding the past as it is crucial in determining the final shape of the peace settlement in the Middle East. Jordan was a pivotal actor in the peace process that got under way in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. Whereas the literature on Israel and the Palestinians is very extensive, little has been written on Jordan. One of the main aims of this book is to fill the gap by providing an account of King Hussein's role in the search for peace in the Middle East, with particular emphasis on his involvement in the Palestinian question and on his secret contacts with Israel, which culminated in the signature of a peace treaty in 1994.

This book represents a natural development of my academic work over the last three decades. My training has been both in history and in the social sciences, and I like to think that I combine the skills of an International Relations generalist with those of a Middle East area specialist. The earlier book that is most directly relevant to the present project is
Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine
(1988). There I challenge many of the myths that have come to surround the birth of the State of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, most notably the myth that Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that persisted for three decades after the guns fell silent. In contrast to the conventional view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair, I dwelt on the special relationship between King Abdullah of Jordan (the grandfather of King Hussein) and the Zionist movement, and on the interest that the Hashemites and the Zionists shared in containing Palestinian nationalism. The central thesis advanced is that, in November 1947, the Hashemite ruler of Transjordan and the Jewish Agency reached a tacit agreement to divide up mandatory Palestine among themselves and to help abort the birth of an independent Palestinian state, and that this agreement laid the foundations for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of the war – until Abdullah's assassination by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951.

The other book that is intimately connected with the present one is
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
(2000). That work extends
my revisionist critique of Israeli foreign policy from 1948 to 1998, in other words, to the first fifty years of statehood. Among the themes covered are seven Arab–Israeli wars and all the major diplomatic initiatives to settle the Arab–Israeli dispute. It is not a comprehensive history of the Arab–Israeli conflict but a detailed study of one actor: Israel. Jordan features but no more prominently than any of the neighbouring Arab states or the Palestinians. The main theme of
The Iron Wall
is that since 1948 Israel has been too ready to use military force and remarkably reluctant to engage in meaningful diplomacy to resolve its dispute with the Arabs. From 1967 Israel had ample opportunities to trade land for peace in accordance with UN Resolution 242, the cornerstone of nearly all international plans to resolve the conflict. But, with the exception of the peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994, Israel preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Israel did sign the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993 but began to renege on this historic compromise with the other principal party to the conflict following the return to power of the Likud three years later. The blind spot that Israeli leaders have always had in dealing with Palestinian nationalism persists down to the current day.