Lion of Jordan (11 page)

While giving credit where credit was due, Ben-Gurion misrepresented Israel's position in the aftermath of the 1948 war. In the first place, Abdullah was not the only Arab ruler who wanted peace with Israel. Husni Za'im, following his military coup in Syria in March 1949, openly stated his ambition to be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel and called for high-level talks, but Ben-Gurion refused to meet him.
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Ben-Gurion also declined all of Abdullah's requests for a face-to-face meeting. So the claim that there was no one to talk to on the Arab side is simply not true. Moreover, one of the reasons for the failure of the negotiations with both Za'im and Abdullah was Ben-Gurion's insistence that peace be based on the status quo, with only minor territorial adjustments and no return of Palestinian refugees. None the less, the death of Abdullah did mark a turning point in Ben-Gurion's thinking: he finally gave up any hope of a voluntary agreement with the Arabs and reverted to the old and seriously flawed premise that force is the only language that the Arabs understand.

Unlike Ben-Gurion, Mendel Cohen had a great deal of direct contact with King Abdullah and was able to observe him and the politics of the royal court at close quarters. Cohen was a first-rate Jewish carpenter who was employed by the royal court in Amman for ten years; his job was to refurbish and furnish the houses of the amir, his wives, his children and his aides. In 1980 Cohen published in Hebrew a book of memoirs entitled
At the Court of King Abdullah
. The book gives a fascinating account of the king, his two sons and the crisis for the succession following the murder at the mosque. One point that emerges clearly from the book is Abdullah's genuine respect and admiration for the Jews. There is also an account of the deep estrangement between
Abdullah and his eldest son, Talal, the result, in part, of very different attitudes towards the Jews. Talal objected to the employment of Jews at the royal court and supported the Arab League's economic boycott of the State of Israel. On one occasion, Talal expounded to Cohen the reasons for his view that there could be no accommodation between the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East. ‘The Jews', said Talal ‘are rich, shrewd, educated, and they have culture and unlimited capability. The Arabs, by contrast, are poor, simple, and lacking in education. Any contact between Jews and Arabs is therefore bound, in the end, to be for the benefit of the strong and to the detriment of the weak.'
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According to Cohen, Abdullah thought his second son, Naif, was also an unsuitable successor, but when he went abroad he usually appointed Naif as regent. Naif, however, never played an independent role. He was a puppet in the hands of the prime minister and the British representatives. The two brothers struck Cohen as totally different: whereas Talal held firm views and expressed them forcefully, Naif was weak, flabby, uneducated, phlegmatic and susceptible to external influences. Abdullah regarded him as the better son because he did not criticize, challenge or defy him. Whereas Talal was openly hostile to the British, Naif was not. Similarly, Naif had a more positive attitude to the Jews than his elder brother. Naif struck up a friendship with Cohen and made frequent visits to his home and his workshop in Jerusalem. Cohen was not surprised that so many politicians preferred Naif to Talal following the murder of their father. These supporters, according to the well-informed Jewish carpenter, expected Naif to be a mere puppet, while real power remained in the hands of the government.
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In Jordan, the death of the founder provoked a frenetic spate of political intrigues, dynastic rivalries and jockeying for power. A large number of Abdullah's top officials were of Palestinian extraction. Samir Rifa'i, a Palestinian from Safed, resigned as prime minister a few days after the trial and execution of the murderers, to be replaced by Tawfiq Abul Huda, a Palestinian from Acre. The politicians were deeply divided among themselves as to what course they should follow, and this exacerbated the power vacuum at the centre. The real authority behind the scenes, however, was Alec Kirkbride. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the British continued to exercise control over the country even after the grant of formal independence in 1946. Kirkbride and Glubb Pasha together played a critical part in resolving the crisis of
the succession in favour of Prince Talal and ultimately his son Hussein.

At the time of Abdullah's death, Talal, the 41-year-old crown prince, was receiving treatment for mental illness in Switzerland. The Jordanian constitution of 7 December 1946, in its English version, unambiguously designated Talal, the first-born son of the founder of the dynasty, as successor. But an error in the Arabic translation made it possible to argue that if Talal did not succeed to the throne, his half-brother Naif would be next in line of succession. Mohammed Shureiki, the current chief of the royal court, seized on this discrepancy to argue that since Talal would never be mentally fit for the job, Naif should be proclaimed king without further ado.
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There was no shortage of opportunists to follow Shureiki's lead. In fact, the majority of Jordanian politicians initially inclined towards Naif. It is not too cynical to suggest that some of the politicians who flocked to Naif's banner did so in the knowledge that he was feeble and docile, and therefore easy to manipulate; what they were after was a puppet king. In any case, as his half-brother was out of the country, Naif was appointed regent in July and remained in that post until 5 September 1951. The regency council consisted of Ibrahim Hashem, Suleiman Toukan and Abdul Rahman Rusheidat, with the Amira Zain as chairman.

Naif's credentials for kingship were far from compelling. In the first place, his mother was the great-granddaughter of the Ottoman sultan Abdel Aziz, and he himself had had a period of service with the Turkish Army. More importantly, he was poorly educated, ill informed, inept and incompetent. He did not seem to have inherited any of his father's quick intelligence, political capacity or zest for life. Naif was generally considered to be a nonentity. One British observer described him as ‘a very dull and ineffective creature'. Kirkbride too had a very low opinion of him. In 1948 he reported to the Foreign Office that Naif was involved in smuggling, black-marketeering and other forms of corruption; he dismissed him as a ‘bonehead' who did not ‘appear to possess sufficient intelligence to play any political role, either good or bad'.
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In 1951 most Jordanians assumed that Kirkbride favoured Naif on account of Talal's well-advertised anti-British sentiments. Indeed, many believed that there was nothing wrong with Talal and that the wily British fabricated the story about his madness in order to get him out of the way. In fact, in 1951 Kirkbride was not in favour of Naif's becoming king, not only because of his doubts about his capabilities but also
because his accession would have been attributed by many Arabs to a Machiavellian plot on the part of the British government to exclude their enemy Talal.
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The solution worked out between Kirkbride, Abul Huda and some of the elder statesmen was to bring Talal back from Switzerland to Amman and to put him on the throne but in the clear expectation that he would not be able to reign for long. It was also hoped that once Talal became king, there would be no further doubt about Hussein's right to succeed his father.
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In short, Talal's role was to keep the throne warm for his son. Hussein's mother, the Amira Zain, fully supported this plan and worked to the best of her considerable ability to realize it. Zain was a strong-minded and determined woman with a full share of the Hashemite sense of realism. She knew that her husband was mentally unstable and erratic, and that he could not reign for very long, but she hoped to sustain him in power just long enough to enable their son to succeed. In other words, for her too Talal was just a stopgap.

Despite this secret consensus in favour of Talal, his path to the throne was far from smooth. Settling the succession was not a purely Jordanian affair; it was complicated by Arab intrigues and by a particularly clumsy intervention by the Iraqi branch of the Hashemite dynasty. Despair of his two sons had apparently driven Abdullah to begin secret discussions about a Jordanian–Iraqi federation, though no concrete decision had emerged from these talks. Abdullah's sudden demise provided the Iraqis with an opportunity to try to revive this dormant plan. A high-level Iraqi delegation arrived in Amman for the funeral, headed by the regent, Abd al-Ilah, Prime Minister Nuri as-Said and Foreign Minister Saleh Jaber. Nuri launched his bid for union between the two countries under the Iraqi crown even before the king's body had been laid to rest. He also interfered in the internal power struggle in Jordan, backing the claims of Naif against those of Talal. But, having found no senior Jordanian figures willing to take up the idea of a federation, Nuri and his compatriots were forced to drop it.
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When news of the plan to bring back Talal reached Naif and his supporters, they stepped up their efforts to capture the throne. The air in Amman was thick with rumours of plots and conspiracies. In his memoirs Kirkbride mentioned reports circulated from various quarters of plans to murder the young Amir Hussein. Even though these were not taken too seriously, he and his mother were given a guard of Bedouin
troops as a precaution.
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Naif sent soldiers to surround the house of Zain and Hussein, placing them under ‘protective custody'. Kirkbride's wife, who was genuinely fond of Talal and Zain, came to the rescue. She sent Zain a note smuggled inside a bouquet of flowers, urging her to come to the British Embassy. The problem was how to get there. The resourceful Zain grabbed the washer-woman, locked her in the wood shed in the garden and borrowed her clothes. Zain then left the house from the servants' quarter with her face covered. She made her way to the British Embassy, met the Kirkbrides and confirmed them in their view that her husband was the right choice.
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The political crisis was compounded by divisions within the army. The 10th Infantry Regiment, a quasi-Praetorian Guard, was commanded by Habis Majali, who threw in his lot with Naif. The 10th enjoyed such a high degree of autonomy that Glubb could not be sure its officers would obey his orders in the event of a showdown with the pretender to the throne. It also possessed six-pounder anti-tank guns and some armoured cars – a serious deterrent to an assault on the palace. Glubb decided to put the officers to the test by ordering the guns and the armour to be transferred to Mafraq, about forty miles north-east of the capital, ostensibly for training purposes. In the event, Glubb's order was meekly obeyed and the plot, if it was a plot, quickly collapsed. Naif moved with his family to Beirut, Mohammed Shureiki left his post at the royal court and the 10th Infantry Regiment was disbanded.
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The way was now clear to bring Talal back from his nursing home in Geneva. He was flown to Amman aboard an Arab Legion aircraft on 6 September 1951, welcomed at the airport by a guard of honour and a strong detachment of armoured cars, and conveyed in a cavalcade to the parliament building to take the oath of office. He was invested as king before the assembled members of both the upper and lower houses of parliament and the diplomatic corps, of which Kirkbride was the doyen. Three days later Hussein bin Talal was officially named crown prince. Talal's formal accession to the throne marked the end of an era in the history of Jordan. In the words of one observer, it ‘proved to be the “crowning” act in the transition of power from Abdullah to a group of men whose understanding of the twin pillars of the Hashemite monarchy – survival and endurance – was no less than his own'.
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Talal himself survived on the throne barely a year. His kingship was essentially an interregnum between the long reign of his father and the
even longer reign of his eldest son. Talal's most significant achievement was the inauguration, on 1 January 1952, of ‘The Constitution of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan', which replaced the 1946 constitution. The new constitution reflected Talal's pan-Arabism, describing the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an independent sovereign Arab state and the people of Jordan as ‘part of the Arab Nation'. Islam was the religion of the state and Arabic its official language. The system of government was described as ‘parliamentary with a hereditary monarchy'. The nation was said to be the source of all power, but in actuality the palace had real power and parliament only the semblance of it.

In Talal's constitution, legislative power was vested in the king and the National Assembly, which was comprised of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Executive power was vested in the king, to exercise through his ministers or directly through royal decree. The king was the head of state and the supreme commander of the armed forces; he ratified the laws and promulgated them; he declared war, concluded peace and ratified international treaties and agreements; and he issued orders for holding elections to the Chamber of Deputies. The Council of Ministers, consisting of the prime minister and his ministers, was entrusted with administering the affairs of state, internal and external; it was collectively responsible before the Chamber of Deputies for its policies. The chamber could force the resignation of the council by passing a motion of no confidence. But, under the constitution, ultimate power rested in the hands of the king. It was the king who hired and fired prime ministers, ministers and senators, and it was he who had the sole prerogative to adjourn, prorogue or dissolve the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. Talal's constitution was an improvement on his father's, but it was far removed from any modern notion of a constitutional monarchy. In a constitutional monarchy the monarch reigns but does not rule; in the Jordanian system of government the monarch both reigns and rules.