Lion of Jordan (39 page)

In order to keep Jordan ‘on the reservation' and to calm down Israel's friends in Congress, Lyndon Johnson decided to link the sale of arms to Jordan with a particularly attractive arms package to Israel. The package reversed long-standing American policy by including offensive as well as defensive weapons. Robert Komer and Averell Harriman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, were sent to Israel in late February 1965 to sell the proposed linkage to the Israelis. As expected, the Israelis drove a hard bargain. In return for their agreement not to oppose the Jordanian arms deal they were promised Skyhawks and 200–250 advanced tanks with 105-millimetre guns. This was quite a sweetener for swallowing the bitter pill of the arming of Jordan, but there was more to come. The talks concluded with a written protocol in which Harriman proclaimed that the United States had an understanding with King Hussein that the tanks that the Americans would supply would not cross the Jordan River.
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The eventual American arms package to Jordan included 250 M-48 tanks with 90-millimetre guns, help with modernizing the Jordanian Air Force and permission to buy suitable aircraft in Western Europe. In return Hussein had to agree not to move the tanks into the West Bank and also pledge not to seek jet fighters from the Kremlin. Hussein's pledge not to deploy the American-made tanks in the West Bank of his kingdom was both secret and highly significant. It accorded with Hussein's repeated assurances to America that his posture vis-à-vis Israel was purely defensive. But it could not be so easily reconciled with the intentions of the other members of the United Arab Command to build up military strength on all of Israel's frontiers in order to hem it in, which was why it was kept strictly secret and shared only with the Israelis. What the pledge amounted to was a partial agreement to demilitarize the West Bank. The thinner the forces deployed by Jordan on the West Bank, the better it was for Israel. Hussein was left in no doubt on this score after his last meeting with Dr Yaacov Herzog. The written pledge that Hussein gave to the Johnson administration thus represents another milestone in the evolution of his tacit strategic cooperation with Israel. It complemented Hussein's firm assurance to Herzog that he
would not allow any foreign troops to be stationed on his territory. If the other leaders of the United Arab Command had any offensive action against Israel at the back of their minds, Hussein most definitely did not.

In February 1965 Hussein appointed Wasfi Tall as prime minister for the second time. Hussein's back was giving him trouble, and he was beginning to feel the strain of the previous year. Having a strong and competent prime minister left Hussein with some time on his hands, and he used it to take a month-long vacation in Europe and to attend to his health. Tall's main complaint on resuming office was that his original Seven-year Development Plan was now dead, and there had been virtually no economic progress in the intervening two years. For the first few months, he drove himself and his ministers like a man possessed in a frantic effort to get results. But ‘having huffed and puffed to the limit of his lungs, Wasfi at last began to relax, to everyone's relief.'
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Containing the PLO replaced economic development as the dominant issue for the rest of Tall's second term. From the beginning he had been opposed to the creation of the PLO, predicting that it would be too weak to mount a serious challenge to Israel and that it would end up by making peace. He also suspected that Nasser had originally sponsored the PLO not in order to fight for the liberation of Palestine but in order to saddle it with the responsibility for settling the dispute with Israel. In his more paranoid moods, Tall even spoke of Israel and America as being the evil spirits behind the invention of the PLO. He was certainly in no doubt that the new organization and its leader posed a serious threat to the survival of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
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The foreign minister at that time was Dr Hazem Nusseibeh, a Princeton-educated member of a prominent Palestinian family from Jerusalem. Nusseibeh put forward a proposal for giving the West Bank a limited degree of autonomy and changing the name of the country from ‘The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan' to ‘The United Kingdom of Palestine and Jordan'. He wrote a White Paper on relations between Jordan and the nascent Palestinian organization, and included this idea in it. Nusseibeh believed that the alternative name he suggested could remove the dichotomy and allow the Palestinians to feel included. By allowing the Palestinians to choose their own representatives, he wanted to forestall more radical demands. The king was quite agreeable to the idea after listening attentively to the reasoning behind it. Wasfi Tall, on the
other hand, spoke forcefully against it. He feared that it would create friction and lead to divided loyalties among Jordanians and Palestinians. Tall won the argument, as usual. In retrospect, Nusseibeh regretted that his proposal was not adopted because he believed it would have made unnecessary the role that the PLO later assumed, that of being the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Under Nusseibeh's scheme, the PLO would have been able to call itself a representative of the Palestinian people, but by no means the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
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But it was a compromise proposal, and Tall did not like compromises.

Within a relatively short time, the tensions between the PLO and the regime came to the surface. The clash became inevitable following the second Arab summit's endorsement of the proposal to create the Palestine Liberation Army. Hussein realized this, but he did not wish to stage a showdown with Shuqairi for fear of jeopardizing his relationship with Nasser. It was Shuqairi who issued the first challenge on arrival in Amman, on 24 February 1965, for talks with the Jordanian government. To allay Jordanian fears, Shuqairi declared that Jordan and the PLO were ‘two wings of the same bird'. His actual proposals, however, revealed an unbridgeable chasm between them. They included the setting-up of Palestinian regiments; the arming and fortification of West Bank villages along the border with Israel; military training for the Palestinians in Jordan; and the raising of ‘popular resistance' units among the Palestinians there. The purpose of the plan was to transform the Palestinians along the border with Israel into ‘soldiers in the army of return'. In addition, Shuqairi demanded the opening of a PLO office in Amman and the collection of 5 per cent of the salaries of Palestinian officials in Jordan for the PLO. What Shuqairi proposed, in effect, was a division of labour between the PLO and the Jordanian government whereby the latter would operate on the official state level while the former would operate on the popular level. Tall rejected all of these requests. Jordan and the PLO were now on a collision course.
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The breakdown of the negotiations encouraged militant Palestinians to take direct action against Israel in defiance of the authority of the Jordanian government. Al-Fatah, a militant clandestine group formed by Yasser Arafat and others, advocated a guerrilla war to liberate Palestine. Its general strategy was to drag the Arab states into war with Israel by stoking up the fire along the borders. From Jordanian territory
al-Fatah mounted a series of rather ineffectual sabotage operations inside Israel. Israel retaliated against these hit-and-run raids with severe military reprisals against Jordanian targets along the border, which prompted the Jordanian government to step up its efforts to prevent the incursions. Its security services carried out arrests of activists, confiscated small arms and explosives, and rounded up Fatah cells on the West Bank. Al-Fatah acted independently of the PLO, but its operations had the effect of making Shuqairi adopt a more combative posture in relation to Israel, and this in turn widened the rift between him and the Jordanian regime. Various measures were taken by Hussein and Tall to fight Shuqairi's irridenta and to prevent him from consolidating his power base on the West Bank. For example, the National Guard, which was based on the West Bank and provided a focus for a possible Palestinian rebellion against the regime, was disbanded and its units integrated with the regular army.

At the third Arab summit, held in Casablanca from 13 to 17 September 1965, the conflict between Jordan and the PLO came out into the open. The ‘unity of ranks' forged at the first summit in Cairo collapsed in a welter of disputes and mutual recriminations. Shuqairi's demand that the Palestine Liberation Army be allowed to recruit Palestinians from Jordan met with a firm rebuff from Hussein. Lieutenant General Ali Amir, the Egyptian head of the United Arab Command, pressed for permission to send Iraqi and Saudi troops into Jordan before the actual outbreak of hostilities; Hussein made it clear that Jordan would agree to accommodate Arab forces only following the outbreak of hostilities. There was thus no change in the Jordanian position. Collectively, the Arab leaders endorsed gradualism rather than extremism on the Palestine issue. The other major issue was the diversion of the headwaters of the Jordan River. The secretary-general of the Arab League reported that the diversion work had to be stopped because of Israeli aggression. The Syrian representative vowed to keep up the fight against the Zionist enemy, but Nasser injected a characteristic note of caution by warning against resuming the diversion work before the Arabs had improved their land and air defence capabilities. He hinted that if Syria acted unilaterally it would not be able to count on his assistance. In effect he conceded that Israel had won the water war.

From Casablanca, Hussein went to Paris, where he had a secret meeting with Israel's foreign minister, Golda Meir. The transition from
an Arab summit conference at which Israel featured as the greatest enemy to a face-to-face meeting with the representative of this enemy was rather dramatic, but then Hussein's relations with the official enemy were full of paradoxes. At Casablanca the discussions revolved round the conflict with Israel; in Paris the leaders explored avenues of cooperation.
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This was Hussein's first meeting at the ministerial level with the Israeli side. It was arranged by Israel's ambassador to Paris, Walter Eytan, in a private flat in 19 Rue Reynard in the Sixteenth Arondissement.

‘I have wanted to meet you for a long time, and I am pleased about this meeting,' said the king to Mrs Meir when they were introduced. He referred to her meetings with King Abdullah, and expressed his pleasure at being able to follow in the tradition of his beloved grandfather.
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Thirty years later Hussein was hazy about the details but he recalled clearly the atmosphere that formed the backdrop to the talk:

It was a good meeting. It was really a meeting of breaking the ice, of getting to know one another. And we talked about our dreams for our children and grandchildren to live in an era of peace in the region and I think she suggested that maybe a day would come when we could put aside all the arms on both sides and create a monument in Jerusalem that would signify peace between us and where our young people could see what a futile struggle it had been and what a heavy burden on both sides. Essentially, it didn't go beyond that. There wasn't very much indeed that happened, just an agreement to keep in touch whenever possible.
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There was slightly more substance to the meeting than Hussein remembered. Both sides reaffirmed their agreement to abide by the water quotas allocated to them by Eric Johnston in 1955. Jordan departed from the pan-Arab position in agreeing to Israel's diversion of water to the Negev, while Israel approved Jordan's various water conservation projects. Then there was the question of the balance, security and trust. Hussein was expecting to take delivery of the 250 M48 tanks, and he knew that a bad report on his behaviour from Israel could cause delays and complications. Nor was he oblivious to the power of Israel's friends on Capitol Hill. He was therefore anxious to reassure Meir that Israel had nothing to worry about, that no foreign troops would be allowed on Jordan's soil, and that he would honour his commitment not to deploy the new American tanks on the West Bank. Another topic that came up in the talk concerned keeping the border between their two
countries quiet. Meir knew that at the Casablanca summit Hussein had fought against Shuqairi's proposal to extend his sphere of operations in Jordan, but she was not content with declarations. She urged the king to take more energetic steps against the groups who were fomenting trouble along the border and especially against the Fatah men, who were crossing into Israel from Syria via Jordan.
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From Meir's vantage point too this was a good talk both because of the friendly atmosphere in which it was conducted and because of the specific agreements that were reached. The meeting was only one link in a chain of contacts and communications, but it contributed to the de facto peace that prevailed between Israel and Jordan in the mid 1960s, despite the activities of irregular Palestinian forces operating from Jordan's territory and a limited number of retaliatory raids by Israel.
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Hussein placed the meeting in the context of a long-term effort to find a peaceful solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict and the proximity of the parties who lived cheek-by-jowl: ‘with the passage of years one realized we were not talking about a country hundreds of miles away. We were talking about a people and a country with a destiny, both of us. We were in a very small region and we had to figure out how we could resolve our problems. If we looked at water, it was a problem that both of us suffered from. If we looked at even a flu epidemic, it affected both of us. Every aspect of life was interrelated and interlinked in some way or another. And to simply ignore that was something I could not understand. Maybe others could, others who were distant, who were not equally aware or involved. By now there were Palestinians and Jordanians, and their rights, their future was at stake. One had to do something; one had to explore what was possible and what was not.'
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