Lion of Jordan (40 page)

On 13 November 1966 the IDF launched a devastating attack on the village of Samu', south of Hebron on the West Bank, about four miles from the border with Israel. It was staged in broad daylight by a large force with infantry, an armoured brigade, heavy artillery, mortars, engineers and two Mirage squadrons. A Jordanian Army unit was rushed to the scene, but it careered into an ambush and suffered heavy casualties. As a result, 15 Jordanian soldiers and 5 civilians died, 36 soldiers and 4 civilians were wounded, and 93 houses were destroyed, including the police station, the local school, a medical clinic and a mosque. One Jordanian Hunter aircraft was shot down in an air battle and its pilot was killed. The attack was a reprisal for a landmine that had exploded the previous day on the Israeli side of the border, killing three soldiers.

Israel, as was its wont, exacted an overwhelming revenge, but this time it was exacted from the wrong Arab party. Israel's leaders knew full well that Hussein was doing everything in his power to prevent Fatah from staging sabotage operations from his territory because they heard it directly from him and from his representatives on the Mixed Armistice Commission. The Israelis knew equally well that the militant Syrian regime that had come to power in February was training Fatah saboteurs and supporting Fatah operations against Israel from Jordan. For some time Israel's leaders had been pointing an accusing finger at Syria and threatening dire consequences if these attacks did not cease. So the attack on the Jordanian civilians came as a complete surprise both at home and abroad. The reason given by the IDF spokesman was that the saboteurs who had planted the mines on the Israeli side of the border had come from the Hebron area, but no satisfactory explanation was ever given for the scale or ferocity of the attack. This was no routine reprisal raid but the biggest operation of the IDF since the Suez War.

Inside Jordan, the effects of the raid were highly destabilizing, opening old wounds, exposing dramatically the country's military weakness and fragility, and touching off large-scale unrest and violent protest against the regime. Hussein felt personally betrayed by the Israelis because their action contradicted their previously expressed commitment to the safety and stability of Jordan. Furthermore, the raid occurred on his thirty-first birthday and the pilot who was killed was one of his friends. Speaking about this incident thirty years later, Hussein chose to stress the unbalanced and unreasonable nature of the Israeli action:

It really created a devastating effect in Jordan itself, because the action, if it had been an action from Jordan, was not something that Jordan had condoned or sponsored or supported in any way or form. And to my way of thinking at that time, what I couldn't figure out was why react in this way, if a small irrigation ditch or pipe was blown up (assuming it was, which I didn't necessarily know for sure)? Was there any balance between the two? Why did the Israelis attack instead of trying to figure out a way of dealing with the threats in a different way, in a joint way? So it was a shock and it was not a very pleasant birthday present.
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At the time Hussein took a much graver view of the raid on Samu', seeing it as a signal of a change in Israel's attitude towards his regime and possibly even as part of a larger design to provoke a war that would enable the IDF to capture the West Bank. No evidence, however, has come to light to support this suspicion, at least not on the part of the Labour-led government. Itzhak Rabin, the IDF chief of staff at that time, claimed that some of the more serious consequences of the raid were unintended. He had repeatedly emphasized that whereas in Syria the problem was the regime, in Jordan the problem was not the regime but the civilians who assisted Israel's Palestinian enemies. The plan of action he had proposed to the cabinet was not intended to inflict casualties on the Jordanian Army but to serve as a warning to the civilian population not to cooperate with the Palestinian saboteurs. The damage greatly exceeded the estimate he had given the cabinet and he later admitted that Levi Eshkol had good reason to be displeased with him. ‘We had neither political nor military reasons', said Rabin ‘to arrive at a confrontation with Jordan or to humiliate Hussein.'
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Eshkol was in fact furious with Rabin for the bloodshed and destruction.
He felt that the IDF top brass had given the cabinet bad advice and that the target should have been Syria, not Jordan. The result, in Eshkol's earthy language, was that Israel hit the wife instead of the wicked mother-in-law. There was also an issue of principle. David Ben-Gurion, as prime minister and minister of defence, rarely called on the IDF to account for its actions. Eshkol also combined the premiership with the defence portfolio but he was determined to assert civilian control over the army. Miriam Eshkol, the prime minister's wife, kept a diary. She recalled her husband's bitterness towards the IDF leaders at that time. After the Samu' raid, her husband said to her, ‘Write down in your diary that, unlike my predecessor, I am not the representative of the army in the government!'
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The main reason for Eshkol's anger over the Samu' raid, however, was that it ran counter to his policy of supporting Hussein and helping him in his struggle against the Palestinian guerrilla organizations.

Hussein perceived the attack on Samu' as an act of war rather than as a routine retaliatory raid. He interpreted it as an indication that the Israelis were no longer committed to the survival of his regime and were casting their beady eye on the West Bank of his kingdom. For him Samu' was not an isolated incident but part of a wider Israeli design to escalate the border clashes into a full-scale, expansionist war. Ze'ev Bar-Lavie, who served on the Jordanian desk in Israeli Military Intelligence and used to celebrate the king's birthday, gave the following assessment of the consequences of the operation: ‘The Samu' affair disturbed Hussein deeply. He saw in it an Israeli intention to prepare the ground for the conquest of the West Bank and an aggressive patrol directed at out-flanking the Jordanian defence line-up from the south. All the attempts by the Western powers to calm him down were in vain. Hussein refused to relax and remained fixed in his fear that the Jews would exact from Jordan the price for the Syrian attacks and for the operations of the saboteurs. Why should the Jews content themselves with the destruction of a few inferior Syrian brigades? No, they, the Jews, would go for something more concrete like the conquest of the West Bank, the moment they find an excuse.'
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Wasfi Tall was equally convinced that Israel was looking for an excuse to capture the West Bank. He believed that Israel wanted to provoke Jordanian retaliation, which would provide the opportunity to go to war.
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In short, both Tall and Hussein suspected that Israel was setting a trap for Jordan, and they took care
not to fall into it. Instead of retaliating, they referred the matter to the UN security council.

The attack on Samu' and Hussein's failure to respond with force stirred greater Palestinian antipathy towards him and played into the hands of his enemies. Samu' thus widened the existing rift between the regime and its Palestinian subjects. The regime was accused at home and in the Arab world of neglecting the defences of the country and of failing to protect the inhabitants of Samu' against the enemy. The PLO, Syria and Egypt fanned the flames of popular hatred against the regime by launching a fierce propaganda offensive, much of it directed against the king personally. All the pent-up frustrations suddenly came to the surface and fuelled angry and often violent protest. Mass demonstrations erupted in the refugee camps and in the cities of the West Bank. Serious riots convulsed Hebron, Jericho, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem and Qalqilyah. Demonstrators marched through the streets carrying nationalist placards, shouting pro-Nasser slogans and calling on Hussein to follow the path of Nuri as-Said – the Iraqi premier who was killed by the Baghdad mob in 1958. The main targets of the demonstrators were government offices and police vehicles. The army was called in and instructed to use harsh measures to suppress the riots: curfews, mass arrests, tear gas and firing live ammunition into the crowd. Even with these aggressive methods, it took the army the best part of two weeks to restore order. One new feature of this crisis was the active involvement of West Bank leaders and mayors in the anti-Hashemite protests. Some of these notables styled themselves as the ‘National Leadership'; they demanded the convocation of ‘a people's convention to discuss the core issues regarding the Homeland'; and they formulated a ‘national manifesto' that called for the presence of the Arab armies on Jordan's soil and supported the PLO as the only representative of the Palestinian people's will. The manifesto stopped short of asserting a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence on the West Bank, but it posed a challenge that the Hashemite regime could not afford to ignore.
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By provoking such a fierce domestic backlash, the Samu' raid constituted a turning point in the relations between the Hashemite monarchy and the Palestinians of the West Bank, and, in the words of Israeli expert Moshe Shemesh, a turning point ‘in Jordan's attitude toward Israel, from a state of guarded coexistence to one of disappointment and pessimism'.
‘At the heart of Jordan's military and civilian estimate,' Shemesh has written,

stood the unequivocal conclusion that Israel's main design was conquest of the West Bank, and that Israel was striving to drag all of the Arab countries into a general war, in the course of which it would make a grab for the West Bank. According to this appraisal, in light of Jordan's military weakness and the Arab world's dithering, Israel believed it would have little trouble in seizing the West Bank. After Samu', these apprehensions so obsessed the Jordanians that they should be regarded as the deciding factor in King Hussein's decision to participate in the Six-Day War. He was convinced that Israel would occupy the West Bank whether Jordan joined the fray or not.
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For Israel's leaders the immediate worry after Samu' was that Hussein's regime would collapse and that forces from the neighbouring Arab states would move into Jordan. Dr Yaacov Herzog was rushed to London to undo at least some of the damage that the Samu' raid had inflicted on bilateral relations with Jordan. A meeting with Hussein was out of the question, so Herzog drafted a letter for Dr Emanuel Herbert to send to his friend the king. Although Dr Herbert was extremely angry with his Israeli friends, he was prevailed upon to send the letter in order to save what Herzog described as a central project in Israel's foreign policy. The letter expressed the deepest regret for the loss of life and assured the recipient on the basis of ‘the most reliable information from the highest authority' that there was no change whatsoever in basic policy. The letter referred to the action as ‘a blunder of the gravest character', but it also mentioned the provocation to which Israel was subjected by the terrorist gangs and ended with a plea for both sides to make an effort to alleviate the tension, as they had done in the past.
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Dr Herbert received no reply to this letter, and he reported that the friends of the king, who came to see him after the raid, spoke about Israel in a very different and extremely hostile manner.
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In mid December 1966 a series of discussions took place in Jerusalem on policy towards Jordan with representatives from the Foreign Ministry, Military Intelligence and the Mossad. There was a general consensus that the Hashemite regime had demonstrated its determination to survive during the previous eighteen years but also that it had virtually no chance of survival in the long term. The question was whether the survival of Hussein's regime was vital for the State of Israel. Here there
were two positions. Those who embraced the first said that Hussein was a problem because the existence of the West Bank in its present form was a catastrophe for Israel and he was an obstacle to change. The second position was the polar opposite of the first. Its adherents believed in the status quo; they wanted Hussein to consolidate it; and they looked forward to coexistence with him. The IDF position was described as being halfway between the two approaches. It was reconciled to the existing situation, but it would be glad of an opportunity to establish a new and more convenient status quo.
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With such opposing views and tendencies within the political–military establishment, it is not surprising that Hussein was getting mixed messages from the Israeli side.

Mistrust of Israel made Hussein turn to America for reassurance. The Johnson administration sharply rebuked Israel for its raid on Samu' and voted in the Security Council for a resolution condemning the attack. Hussein had strong backing from Findley Burns, Jr, the American ambassador to Amman, and from Jack O'Connell, the CIA station chief in Amman from 1967 to 1971. Burns suspected that Egypt, Syria and Israel were not too worried about the consequences of a short Arab–Israeli war that might end with the collapse of Jordan. He did not imply that the Israeli attack on Samu' was part of a dark plot to set in train an Arab–Israeli war or cause the liquidation of the Hashemites. Nor did he discount the advantages for Jordan's neighbours in retaining the country's present regime. He merely suggested that there could none the less be strong policy considerations in all three countries working against their instincts for caution. For these countries the continuation of a moderate Jordan was ‘the stopper that keeps the dirty water from running out of the bathtub'. For Burns, by contrast, the status quo in Jordan was vital for the maintenance of balance and stability in the Middle East.
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Jack O'Connell had a closer relationship with King Hussein than any other American official before or after, one that was based on mutual respect and absolute trust. O'Connell was a well-educated man. As a Fulbright Scholar he did an MA in Islamic Law in the University of the Punjab, after which he returned to Georgetown University to do a Ph.D. in international law. During the 1958 crisis he was sent to reinforce the CIA team in Jordan and that was when he and the king bonded. O'Connell was a man of complete integrity and Hussein always found him to be entirely reliable. Hussein reciprocated O'Connell's honesty by
being honest with him in turn. Hussein could be vague and give indirect answers, but he did not tell outright lies. As a result of this honesty, the working relationship between the two men was both harmonious and effective. O'Connell gave tremendous assistance to the king and his kingdom. The relationship continued after O'Connell retired from the CIA in 1971 and joined a law firm in Washington. He became the family lawyer of the Hashemites and an adviser and advocate of the Jordanian government.
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