Lion of Jordan (52 page)

Hussein felt that the Israelis were going round and round in circles, while his objective was a permanent, durable and just peace. Everything, he said, hinged on acceptance of the UN resolution. The one new idea that he introduced into the discussion was the possibility of yielding territory on the West Bank in return for Jordanian control over the Gaza Strip and access to the sea. This, he said, had the merit of placing all the Palestinians under one umbrella. The Israeli representatives had no authority to take his suggestion any further. They admitted frankly that a common border between Jordan and Egypt would not be in their interests. They also knew that the cabinet intended to annex the Gaza Strip and that it had a secret plan to ‘encourage' the emigration of the Palestinian refugees from this crowded area.
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Hussein's idea did not fit in with these expansionist plans.

Rifa'i was outspoken and even vehement in his rebuttal of the Israeli arguments. The Israeli government, he said, was starting with the wrong premise. If it was interested in property and territory, it could not be interested in peace as far as Jordan was concerned. As the king had explained, no agreement could be reached if it entailed the annexation of Jordanian territory. With the terms on offer, it was impossible for the king to make peace, simply impossible. The only basis for peace was adjustment of the existing armistice lines on a reciprocal basis. Jordan had accepted Resolution 242 and Israel's right to live in peace and security within recognized boundaries. But in return, Israel had to accept unconditionally the principle of withdrawal. The Israelis thought that security would breed peace. Rifa'i assured them that it was the other way round, that peace would breed security. Allon retorted that for him security came first. Nothing was achieved at this meeting except for a decision to hold another meeting in Europe the following month.
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It is difficult to judge whether king Hussein was more disappointed with Israel or with America. He certainly felt that America owed it to itself, to its Arab friends and to the Israeli moderates to use its influence to bring about a peaceful settlement. America's failure to play an active
role in Middle Eastern peacemaking, he pointed out, only encouraged the extremists in Israel.
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Hussein missed no opportunity to impress these points upon any American official who visited his country. To Governor William Scranton, Nixon's special envoy to the Middle East, he handed a paper in December 1968 that summarized his conclusions: that Jordanian contacts with Israel, both direct and indirect, had failed to produce progress towards a peaceful settlement. For whatever reasons, Israel was not truly serious about negotiating a settlement with Jordan; it was determined to annex significant portions of the West Bank to improve its security; and it was also unable or unwilling to leave East Jerusalem. Neither he nor any other Arab leader could accept the terms proposed by Israel. There was nothing more he could do to achieve a settlement. Only massive outside pressure might induce Israel to agree to reasonable terms that the Arabs could accept. And the only country capable of exerting that degree of pressure was the United States.
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Hussein realized, however, that such a dramatic change in the American approach was unlikely in the dying days of the Johnson administration. He could only hope that the incoming Republican administration headed by Richard Nixon would be more even-handed between Israel and the Arabs, and play a more assertive role in Middle Eastern peacemaking.

Ambassador Harrison Symmes's reading of the situation was that the Jordanians, with strong support from Egypt and the other Arabs, would put a challenge to the new administration and that this, coupled with the political impasse, called for a policy review. The Israeli government's inability to develop a consensus not only made it unlikely that Jarring could succeed but was also a major stumbling block in the path of a breakthrough in the purely Jordanian–Israeli context. More and more, Israeli spokesmen were defining security in terms of the acquisition of territory. The Israelis ‘seemed unable to grasp that the Allon Plan and its variations are not only unacceptable to Jordan but that it also represents the kind of arrangement that would perpetuate hostility'. What Symmes called the Israeli ‘clarification process' with Jordan had up to that point been ‘
singularly unrealistic, unspecific, and unproductive'.
Symmes had been baffled all along by what the Israelis were telling the Americans. But Hussein's comments to Governor Scranton forced him to conclude that, in addition to pulling the wool over their eyes, the Israelis had definitely moved too slowly and failed to come to grips with reality as far as Jordan was concerned. Symmes reminded his superiors
that the explicit assurances they had given Hussein – to support the return of the West Bank with minor border rectifications and a meaningful role in the future of Jerusalem – could not be squared with the Israeli demands to surrender substantial parts of his kingdom, including East Jerusalem. Hussein saw these assurances as his final fallback position. Symmes recommended that they continue to make this clear to the Israelis. Finally, Symmes pointed out that in stressing that ‘the parties to the conflict must be the parties to the peace', America was in danger of forgetting that it was itself a very interested party, with high stakes of its own. The past year had demonstrated that if America left peacemaking to the Israelis and the Arabs, there would be no forward movement.
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Whether the new administration would rise to the challenge was yet to be seen. In the meantime, Hussein could not afford to break off the contact with the Israelis. He knew that they were making much of their meetings with him and believed that their motive was to give the Western powers the misleading impression that the two sides were actually getting somewhere. He also felt that Israel's obduracy stood in the way of progress. Nevertheless, he did not threaten to sever the contact. Whenever the Israelis asked for a meeting, he readily agreed. Dates and detailed arrangements for meetings were made by Herzog and Rifa'i with the help of Dr Herbert. On 19 December the two met in London to set up a high-level meeting. Rifa'i wanted to know whether the prime minister and the defence minister would take part, but he received no clear answer. He also said that His Majesty saw no point in holding a meeting unless the Israelis had something new to say. Herzog replied that he was not authorized to say what Eban and Allon would propose, but that both attached importance to continuing the contact.
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Levi Eshkol was still not prepared to meet Hussein face to face. His refusal is noteworthy against the often repeated official claim that Israel's leaders were indefatigable in their search for peace but there was no one to talk to on the other side. This time Eshkol asked Defence Minister Moshe Dayan to meet with Hussein. Dayan favoured direct talks with the West Bank leaders without the involvement of the Jordanian monarch. Were he to meet Hussein, he warned, it would take him ten minutes to state his views and their side would be the loser, because the game of playing for time would be over.
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Dayan, unsuited to these tactics, stayed at home so the game could go on.

Herzog and Rifa'i met again at the home of Dr Herbert on 26 January 1969. Herzog said that the prime minister would be happy to go anywhere at any time for a meeting with Hussein, but that he could not take part in political talks so long as there was no cabinet decision, and that there could not be such a decision until the two sides were close enough to require it. This was a convoluted way of saying that Eshkol did not want to meet Hussein. Rifa'i replied that he understood the prime minister's position and that the king would not complain. In his report to Jerusalem about the meeting, the Israeli ambassador to London wrote, ‘The infant most definitely does not want to sever the contact with us.'
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The following day Herzog called Dr Herbert and expressed a wish to meet Hussein, who was staying in London. By coincidence, Dr Herbert had a similar request from Hussein and a meeting was arranged for the evening of the 28th. Herzog opened the meeting by saying that Eshkol greatly appreciated the king's courage and his dedication to peace. He repeated the official line: Eshkol could not participate personally in political discussions so long as there was no cabinet decision, but in the meantime it was hoped that the clarification process would continue with his two ministers. Herzog implied that direct contact was also in Hussein's interests because the special relationship that had developed between them had led Israel to exercise restraint in responding to fedayeen provocations from Jordanian territory. Hussein nodded to indicate he understood. A long debate ensued between the two advisers about Nasser's latest speech, in which he seemed to justify the continuation of Fatah operations against Israel. Rifa'i argued that the Israelis misunderstood Nasser's meaning because of their complex about him, while Herzog argued that Nasser's aggression and subversion were nothing new and that in the past they had not been confined to Israel. At this point Hussein turned to Rifa'i and said, ‘Let us face facts. The man sometimes says crazy things and does crazy things.' Hussein spoke at length about his vision of peace and of the need to convince his people and the people of the region that its terms were just. He described the Middle East as a mess but was encouraged by the signs that the Great Powers wanted to help resolve their problems. Herzog warned him against pinning his hopes on an externally imposed solution. The atmosphere remained friendly throughout the meeting.
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The next meeting took place on Hussein's boat in the Bay of Aqaba,
on the evening of 20 February. After eating and drinking the serious conversation began. They dealt first with the security situation, and Allon did most of the talking. He warned Hussein against Fatah attacks on Israeli targets from his side of the border. Hussein replied that he was doing all he could and that he had divided up the brigade stationed in the border area into smaller units to achieve better control. Allon said that if Hussein could not control Fatah activities, Israel would be prepared to help him by sending its own forces into his territory, meaning the East Bank. The implication that the West Bank was no longer his territory could not have been lost on Hussein. With a bitter smile he thanked Allon for the offer but turned it down.

Eban talked at inordinate length about all the issues involved in holding talks under the auspices of Jarring. His main point was that the proposals they had made at the previous meetings were only a starting point for negotiations and that the Jordanians were free to criticize them and to modify them. This went down well with the Jordanians, and Hussein said that for the first time he was greatly encouraged. Herzog steered the conversation towards Nasser, and Allon asked Hussein to try to arrange a meeting for him with Nasser. Herzog argued that progress on the Egyptian front would facilitate progress on the Jordanian front. On this occasion Hussein spoke with some hesitation about Nasser, but he did say that he had sent Bahjat Talhouni to ask Nasser whether he still supported a settlement based on the Security Council resolution, and that Nasser had sent him a letter with a positive reply. Nasser also agreed to Hussein's continuing his contacts with the Israelis.

Why was Hussein, in his own words, greatly encouraged by this meeting, although the Israeli officials had brought nothing new to the table? One possible explanation is that Eban presented the Allon Plan in a much more flexible manner than before, and Allon himself did not repeat his usual mantra that security came before peace. At any rate, the possibility of breaking off contact was never mentioned. Nor did the Jordanians press for a meeting with Eshkol, who died six days later after a long illness.

Allon and Eban were not as strict as Herzog in protecting the secrecy of the dialogue that took place across the battle lines. At the beginning of their conversation Eban had looked for a pen to make notes, and when he could not find one, Hussein handed him his own gold pen with the Hashemite crown at the top. The pen remained on the table, and at
the end of the meeting Hussein gave it to Eban as a present. Later Eban waved the pen with the royal crown under the noses of Israeli newspaper editors.
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Allon committed a more serious indiscretion by telling a Vienna-based US correspondent that, public denials notwithstanding, he and Eban had had a meeting with Hussein that had come to naught, with Hussein declaring that he would not go down in history as the first Arab ruler to surrender Jerusalem to Israel.
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The new American secretary of state, William Rogers, found Allon's indiscretion extremely disturbing. ‘Nothing', he wrote to the ambassador in Tel Aviv, ‘could be better designed to undermine Hussein's support for a peaceful settlement and, indeed, to jeopardize his regime if not his life than to give credence to reports that he has met with Israelis.'
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The international context for Jordanian diplomacy changed in two respects in the early months of 1969. In Washington the Nixon administration replaced the Johnson administration. The key foreign policymaker alongside Nixon was his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, rather than Secretary of State William Rogers. Nixon and Kissinger were cold-war warriors who looked at the Middle East through the prism of America's global contest with the Soviet Union. For them Jordan was not a player in the cold war, whereas Egypt was, and therefore concerned them more. Hussein established good personal relations with members of the new administration, but he could not persuade them to lean more heavily on Israel for the sake of a settlement.

In Israel, Golda Meir replaced Eshkol as Labour Party leader and prime minister. Meir was a much more rigid and inflexible person than her predecessor. She had a black-and-white view of the world in which the Arabs featured as an untrustworthy, sinister and implacable adversary. In anything that touched Israel's security she was completely intransigent. As she noted in her autobiography, ‘intransigent' was to become her middle name.
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But in their thinking about the future of the West Bank she and Eshkol were not all that far apart. Both wanted to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, and both were therefore opposed to the annexation of the West Bank. Both came round to the view that the most promising solution to the Palestinian problem lay in a territorial compromise with Jordan that would keep the bulk of the Palestinian population outside Israel's borders. The difference was largely one of presentation: Eshkol put the emphasis on what Israel was prepared to concede for the sake of a settlement with the Arabs, whereas
Meir put the emphasis on Israel's security-related conditions.
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Apart from her preference for the Jordanian over the Palestinian option, Meir had a personal liking for Hussein that went back to their meeting in Paris in 1965 when she served as foreign minister. As far as Israel's terms for a settlement were concerned, however, there was no improvement whatsoever as a result of the change at the top.