Lion of Jordan (58 page)

The pro-Hussein lobby included Meir, Allon, Eban and Rabin. The second group included right-wing politicians, notably Ezer Weizmann and right-wing generals such as Rehavam Ze'evi and Ariel Sharon. Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, who were also ministers in the Labour-led government, told the media that they would not shed tears if the Palestinians replaced Hussein. Some of the participants in the cabinet debate were worried that, if Israel intervened to save Hussein at America's behest, it would look like a gun for hire. Yaacov Herzog kept all the little notes he received during that debate. Shimon Peres referred to Hussein as ‘the amateur king' and gave his opinion that ‘it is not possible to save him but it is possible to stain our reputation.' Gideon Rafael of the Foreign Ministry warned against getting caught up in all the excitement generated by ‘Dr Strangelove Kissinger and Rabin'.

The cabinet's reply to the Americans, on 21 September, said that air operations alone were considered inadequate to the situation unfolding in Jordan and that ground troops would be necessary; the air force alone could not remove 300 tanks from the battlefield. In view of the risk of war involved, the cabinet sought reassurance and submitted a list of eight questions about American policy in the event of escalation. Could the king make his approach to Israel directly and make arrangements to coordinate their moves? What guarantees could America give Israel against Soviet military intervention? It took the State Department the best part of the day to prepare written answers to these and the other questions. Israel's caution and insatiable quest for reassurance took Kissinger by surprise. His advice to Rabin was: ‘Don't try to extract too many conditions before moving. Conditions don't mean much any more. If you lick the Syrians that will count.'
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Acting on this advice, the Israelis prepared for an air strike, laid plans for a pincer movement against the
Syrian forces in Jordan from north and east, and ostentatiously mobilized their ground forces along the borders with Syria and Jordan. The IDF General Staff also prepared a contingency plan in case Jordan disintegrated and there was a general land-grab involving its Syrian, Iraqi and Saudi neighbours. The military commanders thought that, with or without America's permission, the IDF should move swiftly to secure the Gilead Heights, Kerak and Aqaba.
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Allon, the acting prime minister, was the most fervent proponent of prompt action to save Hussein. Through the American ambassador in Tel Aviv, Allon sent a friendly message to the king at 9.13 p.m.: ‘Following developments with deep sympathy and goodwill. In view clarify situation suggest immediate meeting with you or with your authorized competent representative. Place time your convenience.'
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Through this message Allon sought to reassure his neighbour not only that Israel would not take advantage of his domestic difficulties but that it was ready to help him against any and all of his Arab enemies.
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An hour later came the reply: ‘Extremely grateful to old friend for concern. Situation very grave up north. Trying to reorganize and given a chance we may be able to contain threat. However, serious threat of a breakthrough does exist. And this will require immediate action. I would have loved to have this chance to meet, but physically impossible at this time. Will arrange meeting as soon as possible. Meantime please keep in touch through this channel. Best regards and wishes.'
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This extraordinary message reveals, first, Hussein's relief at re-establishing the direct ‘across the river' contact and, second, that he wanted to keep all his options open.

Part of the problem was that Hussein kept changing his mind during the day about the kind of help his army needed. In the morning he asked for an immediate air strike to check the advance of the Syrian armour. His second message was more desperate and gave notice that he might soon be requesting support from ground forces as well. But in the evening he qualified his request by saying that Israeli ground operations would be fine as long as they operated only in Syria and did not enter Jordan. Two considerations probably prompted Hussein to rule out Israeli ground operations in Jordan: they would have damaged his already tarnished reputation in the Arab world, and there was no guarantee that the Israeli troops would leave the country when they were no longer needed. The Iraqi precedent was not at all encouraging in this
respect. Nevertheless, Hussein was evidently very happy to receive the Israeli offer of help.

Tuesday, 22 September, saw the turn of the tide. Emboldened by American and Israeli backing, Hussein ordered his small air force to move against the Syrian forces in the north of the country. Both the air force and the army went into action, and, in a well-coordinated air-ground offensive, inflicted heavy losses on the Syrians. Early signs could be detected that the Syrian forces were preparing to withdraw from Irbid and from the area around it. The great worry of the Jordanian military commanders was that Syria would deploy its air force, which was substantially larger than theirs. Hussein, however, believed all along that the Syrians would not use their air force. He interpreted the PLA markings on the tanks as an attempt to dissociate Syria from the invasion, and considered Hafiz al-Asad, the former minister of defence and commander of the air force, to be a rational and pragmatic man who would not risk an all-out war and super-power involvement.
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It later transpired that Asad had held back the air force for reasons connected with his internal power struggle with Salih Jadid, the deputy secretary-general of the Ba'th Party, who had ordered the invasion. By refusing to commit the air force to the battle, Asad doomed the venture to failure. Shortly after the débâcle in Jordan, Asad ousted Jadid and seized power in Damascus.

Meanwhile, success on the battlefield led Hussein once again to reassess his earlier request for Israeli support against Syria. In the course of the afternoon the Americans received two messages, one from Jordan, the other from Israel. Hussein was becoming ambivalent about Israeli air strikes and negative about Israeli ground support. The Israelis were prepared to undertake ground operations but only in Jordan, not in Syria.
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Israel's help was evidently no longer required either in the air or on the ground; nonetheless, the Israeli Air Force played a part in deterring the Syrians from further escalation of the conflict with Jordan. Phantom jets of the IAF flew low over the Syrian units and created sonic booms to suggest that worse might come if they did not turn round and go back where they came from.
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If Israeli support was one factor that helped the Jordanians to gain the upper hand in the conflict with the Syrians, Iraqi neutrality was another. Iraq had two divisions, with about 17,000 troops and 200 tanks, stationed in Jordan. When the fighting erupted the government in
Baghdad pledged to use these forces to protect the Palestinian resistance against the royalist army. In an ominous move the Iraqis surrounded the Jordanian Air Force base in Mafraq. Syria's invasion raised the fear that the Iraqis and the Syrians had joined up to help the resistance overthrow the regime. Both countries had extremist Ba'th regimes, but they were bitter enemies with old scores to settle and they suspected each other of plotting to gain control over Jordan. There were also bitter rivalries inside the Iraqi Ba'th Party that made the behaviour of the Iraqi Army in Jordan all the more unpredictable. The one encouraging factor was that the Iraqi Ba'thists hated the Syrian Ba'thists even more than they hated Hussein. The Iraqi leadership's main concern was to stop Jordan from falling into the hands of the Syrians, possibly because they wanted Jordan for themselves. In any case, the worst-case scenario did not materialize: there was no coordinated PLO-Syrian-Iraqi effort to overthrow the regime in Amman; each party had its own objectives.
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Upon the outbreak of the civil war, General Hardan al-Takriti, the Iraqi vice-president, took personal charge of the forces in Jordan. Takriti turned out to be much better disposed towards Jordan than his colleagues.
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Fatah's intelligence chief later claimed that he listened to a taped telephone conversation in which Takriti assured Hussein that his country would not intervene militarily. Takriti was as good as his word. The Iraqis allowed large Jordanian Army units to pass through their lines to attack guerrilla strongholds in and around Zarqa on 17–18 September.
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When the Syrians invaded, the Iraqis remained inactive. When the Syrians withdrew, the guerrillas were left to fend for themselves. Takriti was dismissed for his role in these events and assassinated in Kuwait a year later.
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With the Iraqis remaining on the sidelines, the Jordanians launched continuous attacks on the Syrians. At nightfall, 22 September, the Syrians began to withdraw across the border, having lost some 120 tanks and armoured personnel carriers and suffered around 600 casualties. The withdrawal of the Syrians enabled the Jordanian Army to mount an all-out offensive against the fedayeen and to drive them out of the cities and their major strongholds. The Palestinians sustained further heavy losses, and some of their leaders were captured, but there were around 300 defections from the Jordanian Army, including an infantry brigade commander. Political pressures from the Arab world forced Hussein to call a halt to the fighting. Accusations that a massacre
of the Palestinians was taking place in Jordan circulated in the Arab media. Nasser convened an emergency summit in Cairo at which Jordan was represented by Prime Minister Muhammad Daoud. But soon after his arrival there Daoud – under heavy pressure from Colonel Muamar Gaddafy, who posed as the champion of the Palestinians – resigned his post and went to live in Libya. In the palace there were conflicting opinions as to whether the king should leave the country in the middle of the crisis to attend the Cairo summit in person. A telephone call from Nasser tipped the balance in favour of going. It took some courage on the part of Hussein to agree to face his accusers directly at a time when Arab sympathy was turning rapidly away from him.

Hussein flew to Cairo on 26 September to a hostile reception from the Arab heads of state and a chilly meeting with Arafat. But the next day an agreement was signed by Hussein and Arafat in the presence of Nasser, who had served as its broker. This was to be the Egyptian leader's last service to the cause of Arab unity: he died of a heart attack the following day. After ten days of fighting the guns fell silent, and the two leaders shook hands over ‘a sea of blood'. The Cairo Agreement provided for an immediate ceasefire all over Jordan, the withdrawal of the Jordanian Army and the Palestinian resistance from all cities before sunset the same day, the release of all prisoners and the formation of an Arab commission to supervise the implementation of the agreement. In victory Hussein displayed magnanimity. He invited Ahmad Toukan, a loyalist Palestinian, to form a government. In his letter of appointment Hussein urged the new prime minister to ‘bandage the wounds' and combat ‘regionalism' and Palestinian–Jordanian animosity.
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After his victory, Hussein took the initiative and arranged to meet with his old friend Yigal Allon. On 3 October, with Rifa'i and Herzog in attendance, the King of Jordan and the deputy prime minister of Israel carried on an uninterrupted conversation for ninety minutes in an air-conditioned car parked in the Araba Desert north of Eilat.
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The king opened the conversation by expressing his heartfelt thanks for the willingness that Israel had shown to help him in the recent crisis. He then proceeded to shed some new light on what had happened in Jordan. There was a serious plan for a revolution to coincide with the general strike, and he had pre-empted it by only three days. In the Amman area alone he discovered 360 subterranean bases, modelled on those of the Vietcong. He held about 20,000 detainees – among them
some Chinese ‘advisers' – and planned to screen the rest thoroughly before releasing them. In the Fatah bases a lot of documents were captured that would be very valuable in tracking down the terrorists. The king thought he had succeeded in breaking the backbone of the terror organizations. Paradoxically, he said, Nasser's last deed was to prevent the complete ostracizing of Jordan in Cairo. Hussein's impression was that Nasser had not been opposed to the action against the fedayeen but was troubled by the length of time it took. Nasser thought that, had the Syrians got into trouble in Jordan, the Iraqis would have invaded Syria. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had not stopped their financial support for Jordan because of its actions; only Libya had done so. Arafat was a liar, and chiefly responsible for the crisis; but it was necessary to continue to deal with him because, in addition to being the leader of Fatah, he was the chairman of the umbrella Palestinian organization. Hussein said he was determined to build a new Jordanian society. There was no longer a place for the old politicians. He could not repeat the operation he had just carried out and only by building new foundations could a similar crisis be averted in future.

The more concrete part of the conversation concerned joint action against the fedayeen and against Iraq. Hussein reported that the fedayeen were concentrated mainly in the Ajlun area. He kept forces between them and the border with Israel and also behind them. He promised to do his utmost to prevent fedayeen attacks against Israel and agreed to examine Allon's suggestion of forming mobile units to patrol the border area. According to Hussein, the area south of Amman, including the area from the Dead Sea to Eilat, had been cleared of terrorists. He indicated that the forces he had stationed along the border were very slight because the bulk of them were engaged in completing the task of restoring order. Hussein also reported that he had started work on getting the Iraqi forces out of Jordan. He said he wanted to have a swift means of communication with the Israelis because he might again need to ask them at short notice for an air strike – this time against the Iraqis.