IOA Editor: original article title: ‘Peace, but on condition that …’
By Zvi Barel, Haaretz – 10 Dec 2009
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1134214.html
“Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace,” by Avi Shlaim, Vintage (paperback), 768 pages, $19
“I fear the day when we have to sit face to face and conduct negotiations.” This statement could have been the motto of quite a few Israeli governments – including, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu’s current one, even though it announces the desire to negotiate directly with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Abbas on a daily basis. In fact, however, it was coined by Levi Eshkol, Israel’s third prime minister, in response to reports of then-foreign minister Abba Eban’s meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein at the London home of Dr. Emanuel Herbert (the king’s Jewish physician) on May 3, 1968.
Eban had been dispatched to meet with the king in lieu of Eshkol a year after the end of the 1967 Six-Day War. The issue at hand was Hussein’s serious and ongoing offer to sign a peace treaty with Israel: full peace in exchange for a total Israeli withdrawal, including from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would take another 26 years, however, before the peace tent was pitched in the Arava, on the border between Israel and Jordan. Five years after that, Hussein died of cancer, at age 64, leaving behind to Israel, Jordan and the whole Middle East another peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country.
Avi Shlaim’s monumental “Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace” (now published in Hebrew by Dvir in an excellent translation by Daphna Baram) offers for the first time a meticulously documented account of the missed opportunities for peace in the Middle East – a story infuriating in the way that only such a truly frustrating tale can be.
Shlaim does not hide behind a purist scholarly persona. While the documentation, sources and protocols fulfill their intended role of describing history, he does not hesitate to speak his mind, directly and even bluntly. “My own view is that the Balfour Declaration was one of the worst mistakes in British foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes. “It involved a monumental injustice to the Palestine Arabs and sowed the seeds of a never-ending conflict in the Middle East.”
Those seeds of conflict, however, could have been eliminated – if not when they first appeared, then certainly under the reign of King Hussein. Like an obedient soldier, he tried repeatedly to uphold the legacy of his grandfather, King Abdullah I, and reach an agreement with the Israelis. And like the soldier struggling to clamber over the wall in an obstacle course, he discovered that the wall was taller than him and slippery. After countless meetings with Israelis, proposed solutions, drafts of peace treaties and Israeli responses that ranged from sour faces to outright deception, and included vague formulations by diplomats concerning the idea of making Jordan into a Palestinian state, Hussein finally summoned his experience in the form of a 12-page document that he submitted to president George H.W. Bush, in 1989. This is a valuable document not only because it presents the Jordanian position, but also because of the way it reflects the Israeli ethos that spawned fictional narratives allowing Israelis to go on believing they were in the right.
Hussein shatters seven Israeli myths in the document, which was stamped “Top Secret/Sensitive.” The first is that providing Israel with overwhelming military superiority was an inducement to peace. The second is that direct negotiation between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians could lead to withdrawal and peace: “I speak with special authority,” Hussein writes, “because during the past two decades I have personally met in secret, on more than 150 occasions, totaling approximately 1,000 hours of talks, with almost every top Israeli official including, most recently, specifically at U.S. request, with prime minister Shamir. To my eternal dismay and frustration, all those efforts have not brought us any closer to the peace I am determined to achieve.”
The third myth involves the American perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a foreign-policy matter, when in fact domestic U.S. politics have played a central part in it. To this insight the king adds the suggestion that the United States needs to liberate itself from the pressure of the Jewish lobby in order to become an effective partner in the process. A fourth myth involves the legality and morality of Israeli policy in the territories; the fifth is the idea that Israel sincerely wishes to resolve the conflict by trading land for peace.
The next myth, propagated by Israel without any basis in fact, is that someone other than the Palestine Liberation Organization could represent the Palestinians. And the last myth – according to Hussein, at least – is that Israel must seize territory and hold on to it so as to ensure security: “Land-grabbing is not a guarantee for security, but a prescription for continuing hostilities,” Hussein writes in conclusion.
Myth maintenance
Myths require regular maintenance, which the Israeli leadership indeed provided over the generations. Shlaim proves systematically how in each chapter of Israel’s history of missed opportunities, the country gave a virtually identical response to each of the various Jordanian offers: “peace, but on the condition that …” And the condition was an untenable one: Israel gets the West Bank and Jerusalem – and Jordan all the rest.
Yasser Arafat told his biographer, Alan Hart, that if Israel had agreed to withdraw from the West Bank, Hussein would have immediately signed a peace treaty, and “the PLO would have been finished. Sometimes I think we are lucky to have the Israelis as our enemies. They have saved us many times.” He was speaking in response to Golda Meir’s blunt reaction to Hussein’s offer in 1970, which was later referred to as “the Allon plan in disguise” [after the peace plan involving a division of territory between Israel and Jordan, proposed by Israeli politician and minister Yigal Allon]. Apparently, the Palestinians are not the only “wonderful enemies” known for their penchant for missing opportunities.
Israel, however, was not alone in entrenching its myths. With one somewhat unexpected divergence from the pattern by president Ronald Reagan, at least six of the 10 U.S. presidents whose reign coincided with Hussein’s nurtured the Israeli position while taking Jordan for granted. The country formed “by the stroke of a pen,” as Churchill used to say, could not stand up successfully to a cynical Israeli-American coalition fed in part by American ignorance or indifference.
Ultimately, the decision to break away from the West Bank was made by Jordan in 1988, and the entire Palestinian problem was dumped squarely into Israel’s hands – but not before Hussein realized that even the man who had gone out of his way to express support for the Jordanian plan, Shimon Peres, could not be relied on. The 1987 London Agreement between Hussein and Peres collapsed: Then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir opposed the agreement; Peres was unable to convince the Americans to back it; and eventually Hussein realized that Peres “couldn’t deliver.” What Peres was supposed to deliver was an American memorandum endorsing the agreement, as well as the support of the Israeli government. Hussein could not understand why Peres did not take steps to bring down the government after the agreement was rejected. Seven years passed before Hussein met with Peres again.
During the 1996 elections in Israel, the king was openly supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu, after the latter promised him that he would conduct the peace process “at a level and pace suitable to Jordan’s political needs.” But today Netanyahu, it seems, is still searching for the right pace for Jordan.
In some places it seems as though the book’s title betrays its contents, and that Hussein’s biography is only a pretext for unfolding the bloody biography of the region since the early 20th century. The “Lion of Jordan” becomes the narrator of an enormous drama whose heroes are gradually disappearing, whether due to natural causes or assassinations. Shlaim’s Hussein is also occasionally the voodoo doll that is stabbed with pins in lieu of another enemy: whether Israel or the United States, Syria or Egypt.
But this is also a fascinating story about the Hashemite family, about an Anglophone royal house full of ceremony and scheming, about a controlling mother and an intellectual brother, about a king who liked fast cars and flying. And it is the story of the political struggles within a Byzantine court where many forces were meddling – British intelligence, the CIA and Israel’s Mossad espionage agency, which turned the kingdom into its own playground. Furthermore, it is the story of a poisonous war of inheritance that ultimately led to Abdullah’s succession to the throne. All these are woven together with the precise elegance of a surgeon writing down the history of a disease. According to Shlaim, this region could have been spared quite a few wars, and peace would have come much sooner, if not for the negligence of some amateur politicians
