Lion of Jordan (68 page)

Jordan's leaders were virtually panic-stricken. They feared that the new Israeli government would not only annex the West Bank but that it would carry out large-scale expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank. The personal record of the new prime minister – as the leader of a right-wing terrorist group in the pre-independence period and as a member of Levi Eshkol's national unity government -was also a major cause for concern. Hussein viewed Begin with deep distaste on account of his terrorist past and his extremist approach to
politics.
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His misgivings were shared by other members of the royal family. Prince Zaid bin Shaker recalled: ‘The Likud people said that Palestine is on the East of the River and the only thing that needs to change is the monarchy because the great majority of the people here are Palestinians, which is untrue. We had contingency plans for the possibility of expulsion. His Majesty had contacts with all our allies. It was a period of anxiety in Jordan.'
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The Jordanian leadership felt threatened by both the programme and the composition of the new government. Ezer Weizman, the hawkish former commander of the Israeli Air Force and a loud-mouthed enemy of the Hashemites, became minister of defence. Ariel Sharon, another hawkish former general, became minister of agriculture. Sharon was one of the most aggressive proponents of the right-wing thesis that ‘Jordan is Palestine'. According to this thesis, there was already in existence a Palestinian state on the East Bank of the Jordan River and the West Bank should be incorporated into Greater Israel by accelerating the pace of Jewish settlement there. During the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, Sharon was one of the very few members of the IDF General Staff who were opposed to helping Hussein beat the challenge to his regime from the PLO. Sharon wanted to help the PLO topple the regime in Jordan and turn the country into a Palestinian state. One of the most surprising decisions made by Begin was to invite the Labour Party's Moshe Dayan to serve as foreign minister. One of the reasons for offering Dayan this key post was to stress the continuity in Israel's foreign policy. Begin was well aware that outside Israel he was widely perceived as an extremist, a fanatic and a warmonger. He knew of the widespread fears that his rise to power would cause tension between Israel and its neighbours. To allay these fears, he tried to give the impression of being reasonable and responsible.

With the Likud and Dayan in power, the Jordanian orientation in Israel's foreign policy was replaced by one in favour of Egypt. But, before issuing any peace feelers to Egypt, Dayan arranged a secret meeting with Hussein in London on 22 August at the home of Dr Emmanuel Herbert. Dr Herbert was now seventy-nine years old and in poor health, and this was to be the last secret meeting he hosted at his home between his Jordanian and Israeli friends. It was also the last meeting between the king and the Likud leadership for a decade. Dayan's account of the meeting is as follows:

King Hussein was late, and he apologized as he greeted me with a handshake and a broad smile. He had had guests, he explained, and could not get away till they had left. I found him greatly changed, not in appearance but in spirit. He was not the same man I had last seen. He was now withdrawn, subdued, without sparkle, and the political topics I raised did not seem to touch him deeply. His language was clipped, his answers to my questions often monosyllabic, rarely more than yes and no and without clear explanation. His depression may have been caused by the tragic death of his wife, who had been killed shortly before in a helicopter crash. Or it may have sprung from one of the decisions of the 1974 Rabat Conference of Arab States, of which he was bitterly critical. This was the decision to recognize the PLO as the sole authorized representative of the Palestinians and withdraw Hussein from that role. Now, he said, he was concerning himself exclusively with administering the East Bank of the river -his kingdom of Jordan. He was neither able nor anxious to clash with the Arab countries and the PLO on this matter. If they did not want him, they could run the affairs of the Palestinians without him.

Dayan then asked the king whether he would agree to a peace treaty with Israel based on the partition of the West Bank between Jordan and Israel. By his own account, Dayan received not only an unequivocal answer but an instructive lesson. The king rejected the idea out of hand, saying that he, as an Arab monarch, could not propose to the people of even a single village that they cut themselves off from their brother Arabs and become Israelis. Agreement to such a plan would be regarded as treachery. He would be charged with ‘selling' Arab land to the Jews so that he could enlarge his own kingdom. ‘Was Hussein', Dayan wondered, ‘still the King of Jordan or only the shadow of a ruler? Was he really looking after his country or was he spending most of his time gallivanting abroad? In any event, his attitude toward the subject of our discussion – the attempt to find a suitable and agreed-upon arrangement for the problem of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – seemed to be one of indifference.'
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The disenchantment was mutual. Hussein's account of the meeting may be plain, but it has the merit of clarity: ‘I saw my friend Moshe Dayan who had become the Foreign Minister of the Likud here in London. His attitude was even harder than it had been earlier and that was the end of that. We never had any contact for a long period.'
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The meeting contained no surprises. Hussein's position had not changed since he had met Dayan in his earlier incarnation as the minister
of defence and member of the Labour Party. Dayan received the answers he expected, which simply confirmed Begin's view that the king would not agree to relinquish any territory to Israel on the West Bank and that he also rejected any possibility of power-sharing. On many subsequent occasions, Begin would quote the king's words to Dayan that the division of the land was ‘totally unacceptable'.
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Territorial compromise between Israel and Jordan was now ruled out by both sides. The ‘Jordanian option' was buried. This left Begin and Dayan free to explore the ‘Egyptian option', and they stepped up their diplomatic efforts to persuade Sadat that Israel wanted to begin bilateral negotiations.

Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin were at cross purposes from the beginning. Carter replaced Henry Kissinger's step-by-step approach, which had suited Israel very well, with an attempt at a comprehensive approach, which did not suit Israel at all. Carter saw the Palestinian problem as the core of the Middle East conflict and considered it to be in American interests to promote a solution to it. The solution he favoured was a Palestinian homeland on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip linked to Jordan. He worked for the reconvening of the Geneva conference with the participation of the Soviet Union and all the parties to the conflict, including the Palestinians. Begin denied that the Palestinians had any national rights; he was opposed to an international conference and to the Soviet participation that it would entail; and he did not consider that UN Resolution 242 applied to the West Bank or Gaza. What he wanted was direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and Egypt without the involvement of any other Arab party, least of all the PLO, which he regarded simply as a terrorist organization. By raising endless procedural problems, Begin succeeded in sabotaging Carter's plans for an international conference.

There were also problems on the Arab side. Asad and Hussein favoured a unified Arab delegation to the reconstituted Geneva conference, while Sadat preferred separate national delegations. Hussein welcomed the American initiative for a conference because it was based on UN resolutions, because it promised a comprehensive settlement, and because it assigned a major role to Jordan. His approach at the preparatory stage was both constructive and creative. The Israelis had vetoed PLO participation in the conference, but Hussein proposed to include non-PLO Palestinian leaders as members of the Jordanian delegation to ensure Palestinian representation. He also made a tour of Arab capitals
in an effort to forge a unified front. In Cairo, Sadat was in no mood to consult or take advice on anything. From the beginning there was no trust and no chemistry between the two leaders. Hussein offered Sadat the benefit of his experience in dealing with the Israelis. He wanted to give him an idea of what the difficulties might be, but no reaction was forthcoming. So Hussein said pointedly that he had been in touch with ‘their neighbours' and invited Sadat to ask questions about these contacts; Sadat replied that he would assume his own responsibilities in this respect. His attitude was all the more disappointing against the background of Nasser's commitment after the June War to give priority to the recovery of the West Bank in any peace negotiations. Hussein's efforts to find common ground between Sadat and Asad also came to nothing.
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Sadat had decided to act alone and failed to inform any of the other players of the dramatic political initiative on which he had set his mind. On 9 November, in an address to the Egyptian parliament, he dropped his bombshell. ‘I am prepared to go to the ends of the earth for peace even to the Knesset itself,' he announced. Ten days later he embarked on his historic journey to Jerusalem. Sadat finally scuttled the Geneva conference and the comprehensive approach to which it was closely linked.

Sadat's visit to Jerusalem caused disarray and disunity in the Arab world. Some Arab leaders supported his initiative; some opposed it furiously; and some adopted a wait and see attitude. Hussein held the last view. Although Sadat's move took him by complete surprise at a time when he was working for a unified Arab stand, his reaction was surprisingly mild. He refused to condemn the move despite the pressure to do so from the radical Arab states, from the PLO and from domestic opinion. In a televised broadcast to the nation, Hussein criticized both Sadat's unilateral initiative and the emotional reaction it elicited from other Arabs. He praised Sadat for his courage in bypassing the customs, traditions and psychological barriers that constrained the Arab approach towards Israel, but expressed reservations about the form and substance of the Egyptian initiative. The speech was essentially a call on Arab leaders to close ranks. The Arabs could not hope to regain their rights, warned Hussein, ‘if the effort to liberate our territories and secure a just peace is unilateral or partial or not committed to the bond of common action'.
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In effect, Hussein was acting as an elder statesman and putting himself as a mediator and peacemaker between the rival camps.

The moderate tone of Hussein's response to the Sadat initiative was to some extent a reflection of the growing influence of Sharif Abdul Hamid Sharaf, the chief of the royal court, on foreign policy. Sharaf was born in Baghdad in 1939 to an Iraqi branch of the Hashemite family. He was a distant cousin of Hussein, but relations between them had been strained because he was an Arab nationalist; he had joined the Arab Nationalist Movement during his studies at the American University of Beirut. He married Laila Najjar, a Lebanese Druze, a fellow student at AUB who was also an ardent Arab nationalist. Sharif Zaid bin Shaker played an important role in reconciling the king to his other cousin and in enabling Sharaf to return to Jordan and to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Following the June War, Hussein appointed Sharaf as ambassador to Washington, where he stayed for five years; he then moved to the UN in New York. The king trusted Sharaf and was happy with his work in the US. The old tension was diluted. In 1976 Sharaf and his wife returned to Jordan, and he accepted the post of chief of the royal court. From that point onwards, his relationship with the king became extremely intimate. Sharaf was a proactive chief, and the king relied on him for advice and trusted his judgement. Sharaf believed in a balanced relationship between Jordan and the other Arab countries.
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MudarBadran, the prime minister at that time, was dogmatically opposed to the Egyptian initiative. Sharaf counselled that outright Jordanian rejection would leave Sadat isolated and vulnerable to Israeli pressure and that Egypt's isolation would accelerate the process of fragmentation among the remaining Arab states.
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His advice prevailed because it was more in tune both with the king's style and with his strategy.

By visiting Jerusalem, Sadat succeeded in breaking the psychological barrier that, according to him, constituted 90 per cent of the Arab–Israeli conflict. He persuaded the majority of Israelis that peace with the Arabs was a real possibility but that it could be achieved only at a price: withdrawal from the occupied territories. Yet Sadat made no dent in the political barrier to peace, namely, the Likud's refusal to withdraw from the West Bank. In this respect his visit was a failure but one that he refused to admit. Negotiations continued after the visit, and in December Begin presented Sadat with a plan for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This plan was unacceptable to any Arab, including Sadat, because it amounted to an attempt to legalize Israel's occupation of these areas, including East Jerusalem. Negotiations
dragged on, but it became clear to all concerned that the Sadat initiative had reached a dead end. In the summer of 1978 President Carter intervened with an initiative of his own: an invitation to Egypt and Israel to a peace conference under American auspices at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Hussein received no invitation, only a letter from President Carter outlining his plans.
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Carter's initiative represented his abandonment of a comprehensive approach in favour of a bilateral Israeli–Egyptian one, and it relegated Jordan to the periphery of Middle East peacemaking. Hussein replied to Carter with a long letter wishing him success but also pointing out the pitfalls along his path. He began by noting that Israel's negative response to President Sadat's brave initiative increased the belief in Arab minds that it was opposed to withdrawal from the territories it occupied by force in 1967 under any circumstances and that it did not intend to allow any reasonable solution to the Palestinian question. The Israeli government, wrote Hussein, added to the obstacles to peace by refusing to admit that the West Bank was occupied Jordanian territory. Jordan was ready to participate positively in the efforts to construct peace, but before entering into negotiations it needed a clear and unambiguous indication that the result would be total Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories. Implicit in the letter was a warning that a separate settlement would not be acceptable to Jordan or its Arab allies.
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