Lion of Jordan (74 page)

However, Peres later decided he was sufficiently interested in the king's scenario to ask the Americans to give it a try. As Shultz reveals in his memoirs, on 5 August, Simha Dinitz, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, came to his home with some startling news. He had been sent by Peres, without the knowledge of the cabinet, to report on his meeting with Hussein. But in addition to reporting on the progress made at that meeting, Dinitz informed Shultz of something that Peres had apparently not told the king: if some PLO supporters were included in the delegation to the preliminary talks with Richard Murphy, Israel would have to live with it – after stating its objections publicly. Shultz received a rather different message from Itzhak Shamir, the hawkish foreign minister, through Washington attorney Len Garment. Garment said that Shamir did not want Richard Murphy to meet
any
Palestinians and questioned their judgement in even considering such a meeting, which he felt would break both the letter and spirit of their 1975 commitment not to meet with PLO members, tear apart the Israeli government and jeopardize US–Israeli relations. It was only one more example of the government of national unity speaking with two voices. Shultz consulted Reagan, who ruled that there should be no ambiguity about their refusal to deal with anyone even vaguely connected with the PLO.
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Israel's position regarding the PLO was much closer to that of the United States than to that of Jordan. Jordan argued the PLO was relatively weak and could therefore be pressed to make concessions. Israel replied, much like America, that if the PLO was weak it should be excluded altogether from the diplomatic process. This divergence was a major reason for the failure to get peace talks off the ground. As one
student of Israeli–Jordanian relations has observed: ‘For Peres and the Labour Party, the higher the profile of the PLO in any negotiations, the harder to create a political majority for the process in Israel. For Hussein and the Hashemites, the higher the profile of the PLO the fewer the risks in any negotiations, both in the regional and in the Jordanian domestic framework. Hussein felt he could not proceed without the PLO; Peres could not proceed with it.'
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Arafat helped Hussein by providing a list of names of seven moderate Palestinians for inclusion in the unified Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. None of the seven were prominent members of the PLO. Hussein passed on the list in confidence to the Americans and asked them to select four out of the seven. The Americans went back on their promise and leaked the names to the Israelis, whereupon the secret list became public knowledge. This enabled right-wing Israelis and their even more right-wing supporters in Washington to wage a vigorous campaign on Capitol Hill and in the media against the holding of talks with anyone connected with the PLO. Shultz had authorized Murphy to go to Amman to hold talks with the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. For a short while it looked as if the Reagan administration was about to break with the tradition of allowing the Israel lobby to dictate American policy in the Middle East. Murphy impressed on his boss that no peace process worthy of the name could be started unless they honoured their commitment to Hussein. But Shultz buckled under the pressure of the lobby and ordered Murphy to cancel his trip to Amman. To the Arabs it seemed that American policy was to erect a series of obstacles to peace and that as soon as one obstacle was removed by Arab effort, another was put in its place. Hussein and Arafat were not alone in their despair. Shimon Peres was said to be very angry in private. He told his close friends that Shultz was ‘a very stupid man' who had ‘blown it'. What Shultz should have done, in Peres's view, was to ignore the protests, to go ahead with the meeting and to present Israel with a fait accompli.
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The aborting of the Murphy mission gave the hardliners on both sides their chance and was consequently followed by a cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Palestinian terrorists murdered three Israelis thought to be Mossad agents in the port of Larnaca, Cyprus. Sharon, the minister of trade and industry, publicly demanded that Israel retaliate against ‘the terrorist headquarters in Amman'. Sharon wanted to destroy any chance of renewing the dialogue with Jordan and to destabilize the
country. He had always opposed the Jordanian option, and pointed to the pact between Hussein and Arafat as evidence that Hussein was not a suitable partner for peace talks. Peres and Rabin resisted Sharon's demand to undertake an operation inside Jordan, but they could not afford to appear ‘soft' compared with the Likud half of the administration.
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They therefore proposed to the inner cabinet a strike by the IAF on the PLO headquarters in Tunis. On 1 October eight Israeli F-16s carried out the raid against Hamam el-Shaat, the military compound in the PLO headquarters, killing 56 Palestinians and 15 Tunisians and wounding about a hundred others. Arafat himself narrowly escaped. The Security Council and many countries condemned the raid, but the United States condoned it as a legitimate response to terrorism. Reagan sent Peres a message expressing his satisfaction with the operation.

On 5 October, only four days after the raid on Tunis, Hussein had another meeting with Peres. Hussein was accompanied by his prime minister, Zaid Rifa'i, and Peres was accompanied by the young and very dovish director-general of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi Beilin. The meeting took place in the country cottage of Lord Mishcon, a British Jew, a distinguished lawyer, a member of the British Labour Party and a close friend of the king. Hussein's younger sister, Princess Basma, went to school and university with the daughter of Lord Mishcon. He liaised between Hussein and Peres, and his flat in Hyde Park Gardens in central London was used on several occasions for private meetings between them.
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The relationship between Victor Mishcon and Hussein was one of mutual respect and admiration; Mishcon thought Hussein was a great and very brave man. Mishcon's role in the 1980s was rather similar to that played by Dr Emanuel Herbert, Hussein's Jewish physician, in the 1960s.
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The king summarized his contacts with the PLO and his efforts to set up a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation for peace talks with Israel. He stressed that the negotiations would have to be part of an international conference. Peres summarized his country's complicated domestic political scene in order to underscore the importance of speed. He would have to change places with Shamir in a year's time, he said, and then it would be harder to move towards peace. The king expressed concern that the government of Israel, as a result of its unusual structure, was paralysed and incapable of making difficult decisions. The prime
minister responded by saying that if and when the moment of decision arrived, and the Likud ministers were the final obstacle to peace negotiations with Jordan, he would not hesitate to dismantle the coalition. The two leaders exchanged views about the speeches they were due to give later that month at the annual session of the UN General Assembly. The meeting ended with polite smiles, handshakes and an agreement to meet again ‘to advance the peace process'.
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Within the PLO the hardliners began to pose a challenge to Arafat's leadership and to devise ways of arresting his drift towards accommodation with the enemy. They worked behind his back to mount terrorist attacks on Israeli targets with the intention of scuppering the diplomatic option. The most spectacular of these acts of terror was the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro
by four gunmen off the coast of Egypt on 7 October. Before the end of the incident, an elderly American Jew confined to a wheelchair was murdered and thrown overboard. Although the operation was carried out by a minor faction of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), it seriously damaged the credibility of the entire organization. For Hussein this episode was almost the last straw. ‘At the end of the day Arafat didn't deliver, and that,' according to Taher al-Masri, ‘was the beginning of the severing of relations between them.'
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In the aftermath of this episode Hussein came under growing pressure, especially from America, to dump Arafat as a negotiating partner and go forward with Israel on his own.

Gradual estrangement from Arafat paved the way for Hussein's reconciliation with his old enemy, President Asad of Syria. Asad had opposed the Jordan–PLO accord from the outset and warned that the effort to arrange direct talks with Israel could lead to another Camp David. Hussein was forced to conclude that Syrian claims could not be ignored if the peace process was to move forward. Zaid Rifa'i activated his back channel to Asad to prepare the ground for a reconciliation. The price of reconciliation with Damascus was a confession of past misdeeds in aiding and abetting the domestic opponents of the Ba'th regime. Hussein was obliged to acknowledge in a letter to his prime minister that underground Syrian Muslim groups had been allowed to operate from Jordan's territory in their violent struggle to overthrow the Asad regime. At the end of the year Hussein and Asad met in Damascus for the first time in six years. The meeting secured Jordan's flank with
Syria and further isolated the PLO, setting the stage for the final break between the king and the PLO leader.

In January 1986 Hussein made a private medical visit to London. During the visit he also had two rounds of talks with Richard Murphy. These dealt with two main issues: defining the mandate of the international conference, at which he was still aiming, and Palestinian representation. Murphy displayed considerable flexibility, and Hussein asked him for a clear statement of the American position to convey to the PLO. Their joint efforts seemed to bear fruit. On 25 January, after his return to Amman, Hussein received a final reply from the Reagan administration concerning PLO participation in the proposed conference. The reply came in the form of a written commitment that said: ‘When it is clearly on the public record that the PLO has accepted Resolutions 242 and 338, is prepared to negotiate peace with Israel, and has renounced terrorism, the United States accepts the fact that an invitation will be issued to the PLO to attend an International Conference.'

Hussein felt that his persistence had at long last paid off and that the ball was now in the PLO's court. He proudly presented the American text to the PLO delegation headed by Arafat that came from Tunis to Amman on 21 January. The talks went on for four days. The upshot was that the PLO would not accept 242 unless America recognized the Palestinian right to self-determination. Hussein argued that the important thing was to achieve Israeli withdrawal first and then to proceed to a confederation along the lines of the 11 February accord. But since Arafat insisted, Hussein referred the matter back to the State Department and received an amended text. The new text contained a reference to ‘the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people'. Arafat informed Rifa'i that, despite the positive development of the American position, recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people did not encompass the right to self-determination. There was nothing more that Hussein could do, and both he and the Americans finally gave up on Arafat. Hussein concluded that Arafat would never be able to show the vision and leadership necessary to accept the conditions that would make a peace conference possible. One American described Arafat as a ‘mud puppy' – a bottom-feeding salamander in the canals of the South, which flaps about to muddy the water whenever anything approaches.
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Angry and downcast, Hussein asked Adnan Abu-Odeh, his political
adviser, to draft a lengthy speech detailing why his efforts to forge a peace partnership with the PLO had ended in failure. On 19 February 1986, in a speech from the throne that lasted three and a half hours, Hussein gave his side of the story. He characterized Arafat as untrustworthy and said that the problem lay in Arafat's unwillingness to accept unconditionally resolutions 242 and 338 as the price for participation in an international conference. ‘After two long attempts,' Hussein said, ‘I and the Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan hereby announce that we are unable to continue to coordinate politically with the PLO leadership until such time as their word becomes their bond, characterized by commitment, credibility and constancy.'
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The long speech marked not just the end of a phase but the end of an era in which Jordan was the leading actor in the search for a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict.

The rift between Hussein and Arafat revived hopes in the Peres camp that the Jordanian option might be realized after all. The Israeli government supported Hussein in his efforts to rebuild his political influence on the West Bank. As a means to this end, Jordan launched an ambitious five-year plan for improving economic conditions on the West Bank. However, the PLO's assassination of Zafir al-Masri, the pro-Jordanian mayor of Nablus, on 2 March 1986 sent a strong signal that it intended to fight for its position as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Political rivalry thus undermined joint action between the Jordanian government and the PLO to promote the economic well-being of the West Bank population. The Joint Commission to Support the Steadfastness of the Palestinian People was established, with Taher Kanaan, the Jordanian minister of occupied territories affairs, as head of its Jordanian side and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) as head of its Palestinian side.

The Palestinians had complete confidence in Kanaan, who was himself of Palestinian origins. When Jordan launched the West Bank Development Plan, Kanaan approached it as an economist. He advocated a whole menu of measures to improve the everyday life of the people of the West Bank in education, health and welfare. But Prime Minister Zaid Rifa'i had a
political
agenda that affected economic and technical cooperation with the PLO. Rifa'i was trying to prove that a large section of the West Bank population was still loyal to Jordan. He also wanted to demonstrate that the PLO was inadequate and that Jordan was indispensable. Kanaan, by his own account, performed poorly because
he did not understand the political game. He was therefore moved to the Ministry of Planning and replaced by Marwan Doudin, who knew much less about economics but much more about politics.
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