Anton La Guardia
The Peacemaker King
Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace
By Avi Shlaim (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 720pp £30)
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!
When the Hashemite rulers of the Hijaz rose up against their Turkish overlords in the First World War with the help of Britain, they imagined they would lead a great Arab kingdom encompassing Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad. This notion of Arab emancipation, however, collided brutally with the realities of European imperialism. Over the decades, the Hashemites' ambitions were reduced by trickery, violence and their own errors.
The Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire were carved up: Palestine and Lebanon came under direct rule by the British and the French respectively. One Hashemite prince, Faisal, was evicted from Syria by the French, but then placed on the new throne of Iraq by the British. His brother, Abdallah, was given a consolation prize, the emirate of Transjordan, conjured up by the stroke of Winston Churchill's pen out of the eastern half of the mandate of Palestine.
The princes' father, Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, had styled himself the King of the Arabs and at one point even Caliph (after Atatürk decided to abolish the Caliphate in Istanbul). But he lost his kingdom in the Hijaz to the Wahhabist-inspired warriors of Ibn Saud (who created the kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and fled into exile in Cyprus in 1924.
In 1958 the descendants of Faisal were overthrown and butchered in Iraq. In Transjordan, meanwhile, Abdallah had been murdered by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951, soon after the first Arab-Israeli war. By this time known as Jordan, the kingdom was ruled precariously by his grandson, the boy-king Hussein, who went on to lose the West Bank and the holy sites of Jerusalem (which had been won by Abdallah) in a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The great Hashemites were thus reduced to an insignificant parcel of land, mostly desolate, lying between the Dead Sea and the middle of the Iraqi desert.
And yet through luck, circumstance, wiliness and sheer force of character, the diminutive King Hussein became a larger-than-life figure of the Arab world. He was a king at a time of republican revolutions, a client of Britain and then America amid anti-Western agitation, and a friend of both Ariel Sharon and Saddam Hussein. Despite being subject to countless assassination attempts, and often accused of selling out his people to the Zionists, he died in his own bed in 1999 and was genuinely mourned by his subjects. Lord Curzon's description of his grandfather, Abdallah, might just as well have applied to him: 'Much too big a cock for so small a dunghill'.
For Israel, King Hussein was the best of enemies. The peace treaty he signed with the Jewish state in 1994, after decades of not-so-secret meetings with Israeli leaders, was a distinctly warmer affair than either the loveless settlement with Egypt in 1979, or the ill-starred autonomy deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation that collapsed violently in 2000.
Appropriately, it is a British-Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, who has written Lion of Jordan, the most comprehensive biography of the 'plucky little king', or the 'Dwarf King', as Radio Cairo mockingly liked to call him. Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford, is a leading member of the so-called 'New Historians' who mounted a frontal attack on Israel's founding myths. His previous book, The Iron Wall, was one of several that placed a large share of the blame on Israel for the tragedy of the Middle East. There is nothing iconoclastic, however, about his biography of King Hussein. Like many Israelis, Shlaim seems besotted by his subject.
Lion of Jordan is a natural extension of one of Shlaim's earlier books, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. In that book he described the secret negotiations between King Abdallah and the Zionist leadership to partition Palestine after Britain gave up the unhappy mandate in 1947. The deal between the two gave the embryonic Jewish state vital breathing space to establish itself and fight off other Arab armies, while allowing Abdallah to enlarge his kingdom into the mountainous eastern part of Palestine (known as the 'West Bank' of the River Jordan). In so doing, however, Abdallah earned the enmity of Palestinian nationalists. Shlaim is kinder. He suggests Abdallah should be seen not as a traitor but as a saviour; without him, all of Palestine would have been lost to Israel.
Aged fifteen, the young Hussein was by his grandfather's side when he was shot dead at the entrance to the al-Aqsa mosque. One bullet ricocheted off a medal that Abdallah had given his grandson as a reward for winning a school fencing prize. Hussein's mentally ill father, Talal, was placed on the throne just long enough for Hussein to come of age and receive a crash course in kingship at Sandhurst.
The young King Hussein experimented with liberal political reforms but soon reversed them as Jordan was caught up in not only one but two Cold Wars - the global one between East and West, and the regional one between the radicalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser and his rivals, who were mostly conservative monarchs.
Hussein had to try to lead the nationalist movement, or risk being overwhelmed by it. In 1956 he dismissed the British commander of his army, General John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha. Hussein won great popularity, but would remain a Western client. With the humiliation of Britain in the Suez crisis of 1956, in which Jordan narrowly avoided becoming embroiled, King Hussein passed speedily into the American orbit, receiving public aid as well as private payments from the CIA.
The revolutionary tide of 1958 saw the union of Egypt and Syria and the violent overthrow of Hussein's Hashemite cousins in Iraq. British troops flew to Jordan to avert its collapse, while American marines landed in Lebanon. Israel allowed the kingdom to be resupplied through its airspace after Jordan's land borders had been shut off by its neighbours. 'Where an Arab nation refused,' King Hussein later recorded, 'an enemy agreed'.
With every crisis in Jordan, Israeli leaders have been torn between their desire to shore up their neighbour, and their hunger for territorial spoils should it collapse. In the 1967 war, Israel finally took the West Bank and its biblical sites. Shlaim, though, blames the loss on Hussein's ineptitude rather than on Israeli greed. As he tells it, the slide to war was caused by inter-Arab rivalries rather than by enmity with Israel. Cross-border attacks by Palestinian militants, harsh Israeli reprisals, brinkmanship and mutual accusations of cowardice encouraged the Arabs to talk themselves into a war for which they were not prepared. Driven by a popular fervour for war, King Hussein made the cardinal error of placing his forces under Egypt's control, allowing its incompetent commanders to open the Jordanian front when the war was already lost. Even in retrospect, Hussein insisted he had little choice. He could have either joined the Arabs and lost, or stood back and allowed his country to tear itself apart.
Hussein did stay out of the next round of war in 1973. His first priority was always the survival of the monarchy, and more often than not - for instance, during the civil war with Palestinian militias in 1970 - Israel was an ally rather than an enemy. Hussein tried to recover his lost inheritance by negotiation with Israel. In arguments that would be repeated over decades, Jordan said it could only reach a deal on the basis of 'peace with honour', meaning the full recovery of the West Bank, while Israel insisted that it needed to hold on to territory for security. In Shlaim's view, though, Israel paid only lip service to peace; it wanted the appearance of a diplomatic process in order to absorb as much of the West Bank as possible.
Jordan's geopolitical importance has rested on three pillars: its alliance with the West, its role as a buffer state and its intimate involvement in the question of Palestine, not least because more than half its population is Palestinian. But as the PLO gained recognition, and Palestinians inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip led the resistance to Israeli occupation with the first Intifada, Jordan distanced itself ever more from the affairs of the West Bank. When the PLO signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993, Jordan quickly signed its own treaty and all but gave up on the West Bank.
Intriguing and eventful as King Hussein's life may have been, Shlaim's book would have benefited from some severe pruning. And despite its length at more than 700 pages, it is oddly incomplete. Too often, Shlaim offers a meeting-by-meeting diplomatic history rather than a fully rounded biography. We read much about Hussein's dealings with Israeli leaders, but do not have enough sense of the personal relationships, animosities and jealousies with other Arab leaders, not least with Yasser Arafat, his perennial rival for Palestinian affections. And what precisely did the King see in the odious Saddam Hussein?
Shlaim makes far too little of King Hussein's alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was used to counter first Nasser's radicalism and then Palestinian nationalism. The King, we read, shed tears after the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin, which had brought him to West Jerusalem for the first time 'to bury a friend' and also, perhaps, 'to bury the peace'. But it was the suicide bombings of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, with support networks in Jordan, that did so much to undermine peace-making early on and allowed Jewish extremists to portray Rabin as a murderer of Jews. Afterwards, Hussein supported the Likud party over Labour. Hussein had more to do with today's disaster in Palestine than Shlaim cares to admit.