Hussein (ibn-Talal)

(b. 1935)

   Third king of Jordan. When King ABDULLAH of Jordan was assassinated in 1951 at the entrance to the El Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, his sixteen-year-old grandson, Hussein, was at his side. The youth soon succeeded to the precarious Hashemite throne since his own father Talal was mentally deranged. Against all predictions, his became the most durable of Arab regimes, surviving decades of war, insurrection and assassination attempts.

   Britain had in effect created Jordan, and was its protector. Hussein’s preparation for rule was his schooling at Harrow and Sandhurst. For the first few years, he continued to rely on the British connection, and on the loyalty of the Bedouin tribes in Jordan to the Hashemite dynasty founded by Abdullah. But the pressures of Arab nationalism mounted among the Palestinian majority in the kingdom, especially on the West Bank. Agitation was also fomented by NASSER’S agents and by the Cairo broadcasts. In 1956, the king shifted course. He dismissed Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Jordan Arab Legion, and joined in a military pact with Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless he was prudent enough to remain on the sidelines when Nasser’s army was being trounced in the Sinai campaign in that same year.

   This caution deserted him at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. On 30 May, with the crisis coming to a head, he flew to Cairo, and again joined the Arab military coalition. The world’s press carried photographs of the stalwart Nasser embracing the stocky little king, after years of bitter enmity and mutual mud- slinging. Some Egyptian de-tachments were rushed to Jordan and an Egyptian general took command of the ‘eastern front’. At 9:30 AM on the morning of 5 June, when the war with Egypt had started, General Bull, the head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, took a terse message from Prime Minister Levi ESHKOL to King Hussein. It read, ‘We shall not initiate any action whatsoever against Jordan. However, should Jordan open hostilities, we shall react with all our might and you will have to bear the full responsibility for all the consequences.’ Carried away by the first boastful communiqués from Cairo, Hussein ignored the message. His troops started shelling Jewish Jerusalem and other Israel towns, and moved forward in Jerusalem, taking over General Bull’s own headquarters at Government House. Within the next seventy-two hours, the Israel army had occupied the whole of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and stood along the Jordan River. Everything that had been occupied and annexed by Abdullah in 1948 had been lost by Hussein in a single act of miscalculation.

   After the defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War, the Palestinian Arab terrorist movement became more active and expanded rapidly, with El Fatah as the major organization. On the West Bank, they were effectively curbed by the Israel authority. Jordan now became their main base to the point where they became virtually a state within a state, openly flouting and undermining the authority of the king, the government and the army. The situation reached breaking point in September 1970, when one of the more extreme terrorist groups brought off a dramatic multiple hijacking and held the planes, with hundreds of passengers and crews, as hostages at Dawson’s Field in northern Jordan. The Jordan army was ordered into action and in the brief but bloody civil war that followed, the terrorist organizations were smashed and the king left undisputed master in his own house. At one stage the conflict had a menacing international dimension, when Syrian tank forces moved across the border into Jordan, with Russian approval. President Nixon ordered the United States Sixth Fleet to steam towards the Syrian coast and the Israel air force stood poised to intervene. These moves acted as a deterrent, and the Syrian column withdrew, though not before the Jordanians had knocked out some of their tanks.

   After the September 1970 showdown, the king was regarded as being in a stronger position to move towards a settlement with Israel, which he clearly wanted. There were two main obstacles. Firstly, private contacts with the Israel government did not indicate that he could get all the concessions he demanded, particularly on the sensitive question of Jerusalem. Secondly, Hussein preferred that the first move towards an accommodation with Israel should come from Egypt lest he should be isolated and under general attack in the Arab world. As the diplomatic stalemate continued year after year, the king became increasingly concerned about the attitude towards his regime of the population on the West Bank. That area had settled down to a relaxed and prosperous co-existence under Israel military government. Its allegiance - to the Hashemite kingdom had never been firm since King Abdullah had annexed it in 1948, and given its inhabitants Jordanian citizenship. From time to time, before 1967, there had been disturbances that the king’s soldiers had suppressed with tough measures. Hussein now realized that even after a peace settlement the people of the West Bank would not go back to the same control that had existed before the Six-Day War and that many of them would not want Jordanian rule at all. In 1972, he made public a blueprint for a future kingdom on a federal basis, with the West Bank enjoying home rule, and a centre of its own in Jerusalem. Since any future arrangements about the West Bank depended on a prior peace agreement with Israel, the sarcastic comment in some Arab quarters was that the king was selling fish before he had caught them.

   During these years, Hussein from time to time visited Britain and the United States, where his image remained an appealing one. He was a moderate and staunchly pro-Western Arab leader, with great personal courage. The image became a little tarnished in Britain when in 1972 he divorced his English wife, by whom he had had four children, and made an Arab girl from a Nablus family his queen.

   Hussein participated with his Arab allies in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and he formally recognized the right of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s right to govern the West Bank. Later he was involved in negotiations with Saddam Hussein during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He is the author of two books, his autobiography Uneasy Lies the Head (1962) and My War with Israel (1963). In 1994 he signed a peace accord with Prime Minister RABIN of Israel.