Shed no tears for Hussein
The funeral of King Hussein, the west’s favourite Arab ruler, was attended by a rogues’ gallery of his admirers and allies mourning the man referred to by some Israelis as "our king".
In the acres of newsprint dedicated to Hussein in the British press, there was scarcely a negative comment. And in the Jordanian press, too, he was praised and sanctified.
Yet Hussein was a man who, for nearly half a century, was the autocratic ruler of one of the world’s poorest countries; a military dictator from a minority tribe in a state, the majority of whose population were refugees, ethnically cleansed from their homes and land by a regime with which Hussein collaborated for decades, and with which he hastened to sign a treaty at the earliest possible moment. Roland Rance reports.
The press played on the story of the young Hussein ascending to the throne shortly after the murder of his grandfather on the steps of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, and turning to the British army for protection against his enemies.
Invariably described as "brave" and "plucky", he was portrayed as a rare example of civilisation in a brutal region. The obituaries were even full of reports of his "kindness" to Jordan’s political prisoners! The truth is that Hussein – like his dynasty and his state – was created by the British to serve imperialist interests in the Middle East.
Following the First World War – in which Britain had recruited Arab tribal leaders to fight against Turkey with the promise of establishing an Arab kingdom over the whole Middle East – the victorious powers proceeded to carve up and parcel out the territory like a piece of real estate.
Kuwait was created as a British colony in order to deny Iraq access to the sea; Lebanon was established as a French colony, reducing Syria’s coastline and denying it the area’s major ports, and Palestine was designated a "national home for the Jewish people".
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, author of the famous declaration, was candid in his cynicism: "in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country".
Hussein’s great-grandfather, the Sharif Hussein, proclaimed himself king of Hejaz (the area around Mecca and Medina), but lack of popular support enabled Ibn-Saud to overthrow and expel him. As compensation, Britain imposed Hussein’s son Faisal (already thrown out of Syria) as King of Iraq.
In 1922, Palestine was partitioned for the first time, and Faisal’s brother Abdullah was made Emir of Transjordan. (This partition has never been accepted by the founders of Israel’s ruling Likud. Its central component, the Herut Party, still maintains that "The River Jordan has two banks. One of them is ours. The other one is ours too")
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (the only state other than Saudi Arabia to be named after its ruling family) was thus established by outsiders, serving a distant imperial master.
The regime has always been sustained by a British-trained and equipped army; Hussein himself was a pupil at Harrow and Sandhurst. Its economy is based on foreign grants and loans; until the late 1980s, these brought in up to 70% of the national budget. Unemployment is over 25%, and a quarter of families live in absolute poverty.
The whole history of Jordan has been bound up with that of Palestine. Effectively a British colony for thirty years from the end of World War One, it did not attain even nominal independence until the end of World War Two.
In the period leading up to the further partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, King Abdullah, while publicly proclaiming his support for the Palestinian people, was secretly meeting Israeli emissary Golda Meir to discuss the division of spoils.
With the eventual ceasefire, Abdullah annexed those parts of western Palestine not occupied by Israel, and renamed his state Jordan. Revealingly, this annexation was never accepted internationally; only Britain and Pakistan recognised its legitimacy.
As well as acquiring territory, including the religious and tourist centres of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Jordan gained a new population. The 400,000 inhabitants of Transjordan were joined by some 800,000 Palestinians from the West Bank of the Jordan, and several hundred thousand refugees expelled from their homes in the Israeli state.
But, in the absence of any democratic system, power remained in the hands of the tribal leaders of Transjordan, who formed the basis of Abdullah’s regime.
In 1951, Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian incensed at his collaboration with the Zionists. His son, Talal, briefly succeeded him, but was soon deposed and declared insane after he attempted to detach Jordan from its British alliance and to work more closely with Egypt and Syria.
Talal’s son Hussein, still a minor, took over in 1953. For the next 46 years, he ruled with an iron fist, only occasionally hidden in a velvet glove.
From the start, he continued the policy of collaboration with Israel, assisting them in preventing Palestinian refugees from crossing the border to return to their fields and homes. Despite this assistance, in 1953 Israel reacted with fury when infiltrators killed three Israelis.
A huge Israeli force crossed into Jordan, and in the village of Qibya dynamited dozens of houses where people were sleeping, killing 66 men, women and children. The commander of this force was the same Ariel Sharon who oversaw the slaughter in the Beirut refugee camps in 1982, and who in 1999 attended Hussein’s funeral as an honoured statesman and guest.
This set the pattern for Israeli-Jordanian relations. The resulting popular discontent in Jordan, among Palestinians and Jordanians alike, led to increased repression. Even the populist step of dismissing the British commander of the Jordanian army did not help Hussein; with the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 he was forced to call in British troops to maintain his regime against massive unrest. The US propped him up with loans of $50 million a year.
Israel’s continuing raids, and its threats against Egypt, led to the 1967 war. In the first hours, Israel demolished the Egyptian and Syrian airforces, and made deep advances into Egypt. Hussein originally attempted to keep his army out of the war.
He was eventually persuaded that exaggerated Egyptian and Syrian claims of victories were true (possibly as a result of Israeli manipulation of radio signals), and attacked across the border. This led to a lightning Israeli attack, which succeeded in bringing the whole of Palestine under Israeli control.
Hussein lost the only economically productive part of his kingdom, which was forced to absorb many hundreds of thousands of refugees, expelled at gunpoint by Israel’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin – who Hussein later lauded as a "man of peace" after his assassination in 1995.
Palestinian armed resistance to Israel, which had started on a small scale in the mid-1960s, developed rapidly after 1967. In line with its usual practice, Israel responded massively and disproportionately, killing hundreds of Jordanians and Palestinians in cross border raids, and repeatedly destroying the main irrigation channel.
Hussein took the hint, and in the notorious "Black September" of 1970 he launched his own brutal attack against the PLO and other Palestinian groups. So vicious was the Jordanian offensive that many guerrillas forded the Jordan to surrender to the Israelis rather than fall into the hands of Hussein’s security forces. The PLO’s front line against Israel was destroyed, and Hussein had again shown where his true interest lay.
As the PLO turned from military to diplomatic tactics, it gained increasing Arab and international support. At the Rabat summit of 1974, Arab leaders recognised the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, effectively reaffirming their long-standing refusal to accept the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank.
This, and its subsequent endorsement by the UN, led to Hussein officially renouncing his claim to the West Bank, and his recognition of the PLO.
The Palestinian Intifada posed a challenge to Jordan. Jordanian citizens, as well as Palestinians (now 60% of Jordan’s population), rioted and demanded economic as well as political reforms. True to form, Hussein repressed the riots and then made limited reforms.
But his image as a benign ruler is misleading. A 1998 report by Amnesty International notes that "several detainees have died in jail over last two years following beating by different security services".
Shortly before his death, Hussein replaced his brother with his son as designated heir. Jordan has neither free elections, nor a recognised line of royal succession.
With a twenty year military career, including leading the Jordanian special forces, the new King Abdullah II is well placed to continue Hussein’s repressive apparatus. There is unlikely to be any change of policy towards Israel, nor any political opening in Jordan.
Jordan is an artificial and unviable state, the plaything of more powerful neighbours. It owes its creation to the needs of British imperial policy, and its continued existence to its willingness to act as a client of other states.
It can only continue to exist as a military dictatorship, answerable to the demands of its masters and not those of its people.
For the people of Jordan, possibly even more clearly than for others in the area, the only way forward is through the struggle for a socialist federation of the Middle East.