BY THE SAME AUTHOR
British Foreign Secretaries since 1945
(with Peter Jones and Keith Sainsbury, 1977)
The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:
A Study in Crisis-Decision Making (1983)
The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949:
A Study in Crisis-Decision Making (1983)
Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah,
The Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988)
The Politics of Partition (1990)
War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995)
The Cold War and the Middle East
(co-editor with Yezid Sayigh, 1997)
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948
(co-editor with Eugene L. Rogan, 2001)
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First published 2007
1
Copyright © Avi Shlaim, 2007
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90635–5
To Gwyn
List of Maps
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 The Hashemite Heritage
2 Murder of a Mentor
3 The Making of a King
4 The Baghdad Pact Fiasco
5 The Dismissal of Glubb
6 The Liberal Experiment
7 A Royal Coup
8 The Year of Revolution
9 Arab Foes and Jewish Friends
10 The Palestinian Challenge
11 The Road to War
12 Picking up the Pieces
13 Dialogue across the Battle Lines
14 Civil War
15 The United Arab Kingdom Plan
16 The October War
17 The Road to Rabat
18 The Camp David Accords
19 Lebanon and the Reagan Plan
20 Peace Partnership with the PLO
21 The London Agreement
22 Intifada and Disengagement
23 The Gulf Crisis and War
24 From Madrid to Oslo
25 Peace Treaty
26 The King’s Peace
27 Collision Course
28 The Last Journey
Epilogue: The Life and Legacy
Notes
Jordanian Secret Meetings with Israeli Officials
The Hashemite Dynasty
Chronology
List of Interviews
Bibliography
Index
1. Jordan and the Arab World
2. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
3. The 1949 Armistice Lines
4. The Middle East after the June 1967 War
5. The Allon Plan for the West Bank, 1967
6. Jordan 1970
1 King Hussein ibn Ali, King of the Hijaz (Corbis/Bettman)
2 King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan (Corbis/Bettman)
3 Sir John Glubb (Getty Images)
4 Prince Hussein with his parents (Hashemite Archives)
5 Burial of King Abdullah (Corbis/Bettman)
6 Hussein before the Accession to the Throne Ceremony (Hashemite Archives)
7 Hussein at Sandhurst (Topfoto)
8 Hussein and Princess Dina (Topfoto)
9 Hussein and Faisal II of Iraq (Corbis/Bettman)
10 Hussein and Toni Gardiner (Topfoto)
11 Hussein at the wheel of his Mercedes (Hashemite Archives/Flouti)
12 Crown Prince Abdullah (Corbis/Bettman)
13 Hussein with the Royal Family (Albert Flouti/Camera Press)
14 Hussein visits the trenches (AP/PA Photos)
15 Hussein with Sharif Zaid bin Shaker and Sharif Nasser bin Jamil (Hashemite Archives)
16 Hussein during 1967 Press Conference (AP/PA Photos)
17 Hussein with Wasfi al-Tall (Corbis/Sygma/Geneviève Chauvel)
18 Arab heads of state at the Nile Hilton (Corbis/Gamma/UPI)
19 Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan and Efraim Halevy (Israel Govt Press Office/Sa’ar Ya’acov)
20 Hussein with Herzog Yaacov (Private Collection)
21 Golda Meir (Penny Tweedie/Camera Press)
22 Hussein with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Hulton Archives/Getty Images)
23 Zaid al-Rifa’i (UPPA/Topfoto)
24 Hussein with Queen Alia, Princess Haya, Prince Ali and Abir (Camera Press)
25 Hussein with Lisa Halaby (Hashemite Archives/Zohrab)
26 Jimmy Carter, Hussein and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran (Popperfoto)
27 Hussein with Saddam Hussein (Jean-Claude Francolon/Gamma/ Camera Press)
28 Hussein with Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (Corbis/Sygma/Bernard Bisson)
29 Hussein on Independence Day (Camera Press)
30 Itzhak Rabin, Hussein and Bill Clinton (Israel Government Press Office/Sa’ar Ya’acov)
31 Hussein during the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty signing ceremony (Israel Government Press Office/Avi Ohayon)
32 Itzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Hussein, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat (Corbis/CNP/Barbara Kinney)
33 Hussein and Queen Noor with family (Hashemite Archives)
34 Hussein with Princes Abdullah and Hamzah (Hashemite Archives/ Meldos)
35 Hussein returns home (Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)
36 Hussein appointing Abdullah Crown Prince (Corbis/Sygma/Maher Attar)
37 Hussein’s funeral (Corbis/Sygma/Neuhaus Nadav)
38 King Abdullah takes oath of office (Corbis/Sygma/Stephane Cardinale)
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
This preface is written with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness: satisfaction at having completed a big book; but a tinge of sadness at having to put it to bed and losing the chance to further revise or add to it. Gibbon compared the finishing of a book to saying the final farewell to a very old and dear friend. I feel somewhat the same way about this one, a much more modest book than his. I have been working on it for the last seven years, and it is difficult to imagine life without it.
This is not the book I set out to write, and it is three times longer than I had envisaged. As I was on leave for three out of the past seven years, I cannot plead that I did not have the time to write a short book. My original plan was to write a monograph, King Hussein and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East, with the emphasis on his diplomacy in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. But, as I did the research for this study in diplomatic history, I became fascinated by the personality of the PLK, or ‘plucky little king’, as he was often referred to in the West. The book acquired a life of its own and gradually developed, almost without my making a conscious decision, into a full-scale biography.
A. J. P. Taylor once said that every historian should write a biography, if only to discover how different this is from the writing of history. My own academic discipline is International Relations, and I am well aware that writing with reference to one individual is not in the best tradition of social science research. Yet, in this particular instance, given the king’s dominant position within his own country and his highly personalized, not to say idiosyncratic, style of conducting foreign policy, it is the only sensible approach. International Relations is primarily the study of conflict and conflict resolution, of war and peace, and King Hussein’s entire career, as the subtitle to this biography indicates, revolved round waging war and making peace.
One makes peace with one’s enemies, not with one’s friends. With Jordan and Israel, however, the dichotomy between war and peace is less clear-cut than in most other cases. They have been aptly described as ‘the best of enemies’. The triangular relationship between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians is difficult to analyse. But it is as vital to understanding the past as it is crucial in determining the final shape of the peace settlement in the Middle East. Jordan was a pivotal actor in the peace process that got under way in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. Whereas the literature on Israel and the Palestinians is very extensive, little has been written on Jordan. One of the main aims of this book is to fill the gap by providing an account of King Hussein’s role in the search for peace in the Middle East, with particular emphasis on his involvement in the Palestinian question and on his secret contacts with Israel, which culminated in the signature of a peace treaty in 1994.
This book represents a natural development of my academic work over the last three decades. My training has been both in history and in the social sciences, and I like to think that I combine the skills of an International Relations generalist with those of a Middle East area specialist. The earlier book that is most directly relevant to the present project is Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988). There I challenge many of the myths that have come to surround the birth of the State of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, most notably the myth that Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that persisted for three decades after the guns fell silent. In contrast to the conventional view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair, I dwelt on the special relationship between King Abdullah of Jordan (the grandfather of King Hussein) and the Zionist movement, and on the interest that the Hashemites and the Zionists shared in containing Palestinian nationalism. The central thesis advanced is that, in November 1947, the Hashemite ruler of Transjordan and the Jewish Agency reached a tacit agreement to divide up mandatory Palestine among themselves and to help abort the birth of an independent Palestinian state, and that this agreement laid the foundations for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of the war – until Abdullah’s assassination by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951.
The other book that is intimately connected with the present one is The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000). That work extends my revisionist critique of Israeli foreign policy from 1948 to 1998, in other words, to the first fifty years of statehood. Among the themes covered are seven Arab–Israeli wars and all the major diplomatic initiatives to settle the Arab–Israeli dispute. It is not a comprehensive history of the Arab–Israeli conflict but a detailed study of one actor: Israel. Jordan features but no more prominently than any of the neighbouring Arab states or the Palestinians. The main theme of The Iron Wall is that since 1948 Israel has been too ready to use military force and remarkably reluctant to engage in meaningful diplomacy to resolve its dispute with the Arabs. From 1967 Israel had ample opportunities to trade land for peace in accordance with UN Resolution 242, the cornerstone of nearly all international plans to resolve the conflict. But, with the exception of the peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994, Israel preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Israel did sign the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993 but began to renege on this historic compromise with the other principal party to the conflict following the return to power of the Likud three years later. The blind spot that Israeli leaders have always had in dealing with Palestinian nationalism persists down to the current day.
The present book examines the Arab–Israeli conflict and many of the same attempts to resolve it peacefully, but this time not from an Israeli perspective but from a Jordanian one, or, more specifically, from the perspective of Jordan’s principal decision-maker: Hussein bin Talal. It explores the four main circles of Hussein’s foreign policy: Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world and the Great Powers. Special attention is devoted to the persistent tension in Hussein’s foreign policy between the commitment to Arab nationalism and the desire to reach a modus vivendi with Israel. The key to understanding all four strands of his foreign policy, it will be argued, was the survival of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. This was the overarching aim; everything else flowed from it.
The first part covers the colonial context for the emergence of modern Jordan, the Hashemite legacy, Hussein’s childhood, the making of a king and the early years of his reign. But the bulk of the book deals with the period after 1967, and, more specifically, with Hussein’s efforts to recover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It was in this context that Hussein repeatedly offered full peace in return for full withdrawal but encountered relentless Israeli expansionism. This is where the covert contacts with Israel’s leaders fitted into the broader framework of his foreign policy. The first meeting across the battle lines was in fact held as early as 1963. The initiative for the meeting came from the Jordanian monarch, who followed in the footsteps of his grandfather. Each sought a peaceful solution to the conflict, each broke the Arab taboo on direct contact with the enemy, and each was described by his own supporters as the king of realism. But for Hussein the great watershed was 1967. It was only after the loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that his back channel to Tel Aviv assumed critical importance.
The list of prominent Israeli politicians who met secretly with Hussein before 1994 included Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, Itzhak Rabin and Itzhak Shamir. The list of Hussein’s secret meetings with Israeli officials printed at the end of this book is probably incomplete, but it gives an idea of the scope and intensity of the extraordinary dialogue between two parties that remained formally at war with one another, and lends substance to the description ‘the best of enemies’. It captures the essence of a unique adversarial partnership.
My primary aim in writing this book has been to provide an account of Hussein’s long reign and to make it as detailed, accurate, readable and interesting as possible. I hope it will also help the reader make sense of nearly half a century of tangled and tortuous Middle Eastern history. It attempts to break new ground in a number of ways. First, it provides information that is not currently available on a crucial aspect of the diplomacy surrounding the Arab–Israeli conflict. Second, and more importantly, it challenges the conventional view that Israel faced a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world and the related myth of Arab intransigence. Third, whereas much of the literature on the Middle East peace process is written by American and Israeli scholars and focuses on the roles of the United States and Israel, this book focuses on the role of one of the major Arab actors. Like Britain in the post-war era, King Hussein constantly strove to ‘punch above his weight’. His influence in regional affairs was much greater than one might reasonably expect from the ruler of an impecunious and insignificant desert kingdom. He was also a master of the art of political survival. Against all odds, he remained on the Hashemite throne for forty-six years, from 1953 until his death from natural causes in 1999.
Historians of the recent past need lucky breaks; mine was that Hussein very trustingly gave me an interview on the most sensitive of subjects: his clandestine relationship with Israel. The interview took place on 3 December 1996 at Hussein’s residence in Britain, Buckhurst Park. It lasted two hours, was recorded and later transcribed. This was one of the rare occasions when Hussein spoke on the record about his meetings with Israeli leaders prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The interview explains a good deal of his thinking about Israel and individual Israeli leaders, about his troubled relations with the PLO and with other Arab rulers, and about the major stages in his struggle for peace. After the king’s death, I published an edited version of this interview: ‘His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel’ (New York Review of Books, 15 July 1999). The complete transcript of this interview runs to thirty-six pages, and it served as a major source for this biography.
At the meeting at Buckhurst Park, I indicated to King Hussein that after finishing the book on Israel’s foreign policy, I planned to write a book about him, and he gave me every encouragement. He invited me to visit him in Amman and volunteered to share with me his notes on the meetings that I found so fascinating. But I was too slow: he fell ill, and I lost my chance. Despite missing the opportunity for further privileged access to Hussein and his papers, I did not abandon the idea of writing a book about him. But, as with any contemporary history project, this one presented me with problems as well as opportunities. The main problem has been that of access to the relevant official documents; it is particularly acute in this case because Jordan has no proper national archive. My answer has been to make the most of the primary sources I could access rather than lament the ones I could not, on the principle that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The main opportunity has been to get the first-hand testimony of people who were involved in the events that I have written about. Interviews are, of course, notoriously fallible in some respects, but for a project such as this one they are also indispensable.
Because King Hussein had allowed me to interview him and told me so much, many members of his family and of his inner circle helped me with this book after his death. At the end is a list of seventy-six interviews that I conducted with Jordanians who served Hussein in one capacity or another; it includes his younger brother Hassan, his sister Basma, his eldest son and heir, Abdullah II, his cousin Zaid bin Shaker, Talal bin Muhammad, his nephew and national security adviser, prime ministers, senior officials, diplomats and soldiers. These interviews with policymakers of the Hussein era are often revealing and illuminating; they provide much colour, they help to bring the story to life, and they fill in many gaps. They are used here not as a substitute for the written sources but as a supplement to them. I have found that conducting so many interviews has enabled me to take some kind of meta-position, to balance different narratives, and to make allowances for personal and political agendas.
One interviewee deserves a special mention: General Ali Shukri, who served as the director of King Hussein’s Private Office from 1976 until 1999. General Shukri was one of the king’s closest aides and confidants: he was entrusted with many sensitive missions; he set up and attended many of the secret meetings with the Israelis; and he accompanied Hussein on sixty-one visits to Baghdad between 1980 and the Gulf crisis of 1990. General Shukri’s help to me included sixteen long interviews, countless conversations, the checking of facts and introductions to other key officials. The interviews contain detailed information, deep insight into the late king and his policies, and a number of startling revelations, including an attempt by Hussein to arrange a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Itzhak Rabin, a secret meeting he sponsored on a Jordanian air base between Saddam Hussein and Hafiz al-Asad of Syria, the attempt to broker an ‘Arab solution’ to the Gulf crisis, a crucial meeting with Itzhak Shamir in Britain twelve days before the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War, and a Syrian plan to assassinate the king and his brother after he signed the peace treaty with Israel.
Any biography is bound to raise the question of the biographer’s attitude towards his subject. It seems to me that a certain degree of sympathy for one’s subject is essential to a successful biography. As will become clear to any perceptive reader of this book, I certainly felt such sympathy towards Hussein, who appeared to combine humility with humanity and exceptionally gracious manners. I knew him only slightly, but, on the few occasions when we did meet, he invariably came across as an open-minded and sincere individual, and as a decent human being. My sympathy with him as a person was enhanced by the discovery that his efforts to work out a peaceful solution to the conflict in the Middle East met, for the most part, with ignorance and indifference on the part of the top American policy-makers and dishonesty and deviousness on the part of the Israeli ones.
On the other hand, it was much more difficult to reconcile my sympathy for the king with a similar sense of solidarity with the Palestinians, the real victims of the Zionist project. Although I admired Hussein, I did not adopt his perspective on the Palestinians who made up more than half of the population of his kingdom. Nevertheless, concentration on the king has inevitably been at the expense of providing a richer account of the Palestinian struggle for independence and statehood. In dealing with Hussein, I had to maintain a delicate balance: I valued the personal contact with my subject and the help he extended to me, but at the same time I had to be careful that my work did not topple over into hagiography. I set out to write an honest, scholarly and critical book on the life and times of Hussein bin Talal. Whether I have been successful is not for me but for the reader to judge.
At various stages in the long journey that will end with the publication of this book, I received support from institutions and individuals that it is my pleasure to acknowledge. My greatest debt is to the British Academy for awarding me a three-year research professorship in 2003–6 and for the research grant that accompanied it. The professorship freed me from my teaching and administrative duties at the University of Oxford, while the grant enabled me to travel, to visit archives and to employ research assistants. Without the generous support of the British Academy this book could not have been written. My other debt is to the United States Institute of Peace for a generous research grant in 2001–2 that enabled me to employ Adiba Mango as a full-time research assistant and to make several extended visits to Jordan.
The Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College provided a most congenial work environment. My greatest debt is to Eugene Rogan, the director of the centre and one of my closest friends, for his advice, support and encouragement since the inception of this project. Eugene is working on a history of the Arabs, and our regular meetings to read and critique each other’s work provided a welcome break from the isolation chamber of book-writing. His expertise in Jordanian history was an added bonus. Mastan Ebtehaj, the librarian, and Debbie Usher, the archivist, dealt with all my requests promptly, efficiently and with good cheer.
A number of friends read the first draft of this book, corrected mistakes and gave me the benefit of their opinion. Adiba Mango, Christopher Prentice and Charles Tripp went over the entire manuscript with great care and made extremely helpful suggestions for improving it. Sir Mark Allen read and suggested revisions to the chapter on the Gulf War. Randa Habib commented on the final chapter and contributed additional information on the change of the succession, on which she is a leading expert. I am very much in the debt of all these friends.
During different phases of work on this project, I enjoyed the support of three very able and dedicated research assistants: Adiba Mango, Shachar Nativ and Noa Schonmann. In addition to collecting material and transcribing tapes, they rendered invaluable assistance as IT advisers, administrators, editors and proofreaders. Nezam Bagherzade, while still at school, volunteered to help me with research in the Public Record Office in Kew, with very fruitful results. Zehavit Ohana helped me with the archival research in Israel.
Two collections of private papers merit a special mention. Philip Geyelin, a distinguished American journalist, worked for many years on a biography of King Hussein but sadly died without completing it. My colleagues and I are grateful to his wife, Sherry Geyelin, and to his daughter, Mary-Sherman Willis, for depositing his papers and his unfinished manuscript in the Middle East Centre Archive. Dr Yaacov Herzog was the Israeli official most intimately involved in setting up and maintaining the back channel to Amman. I am grateful to his daughter Shira Herzog for giving me access to the meticulous and copious records he kept of the secret meetings from 1963 to 1970. This is the first time a writer has drawn upon these papers as a source for a book in English, and they are a real treasure trove.
A large number of friends have helped me in various ways. They include, in alphabetical order, Ze’ev Drory, Miriam Eshkol, Randa Habib, Foulath Hadid, Mustafa Hamarneh, Donald Lamm, Roger Louis, Avi Raz, Tom Segev, Avraham Sela, Moshe Shemesh, Asher Susser, the late Mreiwad Tall and Tariq Tall. The individuals I interviewed, both Jordanians and others, are listed at the end of the book. Some of these interviews go back to 1981–2, when I spent a sabbatical year in Israel doing research for Collusion across the Jordan. Other interviews are with British and American officials who served in Jordan. I am grateful to all the people on this long list for sparing the time to see me, for answering my questions and for putting up with what sometimes turned into vigorous cross-examination.
My thanks go to the staff at Penguin Books and especially to Stuart Proffitt for his wise direction, superb editing and unfailing support and encouragement. His assistant, Phillip Birch, was very helpful in many different ways. Donna Poppy edited the typescript intelligently, imaginatively and with meticulous attention to detail. Cecilia Mackay was a dynamic, resourceful and inspired picture researcher. Mike Shand drew the maps; Auriol Griffith-Jones compiled the index; and Richard Duguid skilfully supervised the entire production process.
Finally I wish to thank my wife, Gwyn Daniel, for continuing to be interested in my work after thirty-three years of marriage, for many stimulating conversations, incisive criticism, perceptive comments and encouragement throughout many seasons. But for her insistence on taking out the jokes and the clichés, this book would have been even longer!
Avi Shlaim
Oxford
August 2007
King Hussein of Jordan was a man of slight build who possessed a powerful personality and immense political stature. He was in every respect except the physical a towering figure whose courage helped to earn him the popular title ‘Lion of Jordan’. Hussein bin Talal was born on 14 November 1935 in Amman. He ruled over Jordan as an absolute monarch from 1953, when he was only seventeen years old, until his death in 1999 at the age of sixty-three. Throughout his long reign Jordan was in the eye of the storm of Middle Eastern politics, constantly caught up in the turmoil and violence of the region, and Hussein himself emerged as a major player in regional and international politics. He was also a leading actor in the Arab–Israeli conflict, one of the most bitter, protracted and intractable of modern times. Hussein’s cardinal objective was the stability and survival of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, and in this he was successful against all the odds. His other major objective was to find a peaceful solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict, but in this his record is much more controversial. Hussein’s supporters see him as a man who consistently pursued a strategy of peace and ultimately succeeded in bridging the historic gulf by concluding a peace treaty with Israel. His critics take a radically different view of his legacy of accommodation with Israel, seeing it as a surrender and a betrayal of the Palestinians. In a region where the past is so powerful and ever-present, the question of whether Jordan’s rulers have betrayed or championed the Palestinians has been at the heart of a heated, ongoing dispute. It is one of the tasks of this book to explore the realities behind these two positions thoroughly for the first time.
Whatever opinion one takes of Hussein, the starting point for understanding his foreign policy is the Hashemite legacy. The Hashemites are an aristocratic Arab family whose ancestral home was in the Hijaz in the western part of the Arabian Peninsula, along the Red Sea littoral. They are descendants of the prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, whose husband Ali was fourth of the caliphs. The family took its name from Hashem, the great-grandfather of the prophet and a prominent member of the Kureish tribe. The Hashemites were religious, rather than temporal, leaders, the guardians of the Muslim holy places in Mecca and Medina during the centuries of Ottoman rule. The title ‘sharif of Mecca’ was handed down from father to son. In Arabic the adjective ‘sharif’ means distinguished, eminent, illustrious or noble, and the title ‘sharif’ is reserved for the descendants of the prophet.
In the early twentieth century, however, the Hashemites sought to translate their noble lineage into political power and gradually assumed the leadership of an Arab nationalist bid for freedom from the Ottoman Empire. The break between the Hashemites and their fellow Muslim overlords in Istanbul began with the Young Turks’ Revolution of 1908. The Young Turks were a group of officers, officials and intellectuals who ruled the Ottoman Empire from the time of the revolution until the end of the First World War. The shift they brought about in the ideology of the ramshackle empire from Islam to Turkish nationalism displeased and disturbed the Hashemites. The decision of the Young Turks to join the war on the side of Germany then created an opportunity for a Hashemite alliance with Britain in accordance with the Arab adage ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ This dramatic renversement des alliances transformed the Hashemites from Arab aristocracy into actors on the international stage.
Hussein bin Ali (1852–1931) was an unlikely candidate to lead a nationalist Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. He was fifty-five by the time he was appointed sharif of Mecca in 1908. His main concern was to secure his own position and that of his family, and he was robust in resisting Ottoman attempts to encroach on their traditional authority. There is no evidence to suggest that he was attracted to the ideas of Arab nationalism before the war: on the contrary, by temperament and upbringing he was a conservative and inclined to view nationalist ideology as an unwelcome innovation, inconsistent with the principles of Islam. Nor was the Hijaz a particularly fertile ground for the growth of nationalism. A traditional society, bound by religious and tribal identities, it was short on the kind of intellectuals and radical army officers who are normally to be found in the vanguard of nationalist movements.1
Hussein bin Ali had four sons: Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zaid. The two middle sons were more politically ambitious than the other two and they played a major part in persuading their father to assume the leadership of the Arab Revolt. Faisal was the principal commander of the Arab Army, and his association with the legendary T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) helped to spread his fame beyond Arabia. Abdullah, however, was the chief architect, planner, schemer and driving force behind the revolt. As Faisal himself confided to Lawrence, his liaison officer and the most renowned chronicler of ‘the revolt in the desert’, the idea of an Arab uprising against the Turks was first conceived by Abdullah. As a small boy Abdullah had acquired the nickname ‘Ajlan’ – ‘the hurried one’ – and he remained true to this name for the rest of his life.
A profound faith that the Hashemites were destined to rule over the entire Arab world inspired Abdullah throughout a long and eventful political career that started in the Hijaz and later saw him amir of Transjordan and finally king of Jordan. Born in Mecca in 1880, Abdullah received his education and his military training in Istanbul and in the Hijaz. Between 1912 and 1914 he was the deputy for Mecca in the Ottoman parliament, where he promoted his father’s interests with energy and enthusiasm. It was during this period that Abdullah was exposed to ideas of Arab nationalism and began to link his father’s desire for autonomy in the Hijaz to the broader and more radical ideas of Arab emancipation from Ottoman rule. In February 1914 Abdullah returned to Mecca by way of Cairo, where he met Lord Kitchener, the British minister plenipotentiary, and tentatively explored the possibility of support in the event of an uprising against the Ottomans. Soon after his return home, Abdullah became his father’s political adviser and foreign minister.
It was only gradually, and under constant prodding from Abdullah, that the conservative sharif of Mecca raised his sights from the idea of home rule in his corner of Arabia inside the Ottoman Empire to complete independence for all its Arab provinces from Yemen to Syria. While Abdullah became convinced of the necessity to break up the empire at the beginning of 1914, Hussein would become a separatist only after he had tried and failed to attain his limited political objectives within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. A further difference, one of ideology, separated father from son: Hussein’s idea of nationalism was based on the traditional concept of tribal and family unity whereas Abdullah’s was based on the theory of Arab pre-eminence among Muslims. Whatever the source of their aspirations or their ultimate aims, the indigent rulers of the Hijaz province had to have the backing of a great power to have any chance of success in mounting an open rebellion against the mighty Ottoman Empire. That power could only be the British Empire, which had its own designs on Arabia. This posed a problem. The guardian of the Muslim holy places in Mecca could not easily bring himself to embrace a Christian power in his struggle against fellow Muslims. Divided counsels within his own family did nothing to ease his predicament. Faisal emphasized the risks and pleaded for caution; Abdullah wanted to play for high stakes and urged his father to raise the standard of an Arab revolt. Hussein warily plotted a middle course: he continued to negotiate with the Turks while making secret overtures to the British. Turkish rejection of his demands for a hereditary monarchy in the Hijaz made him tilt further in the direction of Britain. The outbreak of war in August 1914 made the British more receptive to these overtures, and to Abdullah fell the task of weaving together the threads of this unholy alliance against the Sublime Porte.
Between July 1915 and March 1916 a number of letters were exchanged between Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, discussing the terms under which Hussein would ally himself with the British. In his first note Hussein, speaking in the name of ‘the Arab nation’, demanded British recognition of Arab independence in all of the Arabian peninsula and the area covered by present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and part of Iraq. To this claim, which reflected Abdullah’s grandiose territorial ambitions, was added a request for British approval of a proclamation of an Arab caliphate of Islam. Britain accepted these principles but could not agree with Hussein’s definition of the area claimed for Arab independence. In his note of 24 October 1915 McMahon excluded certain areas: ‘The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed delimitation.’ After a year of desultory negotiations, Hussein undertook to join the Allies by mounting a rebellion against the Ottomans. The correspondence, conducted in Arabic, was shrouded in ambiguity, vagueness and deliberate obscurity. It reveals a continuous thread of evasive pledges by Britain and opaqueness, if not obtuseness, on the part of Hussein. It is difficult to tell how much Hussein was moved by dynastic interests and the desire to extend the power of his family and how much by the wish to represent the Arabs in their pursuit of independence. It is clear, however, that his dream was to found an independent Hashemite kingdom on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The British failed to spell out the difference between Hussein’s ambition and the extent of their commitments. In particular, the McMahon–Hussein correspondence was imprecise as to whether Palestine was to be included in the area designated by Britain for Arab independence. Conflicting interpretations of this omission were to plague Anglo-Arab relations after the war.2
In the spring of 1916 Hussein proclaimed what is often called the Great Arab Revolt, which holds pride of place in the chronicles of the Arab nationalist movement. It is seen as the dawn of a new age, as the first serious Arab bid for independence and unity. Some scholars, however, have questioned the link between the revolt and Arab nationalism. They point out that the original terms on which the revolt was launched had little to do with Arab nationalism.3 Islam, according to this view, featured much more prominently than nationalism in its original aims. All nationalist movements dwell on the past, and in the case of the Arabs the past was necessarily Islamic. William Cleveland has categorically asserted that the revolt ‘was proclaimed in the name of preserving Islam, not in the name of Arabism or the Arab nation’.4
In diplomatic terms, however, as its origins make clear beyond doubt, the Arab Revolt was in essence an Anglo–Hashemite plot. Britain financed the revolt as well as supplying arms, provisions, direct artillery support and experts in desert warfare, among whom was T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence did more than any other man to glorify the revolt and to advertise its military successes. He also surrounded it with a romantic aura by portraying it as the product of a natural affinity between the British and the Arabs, or at least the ‘real’ Arabs, the nomads of the Arabian Desert.5 The French, on the other hand, took a cynical view of the Arab Revolt from start to finish, dismissing it as British imperialism in Arab headgear.
The Hashemites promised much more than they were able to deliver. After Hussein’s proclamation, only a disappointingly small number of Syrian and Iraqi nationalists flocked to the sharifian banner. Many Syrian notables dissociated themselves from what they saw as treason. The Iraqis had their own leaders; and the Iraqi Shia were particularly apprehensive about the prospect of a Sunni sharif and an outsider taking over their country. (The Sunnis are the leading sect within Islam and strict followers of the teaching of the prophet Muhammad. They differ from the minority Shia sect in doctrine, ritual, law, theology and religious organization.) The Lebanese Christians saw no advantage in exchanging the old Islamic Empire based in Istanbul for a new Islamic Empire, or caliphate, based in the Hijaz. The Egyptians were more hostile than all the others to the idea of separation from the Ottoman Empire and to being ruled from the backward Hijaz. Even in Arabia itself, popular support for the rebellion was nowhere near as enthusiastic or widespread as the British had been led to expect. The Arabian Bedouin and tribesmen who made up the rank and file of the sharifian army were more attracted to British gold than they were to nationalist ideology.
The usual grand narrative of the Arab Revolt, based on T. E. Lawrence’s classic accounts, greatly exaggerates not only its spontaneity, size and scope but also its military value. The first phase was confined to the Hijaz, where Mecca, Taif and Jedda fell in rapid succession to the rebel forces consisting of Hijazi Bedouins commanded by the sharif’s four sons, Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zaid. Three of these groups laid siege to Medina and were tied down there until the end of the war, contributing to the war effort largely by sabotaging the Hijaz Railway, the main Turkish supply route to Hijaz, Asir and Yemen. Only Faisal’s unit assisted the British offensive in Palestine and Syria, and, on 1 October 1918, entered Damascus first and hoisted the Arab flag.
The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers hastened its final dissolution, and by the time the war ended it had lost its Arab provinces. After the end of the war, the Hashemite princes who headed ‘the revolt in the desert’ became the leading spokesmen for the Arab national cause at the 1919 Versailles peace conference and in the settlement following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. For their contribution to the Allied war effort against the Turks, Britain had promised, or half promised, to support Arab independence. But the territorial limits governing this promise had been left so ineptly and obscurely defined in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence that a long and bitter wrangle ensued between the two sides – especially over the disposition of Palestine.
Another major uncertainty surrounded the regime and institutions to be installed in the Arab areas that were indisputably marked for independence. Should this independence take the form of a united kingdom, a federation or an alliance between independent states? Was Britain committed only to the recognition of Arab independence or also to Hashemite rule over these areas? One searches in vain for answers or even clues to these questions in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence. Sharif Hussein himself regarded Arab unity as synonymous with his own kingship and as an empty phrase unless so regarded; it meant little to him except as a means to personal aggrandizement. He aspired to head a united Arab kingdom consisting of the Arabian peninsula, Greater Syria and Iraq, with his sons acting as viceroys, and such was his impatience that within four months of the outbreak of the revolt he proclaimed himself ‘King of the Arab Countries’. At first the British refused to recognize him, and, when they eventually did so, it was only as king of the Hijaz.
The task of fashioning a new political order in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was further complicated by other commitments undertaken by the British government after the initiation of its clandestine exchanges with the sharif of Mecca. The first was an agreement signed in secret by Britain and France in May 1916 and named after its chief negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes and Charles François George Picot. Under the terms of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the whole Fertile Crescent, comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, was divided into British and French spheres of influence. Syria and Lebanon were in the French sphere of influence, while Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine fell into the British sphere. Each sphere was in turn divided into two zones, one to be placed under direct British or French rule and the other turned into semi-independent Arab states or a confederation of states. France and Britain were to supply advisers and enjoy economic privileges in the Arab states that would emerge within their respective spheres. In short, this was an agreement, in the event of an Allied victory, to divide the spoils of war without any reference to the wishes of the local inhabitants.
Were Britain’s promises to the sharif of Mecca compatible with those they made to the French? Elie Kedourie has argued that the Sykes–Picot Agreement did not violate the commitments contained in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence because the latter were so vague and qualified.6 T. E. Lawrence, who was involved at the sharp end in Britain’s wartime diplomacy, was much less charitable. According to him, ‘Sir Henry [McMahon] was England’s right-hand man in the Middle East till the Arab Revolt was an established event. Sir Mark Sykes was the left hand: and if the Foreign Office had kept itself and its hands mutually informed our reputation for honesty would not have suffered as it did.’7
Another promise made by the British government during the war was to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Unlike the promise to Hussein and the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration was not a secret but a public pledge. On 2 November 1917 Arthur Balfour, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, issued the following statement:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Was Britain’s promise to the Zionists compatible with its earlier promise to the sharif of Mecca? Again, there is a vast scholarly literature on the subject. One Israeli historian has denied that Palestine was a twice-promised land and concluded that the charges of fraudulence and deception levelled against the British after the war are largely groundless.8 Groundless or not, these charges acquired the status of dogma not only in the eyes of Arab nationalists but, much more surprisingly, in the eyes of most British officials as well.9 My own view is that the Balfour Declaration was one of the worst mistakes in British foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. It involved a monumental injustice to the Palestine Arabs and sowed the seeds of a never-ending conflict in the Middle East.
In the case of Hussein bin Ali, who was proclaimed and recognized in October 1916 as king of the Hijaz, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the initial response to the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent attitude. When news of the declaration reached Hussein, he was greatly disturbed by it and asked Britain to clarify its meaning. Whitehall met this request by the dispatch of Commander D. G. Hogarth, one of the heads of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, who arrived in Jedda in the first week of January 1918 for a series of interviews with King Hussein. ‘Hogarth’s Message’, as it came to be known, reaffirmed the Allies’ determination that ‘the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world.’ So far as Palestine was concerned, Britain was ‘determined that no people shall be subject to another’. Britain noted and supported the aspiration of the Jews to return to Palestine but only in so far as this was compatible with ‘the freedom of the existing population, both economic and political’.10
Hogarth’s Message is crucial for understanding King Hussein’s attitude to the Balfour Declaration. Following the meetings in Jedda, Hussein thought that he had Britain’s assurance that the settlement of the Jews in Palestine would not conflict with Arab independence in that country. This explains his initial silence in public and his private efforts to allay the anxieties of his sons. Hussein had great respect for the Jews, seeing them, in keeping with the Koran, as ‘the People of the Book’, as monotheists with a prophetic scripture. He was not opposed to the settlement of Jews in Palestine and even welcomed it on religious and on humanitarian grounds. He was, however, emphatically opposed to a Zionist takeover of the area. Hogarth gave him a solemn pledge that Britain would respect not only the economic but also the political freedom of the Arab population. When Britain subsequently refused to recognize Arab independence in Palestine, Hussein felt betrayed and accused Britain of breach of faith.11
If the disenchantment of Hussein and his sons with Britain was gradual, the hostility of the Arab nationalists towards Britain on account of the Balfour Declaration was immediate and unremitting.12 The Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration became the two basic points of reference in all the Arab nationalist discourse that followed – enduring symbols of the cynicism and selfishness of the Western powers, of their disregard for Arab rights, of their sinister design to keep the Arabs divided and weak, and, worst of all, of their support for the Zionist intruders into Palestine. Zionism itself came to be considered not as the national liberation movement of the Jews but as an outpost of European imperialism in the Middle East.
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