Lion of Jordan The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace

by Shlaim, Avi

• ISBN13: 9781400078288
• ISBN10: 1400078288
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-06
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

The first major account of the life of an extraordinary soldier and statesman, King Hussein of Jordan. Throughout his long reign (19531999), Hussein remained a dominant figure inMiddle Eastern politics and a consistent proponent of peace with Israel. For over forty years he walked a tightrope between Palestinians and Arab radicals on the one hand and Israel on the other. Avi Shlaim reveals that Hussein initiated a secret dialogue with Israel in 1963 and spent over a thousand hours in talks with countless Israeli officials. Shlaim expertly reconstructs this dialogue from previously untapped records and first-hand accounts, significantly rewriting the history of the Middle East over the past fifty years and shedding light on the far-reaching impact of Hussein's leadership.

Author Biography

Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945, grew up in Israel, and studied at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of St. Antony’s College and a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006. His books include Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (winner of the Political Studies Association’s 1988 WJM Mackenzie Prize); The Politics of Partition; War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History; and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. He lives in Oxford.

Table of Contents

List of Maps	p. ix
List of Illustrations	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
The Hashemite Heritage	p. 3
Murder of a Mentor	p. 40
The Making of a King	p. 61
The Baghdad Pact Fiasco	p. 77
he Dismissal of Glubb	p. 99
The Liberal Experiment	p. 113
A Royal Coup	p. 131
The Year of Revolution	p. 155
Arab Foes and Jewish Friends	p. 174
The Palestinian Challenge	p. 204
The Road to War	p. 225
Picking Up the Pieces	p. 255
Dialogue Across the Battle Lines	p. 281
Civil War	p. 315
The United Arab Kingdom Plan	p. 346
The October War	p. 361
The Road to Rabat	p. 376
The Camp David Accords	p. 396
Lebanon and the Reagan Plan	p. 412
Peace Partnership with the PLO	p. 428
The London Agreement	p. 446
Intifada and Disengagement	p. 460
The Gulf Crisis and War	p. 485
From Madrid to Oslo	p. 514
Peace Treaty	p. 539
The King's Peace	p. 554
Collision Course	p. 567
The Last Journey	p. 589
Epilogue: The Life and Legacy	p. 616
Notes	p. 624
Jordanian Secret Meetings with Israeli Officials	p. 671
The Hashemite Dynasty	p. 673
Chronology	p. 674
Interviews	p. 681
Bibliography	p. 685
Index	p. 696
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1. The Hashemite Heritage  

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" passed to the next in line within the family. 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

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Excerpted from Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim
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