Jordan

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JORDAN

The territory that is now Jordan was, like most of the Arab East, under Ottoman rule until World War I. During the war, the British encouraged the Arabs, under the leadership of Husayn ibn Ali al-Hashim, sharif of Mecca and amir (after 1917, king) of the Hijaz (western Arabia), to rebel against the Ottomans.

In 1920, his son Faysal, who had been chosen by local notables to be king of Syria, was expelled by the French, who held a League of Nations mandate over that country. The next year Faysal's older brother Abdullah led an army into Transjordan and established himself at Amman, with the intention of moving to restore Faysal in Syria. The British, who held a mandate over Palestine and Transjordan, persuaded him to remain in Amman and agreed to recognize him as ruler there (at the same time they installed Faysal as king of Iraq). By treaty in 1923, Abdullah agreed to accept this arrangement and became Emir Abdullah I of an autonomous emirate of Transjordan (in which the British controlled finance, the military, and foreign relations). In 1946 the country became nominally independent, and declared itself the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, and Abdullah king. A treaty of 1948, however, preserved Britain's dominating presence in the country. It supplied financial aid and stationed troops there; in addition, Jordan's army, known as the Arab Legion (al-Jaysh al-Arabi), continued to be commanded and largely run by British officers.

Abdullah also wished to rule Palestine, or as much of it as possible. This put him in conflict with the rising Palestinian nationalist movement, particularly the Arab Higher Committee headed by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and from the early 1920s he maintained a secret relationship with the Zionist leadership designed to further their mutual interest in thwarting Palestinian aspirations. In November 1947, shortly before the United Nations adopted a resolution partitioning Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian states, the king and the Jewish Agency reached an agreement to divide Palestine between them—the Zionists would establish their state, Abdullah would recongnize it and annex the "Arab part of Palestine" to Jordan, and there would be no Palestinian state. Although matters did not go as Abdullah expected—he did not wish to fight a war against the Zionists, but he was subject to Arab pressures—the truce lines at the end of the Arab-Israel War of 1948—1949 left Jordanian forces in control of a substantial portion of Palestine. On 3 April 1949, the Rhodes armistice agreement ratified this control, and a year later Jordan officially annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank by an Act of Union. Abdullah wanted to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel, but Arab pressure prevented him from doing so.

On 20 July 1951, the king was assassinated by a Palestinian at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. His son Talal succeeded him but abdicated in favor of his own son, Hussein, on 11 August 1952. Resentment of Britain; anti-Hashimite and Nasserist-Arab nationalist sentiment (the Egyptian revolution had overthrown a British-associated monarchy in 1952, and its leader was idolized in the Arab world); the presence of Palestinians in the kingdom (half to two-thirds of the population was Palestinian, including more than 800,000 refugees from the 1948 war); and the continuing Palestine crisis—including frequent Israeli incursions into the West Bank—shaped the political situation at the time Hussein came to power. In 1954 there was major public unrest when general elections were rigged by the Hashimite government. In 1955, under public pressure, the king could not sign on to the Baghdad Pact, initiated by Britain and the United States. On 14 December 1955, Jordan was admitted to the UN. In March 1956, also under public pressure, the king dismissed Sir John Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion (and changed its name), and announced new elections. These took place in October 1956, shortly before the Suez War, and resulted in the installation of a left-leaning nationalist government.

British collaboration with Israel in the attack on Egypt inspired the end of Jordan's subordinate relationship with Britain. In January 1957, Jordan entered the Arab Solidarity Agreement with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, which provided for military cooperation as well as financial assistance to Jordan. In March the government cancelled the 1948 treaty with Britain and negotiated a new one, under which Britain ended its subsidies, turned over its bases, and withdrew its troops. Believing that his Nasserist government was planning to abolish the monarchy, however, Hussein dismissed it in April 1957. After a coup d'etat by the Nasserist army commander was squelched, the newly appointed conservative government dissolved parliament and banned political parties. From this time Hussein took the lead in governing the country himself. The Arab Solidarity Pact having fallen apart almost immediately, the king, claiming to be menaced by Communism, requested and received aid from the United States, which aroused fierce opposition to him in the country. In return for the aid he allowed American and British intelligence agencies to operate freely in Jordan, and they helped him against his foreign and domestic opposition, which included Palestinians, nationalist Jordanians, Nasserists, and pan-Arabists.

At the beginning of February 1958, following the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) by Syria and Egypt, Hussein decided, with his cousin Faysal II of Iraq, to form the Arab Union, which ended the following July when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Faysal was assassinated. Fearing similar events in Jordan, Hussein's government declared martial law; the United States began supplying Jordan with oil, and Britain sent in troops. On 10 November 1958 Hussein himself escaped an assassination attempt while flying to Switzerland, when a Syrian plane tried to force his down. In August 1960 Hussein's prime minister was assassinated in his office; on 29 August the king escaped from an attack directed against him. The plot was traced to Syria. On 30 May 1967, with regional tension rising, Jordan signed a military defense accord with Egypt and Syria, leading to the 1967 war with Israel, resulting in the loss of the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the arrival of almost 350,000 newly uprooted Palestinian refugees in the kingdom.

While favoring a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel, King Hussein was blocked by the refusal of Arab countries, which, by way of compensation, accorded him significant financial aid, principally from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. On 16 February 1968, following new reprisals by the Israeli army in Jordanian territory, he condemned armed actions by the Palestinian resistance, but after the Battle of Karama in March 1968, activities by Palestinian guerrillas (fida?iyyun) in Jordan increased. There was fighting between the Jordanian army and Palestinian organizations, who by then were trying to bring down the Hashimite regime. The situation culminated in what has come to be known as Black September 1970. Hussein installed a military government and the army launched a massive attack on the Palestinian fighters, killing about four thousand of them in ten days—and defeating a Syrian force that had been sent to help them—until a truce was negotiated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser at the behest of the League of Arab States. After renewed fighting in July 1971 the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and other groups were expelled to Lebanon, and all the Palestinian civil organizations that had made up the Palestinian state-within-a-state were shut down. In November 1971, Jordan's prime minister, visiting Cairo, was assassinated by the Palestinian group Black September. Jordan became even more isolated in the Arab world because of an economic crisis caused by the halting of Arab financial help, as well as because of the king's proposed project for a Jordanian-Palestinian federation with the West Bank, to be called the United Arab Kingdom, which he announced on 15 March 1972. This was rejected the next month by the Palestine National Council (PNC). In November, Jordanian security services uncovered a conspiracy organized by Jordanian officers to overthrow the king.

During the October 1973 war against Israel, under the influence of the United States, Jordan remained neutral when the conflict started, although it did send two armored brigades to reinforce the Syrian front. On 26 October 1974, King Hussein opposed the decision of the Arab League summit meeting in Rabat recognizing the PLO as "sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" and supporting an independent Palestinian state in liberated territory. He accepted the decision, however, and dissolved parliament, half of whose constituencies were in the West Bank. He also maintained Jordanian civil and administrative ties to the West Bank. In 1977, the trip by the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, to Jerusalem led to a reconciliation between King Hussein and Yasir Arafat. Both opposed the establishment of autonomous regimes under Israeli control for the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and both wanted Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since 1967. In 1978 Hussein declined to participate in the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt or endorse the 1979 peace treaty, in spite of the secret meetings that he had been conducting for years with Israeli leaders. Consequently, at the Arab summit in Baghdad in September 1980 the Gulf states decided to accord some significant financial help to Jordan. From 1980 through 1988, Hussein supported Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, which allowed his kingdom to benefit from trade with Iraq. In 1981 he negotiated an arms deal with the Soviet Union, which was also supplying Iraq. In 1984 Hussein allowed parliament to reopen, and Jordan began dealing with Egypt again despite the Arab League ban that had been imposed after the 1979 treaty. At the summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Casablanca in January 1984, Jordan supported the return of Egypt to the Arab community.

In 1985 Hussein allowed the PNC to meet in Amman. He came to an agreement with the PLO regarding a coordinated approach to a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, but differences developed—partly over the loyalties of expatriate Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship—and it was abandoned by 1987. In December 1987 the Intifada began in the occupied territories and in July 1988, fearing the violence would spill across the Jordan River, Hussein renounced all legal and administrative claims and responsibilities in the West Bank (this included the cancellation of the payment of salaries of public officials and of the Jordanian citizenship of all West Bank Palestinians). This move gave the PLO complete responsibility for Palestinian interests. During the Gulf Crisis in 1990, Hussein did not support the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but refused to join the anti-Iraq coalition. At the Arab League on 3 August 1990, Jordan abstained from voting on the resolution condemning Iraq, but Hussein did support the League's position that the crisis should be resolved by negotiation under Arab auspices, and rejecting foreign intervention. When the Arab League modified this position a week later, approving the Gulf states' right to self-defense and implicitly approving their use of outside forces, Jordan voted in favor but expressed "reservations"—in effect, chose to remain neutral.

The end of the Gulf War in 1991 led to the organization of the Madrid Conference on Middle East peace, which opened on 30 October 1991. Hussein agreed to the PLO's inclusion in the Jordanian delegation, since the Israelis refused to deal with it directly. On 14 September 1993, following the signature of the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel and Jordan signed an agreement in Washington on future peace negotiations. On 18 July 1994, the first formal peace parley took place, and on 26 October 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty. This accord aroused strong opposition in Jordan, as did the accords between Israel and the PLO. Some Jordanians felt that Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship, who presumably would be leaving for a projected Palestinian state, should not be allowed to vote; some Jordanians still favored annexation of the West Bank to Jordan. Many Palestinians still suspected Hashimite friendliness with Israel. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, however, Jordan since 1988 has been an advocate of Palestinian statehood, as well as a necessary intermediary.

In February 1996, there was a change in Jordan's previously friendly relations with Iraq when the king authorized the opening of the office of an Iraqi opposition group in the Jordanian capital. On 5 June 1996, after the coming to power in Israel of a Likud government opposed to the Oslo Accords, Hussein organized, with Yasir Arafat and Husni Mubarak, a mini summit to reaffirm his support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 3 August, Jordan resumed diplomatic relations with Syria, which had been interrupted by the Israeli-Jordanian peace accord. On 6 August, Hussein met with the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and five days later, he was in Saudi Arabia for the resumption of Jordanian-Saudi relations, interrupted since the Gulf War. On 15 October, he met Yasir Arafat in Jericho, to show his support in the current negotiations with Israel over Hebron, which were at a stalemate. On 12 January 1997, he helped break the stalemate when he mediated an accord on the redeployment of Israeli troops. In August 1998, his health failing, Hussein delegated most of his power to his brother Hassan, and left for the United States for medical treatment. While there, he lent his assistance to the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks at Wye River Plantation in October. Returning to Amman in January 1999, he settled the succession on his son Abdullah. He died on 7 February 1999.

The new king, Abdullah II, spent his first months traveling extensively and making himself known on the international political scene. On 5 September Abdullah signed onto an accord developed at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, between Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, that was thought to open the way to negotiations for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. A few days later Jordan resumed relations with Kuwait, broken off since the Gulf War. Domestically, Abdullah issued a warning to Jordanian Islamists opposed to peace with Israel and announced his intention of continuing the process of democratization begun ten years previously. On 25 November, he declared that Israel should renounce its territorial ambitions in the eastern sector of Jerusalem and accept the return of Palestinian refugees in order to attain a durable peace in the Middle East. On 22 August 2000, he made his first official visit to Tel Aviv, where he was received by Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Before his trip Abdullah had talked with Yasir Arafat and had reaffirmed to him Jordanian support for the Palestinian cause. The al-Aqsa Intifada, however, which began in September 2000, has reduced Jordan's ability to mediate, as well as threatened the peace within Jordan. The king implicitly supported the U.S. campaign to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2002–2003, but opposed the war, refusing U.S. forces the use of Jordanian airspace.

In June 2003 Abdullah hosted the Aqaba Summit, which was intended to work out the means of implementing the Road Map plan put forth that April by the so-called Quartet. The king met privately with Ariel Sharon in Israel in March 2004 to discuss the "separation wall" Israel was building around Palestinian areas in the West Bank; aside from his opposition to the wall as inflammatory, he was concerned that it would eventually cause a mass movement of new Palestinian refugees into Jordan, resulting in economic stress and upsetting the demographic balance between Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians that already threatens the political stability of the country. The international context of Jordanian politics in 2004 is largely shaped by the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories and by the American "war on terror." The king, concerned mainly with the survival of the Hashimite regime and heavily dependent on aid from the West, remains active in his attempts to encourage a political settlement for the Palestine-Israel issue while cooperating with the United States.