Reflections on the Death of King Hussein
Analysis:
King Hussein's death causes us to reflect on the origins of
Jordan and the other nation-states in the region. Their origins
help explain their present and future. The region's nation-
states have their origins in political accident, confusion and
hidden agendas. Hussein of the Hashemites, came from a family
that had governed Mecca for seven hundred years. Driven out by
the Saud tribe, Hussein's mission was to remain alive and in
power so that he or his heirs could one day return and reclaim
this place of honor. Palestinian issues, Israel, Iraq were for
him tactical issues, matters of transitory importance. He did
not expect to return in his life or even his children's, but
memory is long among the Hashemites and everyone else in the
region. Long memory and patience marked King Hussein's life.
Men who never forget and are infinitely patient are unlikely to
be willing to make lasting peace, no matter what they say. They
will simply wait and remember. That is why there can never be
more peace in the Middle East than there is now. This is as good
as it gets.
Analysis:
The death of King Hussein causes us to reflect about the origins
of Jordan as well as those of other countries in the region.
When we think about these things we realize that God truly has a
marvelous sense of humor. The history of the region in the
twentieth century can only be described as both absurd and
deadly. Most important, in spite of King Hussein's apparently
sincere dedication to the concept, the idea of a comprehensive
Middle Eastern peace should be met with gales of laughter from
all reasonable people. Rather than thinking about the future as
we usually do, the death of Hussein of the Hashemite is an
occasion to reflect on the past.
Until the end of World War I, Ottoman Turks ruled the area from
the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, as well as the entire
Saudi peninsula. Allied with Germany, the Ottomans struggled to
hold on to an empire that had been in retreat for centuries. The
British badly wanted to defeat the Ottomans. Having built the
Suez Canal, which gave them rapid access to India and China, they
had to protect it. They needed to secure the sea-lanes of the
eastern Mediterranean and drive the Turks away from the Canal and
its approaches. The British conducted a series of campaigns to
break the Turks, including the disastrous Gallipoli landings and
the more successful invasion of the province of Syria by General
Allenby, who was supported by a Bedouin army recruited from the
Arabian peninsula. Controlled by British intelligence and
special operations teams, including that of the famous Lawrence
of Arabia, they first loosened Turkish control over Arabia and
then supported Allenby's attack on Jerusalem and Damascus. King
Hussein's tribe, the Hashemite, was the engine behind the
operation.
The British were allied with the French, which meant they had to
share the spoils of war. The British kept Iraq and the Arabian
Peninsula for themselves. They did agree to divide the Ottoman
province of Syria, which contained today's Israel, Jordan,
Lebanon and Syria. The division, codified in the then secret
Sykes-Picot agreement, was extraordinarily arbitrary. A line was
drawn through the province. Everything to the north would be
French. Everything to the south would be British.
The French had been making trouble in this area since the 1880s,
when they had intruded into another Lebanese civil war, siding
with Christian factions. The French owed the Christians a great
deal. They also wanted to cement their control of the region by
creating a pro-French Christian state. The Christians were at
the time in the majority (they no longer are), but the area
reserved for them contained Shiite, Sunni, and Alawite Muslims,
Druse, and a wide variety of Christians. The religious groups
were further divided among themselves along clan lines, with some
of the bitterest hatreds dividing clans of the same religion.
The nation was a contrivance without any reality. It didn't even
have a real name, so they named it after a prominent geographic
feature, Mount Lebanon. It was as good a name as any.
Fortunately, the French ran out of ideas for improvements and
left the rest of Syria intact, not even changing its name. They
did, however, get rid of the Hashemite King the British had
selected. The British gave him the consolation prize of the
Iraqi throne.
The British were busy double-crossing everyone. They had made
many promises to many people. They had promised various
competing Bedouin tribes that they would be given responsibility
for Mecca, just as they promised in the Balfour Declaration that
they would give the Jews a homeland while they also promised the
Arabs that they would control their own destiny. They were
particularly close to King Hussein's tribe, the Hashemites, who
had governed Mecca since the 13th century. Having spearheaded
the British campaign against the Ottomans, you might have thought
that the Hashemites were in good shape. Unfortunately, a rapidly
rising Bedouin tribe, the Saud who were Wahabi Moslems, had
become more powerful than the Hashemite, and the British double-
crossed the Hashemites, turning the Arabian peninsula and the
guardianship of Mecca over to them.
The British had to figure out what to do with the Hashemites.
The royal family could be given thrones, but the tribe itself had
to get out of Arabia, since they would be torn apart by the Sauds
or, at the very least, destabilize the region. The British
decided to settle them in the middle of nowhere. There was not a
whole lot east of the Jordan River, so the British decided to put
them there. The region had no name, since it was primarily a
wasteland of little interest to anyone. So they named it for
where it was -- the other side of the Jordan or, to be fancy,
Trans-Jordan. After independence in 1948, the word "trans" was
dropped out and the modern state of Jordan or, to be more
precise, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was born as a homeland
for a displaced band of Bedouin with nowhere else to go.
The rest of the "mandate" was left with the same name it had when
it was a county within the Ottoman province of Syria, Filistina,
after the Biblical people that produced Goliath. The British
kept that name and it became bastardized into English as
Palestine. And so the modern map of the region was born.
Palestine consisted of small villages surviving on agriculture
and small merchants. Divided among Moslem, Christian, Druse and
Jewish communities, much of the land was owned by absentee
landlords. The people of Palestine had as much in common with
the Bedouins across the river as a New Yorker has with a Montana
cowboy -- enough not to like each other a lot and not to
understand each other at all. They were now all neighbors.
So, the French invented Lebanon, the British invented Jordan, a
county became Palestine, and the Syrians claimed everything.
Then the Jews showed up. If things weren't wild enough before,
Jewish intellectuals from Poland, who argued the finer points of
German philosophy, decided to come and farm in the middle of this
insanity. The fact that they couldn't speak Arabic merely added
to their charm, since they also knew nothing about farming. Jews
living in London purchased the land from Arabs living in Paris
and Cairo, thereby throwing people who had farmed the land for
generations off their land. Out of this, the State of Israel was
born.
There is no point in going on. You get the picture.
The Jews settled primarily along the coastal plain as well as in
the Galilee. There were relatively few settlements in what is
today the West Bank. The Lebanese were not unhappy with creation
of Israel, since they were Christian and liked anything that gave
the Moslems a headache. The Hashemites were not too unhappy
either. They had never really gotten along with their
Palestinian brothers. After the War of Independence in 1948, the
West Bank remained under Arab rule. Since at that time no one
had yet thought of an independent Palestine (the main thinking
was that Palestine belonged to Syria), governance of the West
Bank fell to the only Arab country physically connected to it,
the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
This was big trouble for the Jordanians, since the Hashemites
didn't like the Palestinians and the Palestinians didn't like the
Hashemites. Hussein's grandfather held secret talks with the
Israelis on a peace settlement designed to keep the Palestinians
under control. Unfortunately for him, the peace talks didn't
stay secret and he was assassinated. From 1948 until 1967,
Hussein, who succeeded his grandfather, was in constant danger
from the Palestinians. In many ways he welcomed the Israeli
conquest of the West Bank, since it made the Palestinians their
problem rather than his. Unfortunately for him, there were
masses of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan after 1967, who
decided that it was time to get rid of the Hashemites and create
their own state. They tried to do just that in September 1970.
Unfortunately for them, the Bedouin Army that had been trained by
the British not only defeated the Palestinians but conducted a
brutal massacre, securing the Hashemite throne from its only real
threat, the Palestinians.
The "Black September" massacre had two effects. It directly
spawned a wave of Palestinian terrorism and it turned King
Hussein into a wise statesman. Having taken care of his
Palestinian problem, he could now take the long view. In fact,
the last thing Hussein wanted to see was a Palestinian state.
Such a state, bordered by Israel and Jordan, would inevitably
seek to topple the Hashemite throne in order to break out of an
impossible encirclement. Hussein's brilliance was to appear to be
an urbane man and wise ruler utterly dedicated to peace while
doing everything possible to prevent the emergence of an
independent Palestinian state and shifting the blame to Israel.
We suspect that he was much relieved, if not very surprised, when
the Oslo Accords fell apart.
The last thing Hussein wanted was Yasir Arafat feeling hemmed in
on the other side of the Jordan. His mortal enemies, the Saudis,
still rule Arabia (and we wonder how much Hussein's support for
Iraq in 1990 had to do with dreams of a return to Mecca after the
defeat of the Saudis). Syria still claims the entire old Ottoman
province including Jordan. No one knows what Saddam in Iraq will
do next. Hussein's exiled Hashemites had more than enough to
worry about. The last thing he wanted to see was an independent
Palestinian state threatening his throne in the year 2000 as it
had in 1970. So he acted the peace maker at the Wye Plantation
meeting, content with the knowledge that nothing could possibly
come of any of it.
King Hussein's life and the recent history of the Hashemites
embody the wildly improbable history of the region. The heir to
seven centuries of Bedouin nobility, his presence in Amman was
pure accident and in many ways, utterly temporary. The
Hashemites eyes were always on Mecca and the usurper Saudis.
Israel, Palestine and all the rest were detours in Hashemite
history. Hussein was patient, but then everyone in the region
has learned to be patient. Patience and long memories are part
of the region's geopolitics, the one common denominator of all
nations and states in the region, regardless of the name they
were given by the last duplicitous conqueror.
The point to all of this is that there are no permanent solutions
to the region's problems. All of the current structures are
merely temporary and artificial, some without any real substance
at all. How does one make peace in Lebanon when Lebanon is
neither a nation nor a state? How can Syria, which sees itself
as the rightful heir to Jordan, Israel and Lebanon, give up its
inheritance without giving up its identity? How can Israel,
which cannot decide if it is the Third Temple or a place to
produce low-cost microprocessors, make a lasting peace with a
Jordan whose real interest is to dream of a return to Mecca and
700 years of greatness?
Hussein's death reminds us that there is nothing permanent in
this region save perpetual instability. What we have now is as
good as it will ever get. This is something that Hussein
understood. He did not believe in lasting solutions. He
believed in permanent, unchanging interests, the patience to wait
until they become possible, and the skill to stay in power to
take advantage of the day, when it comes. Hussein managed to die
while still king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. That in
itself was his great achievement. There were many times that
people would have given long odds against him pulling that off.
Hussein endured, survived, waited and remembered. The rest was
meant for speeches at Harvard University.
Hussein's secret mission was to survive and to never forget his
lost inheritance. That is everyone's secret mission in the
region. That means tension, conspiracy and war. The best that
can be hoped for is temporary periods of relatively little
mayhem. Peace is out of the question. Many conquerors have come
into this region from the outside, dreaming of permanent empire.
They all have gone away, many broken by the experience. American
dreams of permanent, stable arrangements would be funny, if they
weren't so dangerous.
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