The Least Unreasonable Arab
(See Cover)
Cairo's semiofficial newspaper Al Ahram had some extraordinary news for its readers last week. "The battle is still going on," it proclaimed. "Victory is ours." In Damascus, yellow sandbags were piled high around government buildings to protect them from attack, and signs on many walls promised: WE SHALL DESTROY THE ENEMY. The Arabs clamored for a change in the name of the American University in both Beirut and Cairo to Palestine University, and Algeria compiled a list of "pro-Zionist" movie stars--including Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor and Harry Belafonte--and banned their films. On the banks of the Suez Canal, Egyptian commandos slipped across the canal nightly to harass the Israelis until finally, at week's end, they precipitated a pitched battle with Israeli forces.
Though it recently suffered one of the worst military defeats in modern history, the Arab world does not seem to have awakened to the reality. Instead of trying to salvage what they can, the Arabs are busy blaming just about everybody but themselves for the fact that great gobs of their territory lie in Israeli hands. They are irritated with Russia for suggesting that they will have to be more reasonable as a condition of more economic aid. They are dismayed as they listen day after day to Israeli politicians talk of imposing ever tougher terms for a settlement. They curse the U.S. and Britain.
Last week they reacted with deep bitterness to the United Nations' failure to pass any resolution asking for an Israeli pullout from the conquered territory. The Palestine Liberation Organization even suggested that the Arabs set up their own rival U.N. with Red China, and Damascus radio said: "To hell with the U.N." More than a month after the war had ended, none of this brought the Arabs any closer to solving their basic problem in the war's aftermath: how to come back from defeat and live with a stronger Israel that is clearly here to stay, whether they like it or not.
Privately Disgusted. Amid all the fantasies, delusions, threats and confusions, the most realistic--or least unreasonable--voice that emanated from the Arab world was that of Jordan's King Hussein, whose country fought the hardest and lost the most in the war against Israel. Hussein offered no alibis, made no excuses, used no intemperate language. He is privately disgusted at the postwar performance of his fellow Arabs: their invective, their whining--they considered it unfair of Israel to have used pilots who spoke Arabic to confuse their foes--and their wild threats to fight again tomorrow. "It is apparent," said Hussein, "that we have not yet learned well enough how to use the weapons of modern warfare."
While his brother Arab losers looked to Moscow for aid and affection, Hussein last month set out purposely for Washington and Western Europe, stressing his continued friendship with the West and asking for political, economic and military support to rebuild his land. "We have made many mistakes in the past," he said, "partly because we have failed to present our case properly." After speaking at the United Nations, Hussein visited Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, Charles de Gaulle and Pope Paul VI, trying to convince the world that the Arabs' case is more reasonable than most Arabs make it sound and--not incidentally--that he is the best hope for moderation and realism in the Arab world.
Hussein also had another, more dangerous mission. During his trip, he talked often and long with the leaders or top diplomats of most Arab states, seeking to persuade them to accept a message that has up to now been pure heresy in Arabia: that the time has come for the Arabs to make their peace with Israel.
Starting Point. Hussein's reputation in Jordan and the Arab world is higher than ever before because he was the only Arab ruler to go to the front with his troops. Taking advantage of this, he is trying to get the Arab nations to hold a summit meeting later this month, hoping that he can convince them that they must accept Israel's right to existence as a starting point for negotiations. "We either come out better off now as the result of genuine efforts of all of us to face up to things, or we face some extremely serious possibilities of deterioration in the Arab world," he says. "Even our identity, our ability to maintain ourselves as nations is involved."
It is by no means clear that Hussein can bring the Arab leaders together even to talk about peace. Most moderate Arab nations favor the idea, but Nasser has hemmed and hawed. Algeria's Boumediene, whose militant cries during the war have made him a rival of Nasser for leadership of the Arab left, turned down a suggestion that the meeting take place in Algiers because "there are some Arabs I wouldn't want to set foot in my country." Syrian Information Minister Mohamed Zubi sneered that "the only way to forge Arab unity is through struggle and not summitry."
Still, Hussein believes that if he can only bring the summit off, he has at least a fighting chance to convince the leftist leaders--who are, after all, under pressure from Russia--to listen to reason. "We Jordanians might be in a position to influence their thinking," he says. If not, Hussein intends to ask for their tacit consent for Jordan's coming to terms with Israel alone. If even their neutrality is denied him, Hussein may just go ahead without the consent of his fellow Arab leaders. "If it is absolutely impossible to reach agreement," says a close aide of Hussein's, "then each country will have to deal with the situation as it sees best. We are certainly going to refuse to have our hands tied when any country--Arab or otherwise--behaves negatively. We have the courage to do what is necessary."
Different Ruler. Jordan also has a pressing necessity to act courageously. Hero or not, Hussein cannot long hope to survive, at least as a moderate, without getting the west bank of his country back. Palestinian Jordan, which the Israelis now hold, is the most prosperous part of his land. It contains nearly a third of the arable farm land, nearly half the population--and Jerusalem. With U.S. and British aid, long-range development programs and expanded tourism, Hussein had expected to make his country self-supporting by 1971. Without the west bank, however, and the strong tourist revenues from the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, there is little possibility that Jordan can ever develop a really viable economy.
But Hussein's dilemma extends far beyond the economy. He is a Bedouin King ruling a land populated largely by Palestinians--a sophisticated people who look down on Bedouins as unreliable nomads. His country is hemmed in on three sides by states that have often attacked him. To the east is Iraq, where his Hashemite cousin, King Feisal, was killed and the monarchy abolished in 1958. To the north is rabid, leftist Syria, which last sent an assassination team out to kill him in May and blew up a Jordanian border post only a week before the war began. To the west is Israel, with which Jordan has a longer border than any Arab country. The divisions between the conservative, pro-Western Hussein and the Arab left led by Egypt's President Nasser are so fundamental that the war has just papered them over, not erased them. Hussein has to move with extreme care lest the left seize on his willingness to negotiate with Israel and invite the volatile Palestinians to move against him.
Hussein is an Arab to the core, but he is not at all like most Arab rulers.
A stubby (5 ft. 4 in.), powerfully built man of 31, he is perhaps the world's most active and athletic ruler, relishing racing, flying and any other sport that involves danger and suspense. He can trace his Hashemite dynasty back to the prophet Mohammed, and his ancestors ruled the holy city of Mecca for 37 generations; yet his country is so new (1921) that he is only its third King. Despite his youth and many interests, he rules Jordan with a firm hand, shuffling his Cabinet regularly and on occasion even dissolving Parliament when it refuses to do his bidding. Yet in the 14 years he has been King, Jordan has been transformed from a land of backward nomads to a prospering, growing state --at least until last month's war broke out.
Scorn & Vilification. Hussein did not really want to get into the war, but he must take some of the responsibility for starting it. He carefully abstained from joining the chorus of Arab leftist leaders who demanded that the Jews be driven into the sea, did everything in his power to prevent Arab terrorists from using Jordan as a base. His refusal to cooperate won him scorn and vilification from Nasser and the left. But when the Arab armies began mobilizing on Israel's borders and the cry of jihad filled the air, Hussein figured that if war came he would have to join it or be toppled from his throne by Arab mobs.
Swallowing his pride, he flew off to Cairo, listened to Nasser explain how any war would mean Israel's destruction and signed a mutual-defense pact that put an Egyptian commander in charge of his army in the event of war. The pact improved his standing with the Arab left, but it alarmed the Israelis, who had always considered Hussein a moderate neighbor, as Arabs go, and even had some affection for him.
Within three days, Israel decided to go to war, and attacked Egypt and Syria. Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol sent Hussein frantic messages promising that Israel would not hit Jordan if it would keep out of the battle. But Hussein was trapped by his commitments, and his answer was an artillery barrage and an attack on Israel.
Unlike other Arab politicians--and most Egyptian generals--Hussein spent much of the war at the front. Bumping over fields and back roads in an open army Jeep, he raced from one unit to another urging his troops to hold their ground, several times came under fire from Israeli planes and ground forces. For three sleepless nights and days, he led the Arab Legion in the field, then returned sadly to Amman to announce that the Israelis had wiped out his air force and marched to the River Jordan, and that his men could fight no longer. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he seemed a symbol of courage in the face of odds, and his stature among his fellow Arabs grew overnight. Even Nasser, who had recently called him "a traitor to the Arabs," went out of his way to praise him, and the Syrian regime abruptly stopped referring to him as the "Tom Thumb Tyrant."
Talent for Survival. Hussein from his youth has shown an extraordinary talent for survival. His grandfather, Emir Abdullah, was brought in from Mecca to be the first King of Trans-Jordan, one of the nations created when British Prime Minister Lloyd George carved up the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Abdullah ruled for 30 years--long enough to annex the Arab half of Palestine when Israel was created. In 1951, on a visit to Jerusalem, he was shot down by a Palestinian assassin. Hussein, who was standing beside him, barely escaped: a bullet intended for the young prince ricocheted off a medal on his uniform.
At Abdullah's death, the throne was reluctantly passed to Hussein's father Talal, a hopeless schizophrenic. Talal lasted only eleven months before being packed off to exile in Turkey (where he often forgets that he was ever a King). On Aug. 11, 1952, while Hussein was vacationing with his mother in Switzerland, he received a cable from home. It was addressed to "His Majesty, King Hussein." He did not need to open it. "The title on the envelope told its story," he says. "The message inside was superfluous." At the age of 17, he became Jordan's third King.
Poison Drops. He is lucky to have reached the age of 31. In his 15 years as King, he has lost count of the bullets fired at him, the knives thrust at him and the would-be assassins who were caught before they could act. On one occasion, an assistant palace cook plotted to poison him, but gave himself away by testing the poison on 16 palace cats, all of which died. In 1958, at the controls of his de Havilland Dove on a flight to Europe, he was attacked by Syrian MIGS, escaped only by power-diving toward the desert floor and zigzagging across the border. In 1960, an attack of sinus trouble almost did him in: someone poured acid in his bottle of nose drops. The deed was discovered when a drop spilled on the sink and the King watched in fascination as it burned straight through the chrome fittings.
Hussein takes it all philosophically. "When your time comes to die, you die," he says. "It is God's will." To even up the odds a bit, he wears a .38 pistol tucked in his belt or an armpit holster under his coat. But he obviously enjoys danger. His once cherubic face is now deeply lined, and his hair is flecked with grey, but his sturdy arms and legs are hard with the muscles of a sportsman. He is an inveterate hunter, horseman, scuba diver and deep-sea fisherman. He introduced water-skiing to Jordan, then took up kiting. Above all, he loves speed, and at the wheel of his silver Porsche 911 is usually a winner in Jordanian sports-car events. To the horror of his security men, he is also addicted to motorcycle racing and free-fall parachute jumping. Before the Israelis knocked out his air force, his favorite pastime of all was careening around the sky in a Hawker Hunter jet, practicing aerobatics at nearly 600 m.p.h.
As a boy, even though his grandfather was King, Hussein was far from rich. His family lived in a small, unheated villa in Amman, had to make do on a government stipend of $3,000 a year. The house got so cold one winter, he recalls, that his little sister died of pneumonia. The money once ran so low that his mother had to sell his bicycle in order to pay the bills. His fortunes have since improved. In addition to the three royal residences assigned him, he now has a villa at Aqaba. His real home, however, is a modest converted farmhouse in a suburb of Amman, where he lives with his second wife, Princess Muna (nee Toni Gardiner), a British army officer's daughter whom he married in 1961 after divorcing his first wife. (Toni became a Moslem.) He rises at 7, takes turns with his wife fixing breakfast, plays with their two small sons (Prince Abdullah, 5, and Prince Feisal, 3) until 9, and then helicopters to his office in the Basman Palace atop one of Amman's seven hills.
Royal routine bores him. He receives visitors informally, talks easily and frankly. But he would rather be out of the palace, is constantly showing up to inaugurate schools and factories in towns all over Jordan. He often cruises around Amman alone in his Mercedes, waving at people, feeling the air, occasionally stopping to chat. In his early days, he delighted in disguising himself as a taxi driver, hacking around Amman at night to find out what people really thought of the King. He doesn't have to ask today.
Hollow-Eyed Misery. And yet Jordan has been crippled by the war. The swarm of refugees crossing the Allenby Bridge from the Israel-occupied west bank has been reduced to a trickle, and the Israelis last week reversed their position and announced that refugees would be allowed to return to their homes.
But in Amman, all schoolrooms and mosques have been converted into refugee centers, their furniture stacked in corners, their floors covered with straw mats and the mats in turn covered by ragged, hollow-eyed, miserable people. Ten new tent camps have been opened near Amman, but they are hardly more livable. Hot desert winds whip up sandstorms in the summer afternoons, choking the air and knocking down tents. Camp authorities fear that when winter arrives, at least half of their charges will freeze to death in the cold desert nights.
In the past, Hussein has been the only Arab leader to encourage Palestinian refugees to come out of their camps, get themselves jobs, and take part in the life of the land. But there are no longer any jobs left. Unemployment already stood at 14% before the war, has now hit 25%. Last year, the west bank of the Jordan brought in well over half of the nation's foreign-currency earnings. Without it, Jordan stands to lose most of its tourist earnings of $35 million a year.
The war wrecked Jordan's tough little Arab Legion, left its air force literally without planes. Three-quarters of Jordan's tanks were lost in the fighting, most of them knocked out by Israeli jets. Official casualty figures list more than 6,000 soldiers killed or missing--but there is evidence that perhaps 5,000 of them are hiding out on the west bank, waiting for a chance to steal across the river and return to Amman. Despite his pleas for military aid from the West, Hussein says that he has got no specific commitments from either the U.S. or Britain. Hussein is far from happy with the way the war was fought. "There was not enough coordination, not enough planning, not enough anything," he says. But he is determined to rebuild his forces, with aid or without, as fast as possible.
Throughout the Arab world, the war swirled over armies, economies and political reputations with varying degrees of destruction. Items:
P: EGYPT lost at least three-quarters of its air force, 750 of its 1,000 tanks and enormous quantities of lighter vehicles, weapons and ammunition. A massive Russian airlift--up to 75 Antonov-12 transports a day land at the Cairo airport--has already replaced some of the losses, bringing in an estimated 150 crated jets and a variety of halftracks and trucks. Even if the airlift were main tained at its present rate, it would take at least a year to replace all the equipment that was destroyed or abandoned in the war--and the Russians do not seem anxious to replace the entire $1 billion in lost equipment, preferring to give Egypt a defensive position without making it capable of launching an attack on Israel.
As a result of the Sinai debacle, Gamal Abdel Nasser has tumbled all the way down the prestige pyramid internationally, but he still remains an imposing pharaonic figure to most Arabs. Western experts wonder how long he can stave off a coup, for the fact is that Nasser's Egypt is a mess. Nasser has sacked his top military men, cashiered hundreds of officers for desertion under fire, and left the army's morale near zero--all dangerous for a man whose chief political support comes from a pampered officer corps. The Russians, disgusted with the performance of Nasser's military forces (one army general was dead drunk in a Cairo hotel on the morning of the Israeli attack), are insisting on a complete reorganization of the military.
Egypt's economic problems are desperate. Its four main sources of foreign exchange are either sick, dead, scuttled or in Israel. Tourism, which ordinarily brings in $78 million a year, has dried up. The cotton crop ($300 million a year) is threatened by the worst plague of cotton leafworms since World War II. The Suez Canal, which brings Egypt $260 million a year, is clogged with sunken ships, the work of Egyptian frogmen who dynamited them or opened their sea cocks. Nearly 80% of Egypt's oil production came from wells in the Sinai, which are now in Israeli hands. Egypt cannot even pay its international bills.
P:SYRIA lost all but six of its 70 combat jets, all but a quarter of its armor --and Russia seems in no particular hurry to send in replacements. Syrian President Noureddin Attassi and his ruling Baathist party were unmasked as paper tigers for championing total war and then offering no more than nuisance shelling until the Israelis turned full wrath on Syrian gun emplacements. But the Israeli invasion of Syria united the Syrians and gave the Baathists a new lease on government house in Damascus. Not even they have been able to destroy the country's ability to feed itself--though they have tried by dividing the land into small, uneconomical lots--and Syria had no oil or real tourism to lose. In place of the road signs that used to supply directions, new signs have appeared: "No peace until Zionism ends."
P: IRAQ suffered heavy losses in the two brigades it sent to the front in Jordan, and the Israeli air force took care of eleven Iraqi MIGs, but the moderate socialist regime of Abdel Rahman Aref emerged from the war without many scars. Iraq has two troublesome minority groups--the Kurds in the north and the Shia Moslems in the south--in addi tion to several troublesome cliques of generals. President Aref, who since May has been his own Prime Minister as well, is bumbling along by trying to please everybody, including Nasser and the Shah of Iran. His economy, however, is based on oil, which normally brings in 80% of all revenue, and the Arab oil ban against Britain and the U.S. will force cutbacks on the government's ambitious industrial-development projects. >LEBANON did not fire a shot at the Israelis, but it is suffering badly in the war's aftermath. No one expected the Lebanese to fight, but their Christian-Moslem coalition government made the right kind of noises against Israel, even threw out the American ambassador and downgraded the embassy to a legation. With the ambassador went the tourists, which are the mainstay of Lebanon's economic life. Beirut's luxury hotels, normally jammed, are empty except for the normal quotient of Arab diplomats and spies who take up many of the tables at the bars. The U.S. still prohibits American tourists from entering Lebanon, probably to put pressure on the government to restore full diplomatic relations. Even when the restrictions are lifted, the tourist business will still be off unless the larger problems that surround access to Jerusalem have been solved, since in the past fully 60% of Lebanon's tourists were merely stopping on their way to Jerusalem. Since the beginning of the present crisis, two dozen discotheques and six flourishing nightclubs have closed down, and Lebanon is losing several million dollars a day in trade and commerce. > SAUDI ARABIA was untouched by the war (the troops it sent to Jordan did not have to fight), and King Feisal stayed as far away from it as he could. The King and his princes have been careful to send large donations to help buy new equipment for the armies of shattered neighbors, but his failure to take part in the war deprived him of whatever claims he once had to being the leader of the Arab moderate bloc.
At home, the oil ban is costing Saudi Arabia $300,000 a day in lost royalties, and the country has already announced that it will lift the ban as "shortsighted and injurious to our overall economic position."
P:LIBYA was turned down by Nasser when it offered troops, and Libya's 77year-old King Idris, a conservative even among Arabs, is in trouble with Nasserite crowds at home. He has stopped all oil production (at a cost of $1,500,-000 a day), told the Americans to leave Wheelus Air Force Base (at some unspecified date in the future) and ordered the British army to abandon its small bases at Tobruk and Benghazi. Last week he also replaced Prime Minister Hussein Mazik, a competent moderate, with a man thought to be more acceptable to the left. Tripoli dock workers promptly declared a three-day protest strike. Diplomatic circles in the Middle East feel that there is a strong possibility of a pro-Nasser coup.
Not Negotiable. Given the despair and disrepair of the Arab world, there seems to be little chance that it will seek peace with Israel for some time to come, no matter how hard King Hussein urges such a course. Some Arab leaders are clearly interested--Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba has been talking about recognizing Israel for years--but as far as Hussein is concerned the ones who count most are the ones who did the fighting, and that unfortunately includes Nasser and the truculent Syrians. It has not quite sunk in yet that there will soon have to be a reckoning of the price of defeat; somehow, they seem to have hoped that the United Nations, or the Russians, or even their own refusal to admit defeat would save them from facing up to it.
All Arab leaders, Hussein included, demand that Israel withdraw from the conquered territory before any steps toward negotiation are taken, and most of them still refuse to sit down at the bargaining table with the Israelis no matter what. "Our minimum requirement," says Hussein, "is that there must be a return to conditions that existed before the 4th of June"--the day before the war started. That specifically includes the Old City of Jerusalem. "Jerusalem," says the King, in a phrase borrowed from Tel Aviv, "is not negotiable. If they do not give it up, we will have to take it away from them." Still, if Hussein got back the west bank, he might agree to go along with a plan to internationalize the Old City, as the Vatican is asking, if it comes down to a choice of that or continued Israeli con trol. Once the Israelis leave the occupied territory, says Hussein, "everything is negotiable."
Not an Inch. As it is now, Israel holds almost all the cards. There was once a time when the Israelis would have done almost anything to entice the Arabs to talk peace, but their terms have been getting tougher in the face of the Arabs' continued intransigence. Israel will not move back an inch, says the government, until the Arabs show their willingness to begin negotiating directly with it. Even then, the Israelis say that they will demand three irreducible conditions in any final peace settlement: Israeli retention of a united Jerusalem, free passage through the Gulf of Aqaba and the reopening of Egypt's Suez Canal to Israeli ships.
Moreover, the longer the Arabs take to begin talking peace, the more conditions Israel is likely to add. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan last week said that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip --and, although the government denied that his words were official, it did not say that they were necessarily wrong. Another area that Israel is getting increasingly attached to is the west bank of the Jordan, where Israeli administrators are finding it easier than they had thought to govern a large Arab population. Not only that, but the fertile west bank would make an attractive place in which to move the 315,000 refugees now crowded into the Gaza Strip, say the Israelis. The Israelis are also disposed to hold, or at least insist on the demilitarization of, the Golan Heights of Syria, which not only served as a launching platform for Syrian shells aimed at Israel but also controls one of the sources of the River Jordan, which the Arabs have threatened to divert. For their part, the Israelis hold out, among other things, the possibility of giving Jordan access to a port on the Mediterranean coast, forming a joint development plan and even integrating the communications systems of the two states--all points that would greatly benefit Jordan's economy.
King Hussein recognizes the reality of Israel's existence better than any of the other Arabs, and he knows that the failure of his fellow Arabs to recognize it can only mean continued strife for the entire Middle East. The Arabs are already beginning to squabble among themselves again, and some heads are bound to roll when the first shock of defeat wears off. "If the situation persists," warned Hussein last week, "there is a grave danger that war will occur again." That danger was illustrated dramatically by last week's Arab-Israeli clash at Suez, which quickly escalated from sporadic firing to aerial dogfights and full-scale cannon barrages.
Having told their people for so long of the impossibility of accepting defeat, the Arab leaders will have to teach them to accept the inevitable postwar concessions if they hope to survive negotiations. And negotiations must come, no matter how long the Arabs drag their feet. King Hussein runs a very real danger to his own person and throne for his efforts, but in the long run he is bound to help the Arab cause by raising a voice of comparative reason and moderation at a time when Arabia needs it more than ever before.
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