- Analysis
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- There is no point in going on. You get
the picture.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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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