As King Hussein’s Health Deteriorates, Israeli Right-Winger Proposes Invading Jordan

By Richard H. Curtiss

King Hussein of Jordan now is 63 years old, about the same age as many of the other heads of state with whom he has to deal. A major difference, however, is that King Hussein has ruled for some 46 years since, at age 18, he succeeded his assassinated grandfather and psychologically disturbed father. Another major difference is that after having suffered his second bout of cancer in five years, King Hussein’s health is precarious.

That lent urgency to his surprise move on Jan. 25, just one day before returning to the U.S. for further medical treatment, to name his 36-year-old son, Abdullah, as his successor, replacing the king’s brother, Prince Hassan, who is 12 years the king’s junior and who has been crown prince for 34 years. The new crown prince, whose English mother was Hussein’s second wife, is a major general in charge of the Jordanian army’s special forces and, in personality, is said to closely resemble his father.

Before King Hussein’s recent move, it had been expected that if his more scholarly brother, Hassan, succeeded him, Hassan might in turn name King Hussein’s son, Abdullah, as his own successor. That could get complicated, however, since King Hussein also has sons by his Palestinian third wife and by his American fourth wife, and Hassan has a son of his own.

It may have been concern over whom Hassan would designate as his own successor that prompted the king’s surprising, and therefore potentially destabilizing change of plans. The reasons for the move, however, are far less significant than the immediate effect it might have on Jordan’s security.

Israel could move very quickly to take advantage of any destabilization in Jordan. In fact, like Hitler’s blueprint for Germany in his book, Mein Kampf, leading Israeli right-wingers have made no secret of their plans for Jordan if and when its government falters. One such rightwinger, Israel Harel, even published such a plan in a Jan. 21 op-ed piece in Ha’aretz, the leading Tel Aviv daily, during the week King Hussein was in Amman.

In fact, when Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon launched his 1982 invasion of Lebanon, his plan was not only to keep a strip of territory adjacent to Israel’s northern border and to drive Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian forces out of Lebanon. Sharon apparently also hoped to trigger a mass exodus of Palestinian refugees out of Lebanon, through Syria and into Jordan where they would join the indigenous Palestinians—who by 1999 constitute some 82 percent of Jordan’s population—to bring down King Hussein’s government.

Sharon’s plans for Lebanon succeeded when the Palestinian guerrilla armies were evacuated from Beirut. The final phase opened only days later with the horrendous Israeli-supported massacre by Christian Lebanese militiamen in Beirut’s Sabra-Shatila refugee camps of between one and two thousand old men, women and children left behind by the departing PLO fighters.

But while it was underway the massacre was discovered by Israeli and other foreign journalists, who notified U.S. peace negotiators who in turn demanded that Israeli political leaders bring it to a halt. The plan had been to replicate the infamous Deir Yassin massacre of entire families of Palestinians in April 1948. That horrible event sparked an exodus from hundreds of Palestinian villages as Israeli forces approached, warning villagers to flee or die.

In 1982, however, the Palestinians did not flee Lebanon and therefore neither the Syrian nor the Jordanian governments were destabilized. Nevertheless, it has been obvious from the consistent opposition by leaders of Israel’s ruling Likud Party to any land-for-peace deal that they have never abandoned the policy of their party’s Revisionist founders to keep all of the land but “transfer” all of the Palestinians on it “beyond the borders” of Israel.

Israeli Labor governments have tried through legal harassment and economic pressure to induce Palestinians to emigrate voluntarily. Likud leaders have planned openly to take advantage of any major disturbance that would leave borders of neighboring Arab countries undefended to expel all the Palestinians from the West Bank and from inside Israel over those borders at gunpoint.

In his successful 1996 election campaign, Binyamin Netanyahu publicly criticized his Labor Party predecessors for not taking advantage of the world’s distraction at the time of the Tienanman Square massacre in China to carry out just such a transfer.

After his election in 1996, Netanyahu, apparently in pursuit of the same result, approved a Mossad plan to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Amman, but the Mossad agents were caught and the plan thwarted. The purpose of the plot had been to trigger rioting and perhaps even a coup by convincing the Palestinian majority in Jordan that King Hussein’s government was responsible for the assassination.

Depending upon what followed, Israeli troops would have been dispatched to “restore order,” as they offered but were prevented from doing by the United States during the “Black September” fighting in Amman in September 1970. When the dust cleared this time, however, the Israelis would be in a position to announce that their own Palestinians should, or must, leave for the new Palestinian state whose capital would be in Amman.

None of this is a pipedream. It was publicly laid out Jan. 21 by right-winger Israel Harel. In his Ha’aretz op-ed piece Harel first falsely charged that “in 1922 the British, in a cynical imperialistic manipulation, ripped Trans-Jordan, or the eastern bank of the Jordan, out of the ‘national home for the Jewish people.’”

Then he asserted that “if only one of the assassination attempts on King Hussein had succeeded” in Jordan, Iraq or Syria would have “pounced upon it and torn it to pieces.” With such justification for a “pre-emptive” Israeli invasion thus established, Harel continued:

“The Syrians and Iraqis have sent thousands of agents into Jordan to foment agitation as the end of the Hussein era seems near while the Saudis...are concocting plots and the Palestinians...are not sitting idly by...However, if there is any attempt by Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia—separately or in unison—to grab a chunk of Jordanian territory (this scenario could arise if King Hussein’s successor cannot restore stability), our refusal to intervene in Jordanian affairs could allow Iraq’s Saddam Hussain or Syria’s Hafez Assad to set up a hostile puppet government on our eastern border (a not improbable scenario), in which case the war Syria is conducting against us in Lebanon would spread southwards and be more intense.

“It will ultimately become apparent...that two nations cannot live on the small piece of land to the west of the Jordan and that two states cannot exist there. If nations with vast stretches of land that have no need for additional acreage are feasting their eyes on Jordan, Israel must also stake its claims to Jordan, if only by reason of the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate...With that territory—even part of it—we could solve, in cooperation with our peace process partners, many territorial disputes we have with the Palestinians.

“Israel can help create a Palestinian entity or can prevent the creation of such an entity if it unilaterally declares independence for belligerent purposes. After proving its friendly intentions, it could occupy part of present-day Jordan and be linked with the West Bank territory already given to Arafat. The Palestinian entity would then be much larger than Israel. We could then annex those parts of the West Bank that are still in our hands...

“If we promote this plan instead of vainly expending our energies to perpetuate the survival of a wobbly kingdom, which will inevitably collapse, we will serve our interests and those of our neighbors and we will also create an atmosphere conducive to a peace settlement and to mutual trust and conciliation between the nations of the region.”

So once again, it seems, Israeli right-wingers are planning to take over Jordan to provide a new home into which they can expel, at gunpoint, all of the Palestinians remaining in the Holy Land. Either the transfer of power from King Hussein or the proclamation of a Palestinian state by Yasser Arafat can provide the excuse. With either, or both, likely to occur very soon, it is time for the other Arab states to ask the United States what it will do if Israeli troops start moving across the Jordan River—perhaps as early as this spring.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.