Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Read online

  Bringing peace is not the only struggle we face. Among our greatest challenges are political reform and the improvement of our economies. We need to learn to make things the rest of the world wants to buy, and to raise the living standards for all our people. Providing proper education and good jobs for young people is one of the most effective defenses against the siren call of the extremists. We cannot afford to have so many unemployed young men. And we must let women play a greater role in our economies. The impulse to hold women back for so-called religious or cultural reasons, to keep them out of the workforce, comes from a deep insecurity. It is unacceptable for half of society to be denied their rights and for half the workforce to stay at home.

  Think of a world where the managerial expertise of the Israelis, the professionalism of the Jordanians, Lebanese entrepreneurship, and the education of the Palestinians could be combined effectively. I see the association of these potential partners as producing a regional economic powerhouse—a Middle Eastern Benelux. All this can be achieved. But the situation on the ground is rapidly getting away from us, rendering this outcome more and more unlikely. If current trends are not reversed soon, there will be no land left to swap for peace—no reason for Palestinians to cast their lot with moderate leaders rather than with the extremists. Our future will be doomed to war and conflict.

  There is a tendency in life and in politics to default to the status quo. But in this case the seeming stability is misleading. I hear the mounting frustration and anger, and I fear it will soon eclipse all dreams of peace and reconciliation. I do not think most Americans and Europeans recognize the urgency of the situation. It is because of this sense of urgency that I have decided to write this book. In the eleven years since I succeeded my father, I have seen and learned a great deal. I am determined to share my story openly and honestly, in the hope that it can help make a difference.

  In my region, we live history, for better and for worse. What may seem abstract and intangible at a distance is part of the fabric of our everyday lives. I have decided that the best and most persuasive way to tell this story is through the story of my own life—by sharing what I have seen, what I have done—to show how the personal and the political are often intertwined.

  I never intended to hold the position I am now entrusted with, and expected instead that I would spend my life in the army. Part of my story is about that military experience and what it taught me about Jordan and about leadership more generally. I have tried to tell my story simply, using the straightforward language and imagery of a military man rather than the long-winded phrases and vocabulary beloved by politicians.

  I hope in this book to challenge some of the false ideas about the region in which I live. Too often, when people in the West hear the words “Arab,” “Muslim,” or “Middle East” they think of terrorism, suicide bombers, and wild-eyed fanatics hiding in caves. But I want them to associate our region with multimillion-dollar IT start-ups in Jordan, Nobel literature prize winners in Egypt, and the historic architecture of Damascus.

  One of the most dangerous ideas to have emerged in recent years is the suggestion that the West and the Muslim world are two separate blocs, heading inevitably on a collision course with each other. This concept is ill-informed, inflammatory, and wrong. For over a thousand years Muslims, Jews, and Christians have lived together peacefully, enriching one another’s cultures. For sure, there have been conflicts, such as the Crusades or the European colonization of many Middle Eastern countries after World War I. But these are political, rooted in the motivations of a certain time and context, rather than manifestations of an eternal cultural hostility.

  After my military education at Sandhurst, I served for a year in Britain’s 13th/18th Hussars, a proud regiment that traces its history back to almost six decades before the battle of Waterloo. The regiment also fought bravely in the Crimean War in the nineteenth century. In that conflict, made famous by Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Britain and France fought alongside the Ottoman Empire to protect it from invasion by the Russians. More than half of the Ottoman Empire’s thirty million subjects were Christian, with many serving in the Ottoman army. And Muslim soldiers fought bravely on both sides of the conflict, including in the French and Russian armies.

  This pernicious idea of a clash of cultures bleeds into the modern political arena, giving strength to extremists on all sides and empowering those who wish to set men and armies against each other. If an Algerian, an Afghan, or a Jordanian carries out a terrorist attack, he is inevitably described in the West as a “Muslim terrorist.” But if a similar attack is carried out by an Irishman or a Sri Lankan, they are rarely called a “Christian terrorist” or a “Hindu terrorist.” Rather, they are described according to the political motivations of their group, as an Irish Republican Army activist or a Tamil separatist.

  People with a narrow view of history assume that the way things are now is the way they have always been. But the economic and technological ascendancy of the West is relatively recent, born out of an amazing flourishing of innovation in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To those who take a longer view, things can look quite different. In the Middle Ages, when Washington, D.C., was just a swamp, the great cities of Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Damascus were the world’s leading centers of learning and knowledge. Over the centuries, the pendulum of history swung toward the West, and by the twentieth century the Arab world had fallen far behind.

  My family, the Hashemites, are descended from the Prophet Mohammad, and for generations have been leaders and rulers in our region. In the sixth century, my ancestor Qusai was the first ruler of Mecca. My heritage is one of tolerance and acceptance of different cultures and faiths. The Holy Quran says:God Almighty said: “Mankind! We created you from a pair of a male and female, and made you into nations and tribes that ye may know each other.” (Al Hujurat: 13)

  I have never felt that interacting with Western culture comes at the expense of my identity as an Arab or a Muslim. As somebody born in the East but educated in the West, I feel a deep affinity for both cultures. My hope is that this book can, in a small way, act as a bridge between them. All too often extremists on both sides frame the discussion and dominate the debate. All too often the voices of moderate Arabs are drowned out by those who shout the loudest. I will not shout, but I do want my message to be heard. I want to tell the world that while there are great problems in our region, there is also cause for hope.

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  The Conflict Begins

  One constant in my life ever since I was a small child has been the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Some people in the West and Israel like to portray this as the continuation of a centuriesold struggle. They are wrong. It is a relatively recent conflict, rooted in Jewish immigration into Palestine in the early twentieth century. In the Middle East, perhaps more than any other place, history matters, though far too many people use historical grievances as an excuse for not dealing with current problems. If you want to understand where you are going, it helps to know where you have come from. So before I try to explain the situation we find ourselves in today, and offer some suggestions on how to get out of the current stalemate, I would like to say a few words about the distance we have come.

  As the Ottoman Empire, which extended over much of the Middle East from the early sixteenth century, was taking its last breath toward the end of World War I, the Arabs began to follow new nationalist leaders. One of these was my great-great-grandfather, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the sharif of Mecca. A member of the Hashemite family, which had ruled Mecca since the tenth century, Sharif Hussein was an outspoken supporter of Arab nationalism. He was believed by other Arab nationalists to have the religious status and political experience to lead the Arab nationalist movement and the planned revolt against Ottoman rule, and to represent his people in negotiations with the British to secure an independent Arab state. His role was formalized by
the Charter of Damascus in 1915. Negotiations between Sharif Hussein and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, resulted in the secret Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915-16 in which Sharif Hussein was promised support for a united and independent Arab kingdom under his rule. The agreement with McMahon was later subject to differing interpretations by the British and Arabs.

  In June 1916, Sharif Hussein launched the Great Arab Revolt, initiating the revolutionary push for a single independent unified Arab state, and was declared King of the Arabs. His vision was to establish a new Arab country that would stretch from Palestine to Yemen. He believed that the Arab peoples could be united based on their shared culture and Islamic ideals, and he embraced a tradition of tolerance and respect for minorities. He hoped to bring about an Arab Renaissance. His four sons, Princes Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid, led the Arab armies against the Ottoman forces. They were eventually victorious and succeeded in driving the Turks from Arabia in 1918. Faisal became king of Syria and then Iraq, and Abdullah became emir of Transjordan. Following Sharif Hussein’s abdication in 1924, Ali became king of the Hijaz (later part of modern Saudi Arabia). Zeid worked with Faisal in Iraq, and served as Iraq’s ambassador to Turkey, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

  The Arab Revolt brought to prominence a young British officer who went by the name of T. E. Lawrence. He was later immortalized as “Lawrence of Arabia,” played onscreen by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 film, parts of which were shot in Jordan. My great-great-uncle Prince Faisal was played in the film by Alec Guinness.

  My mother briefly worked on the production of the film, but she left to marry my father in the summer of 1961. A few months later, she took him back to visit the set. The director was filming the scene in which Prince Faisal’s camp is bombed by Turkish airplanes while his forces are en route to Damascus. My mother and father watched from a hill overlooking the set. When the word spread that my father was there, the bedouin extras left the camp and rushed up to him, shouting out their loyalty and admiration. Once things had settled down, the crew prepared to film the scene again. As the airplanes flew overhead, one of my father’s retainers, a very tall old Nigerian man, turned to my father and said, “Sir, that’s not the way it happened.” My father asked him how he knew this. “Well,” he replied, “I was a child in that camp at the time, and the planes came from the other direction.” After their visit, the production crew politely asked my father not to visit the set again.

  The film was tremendously popular in the West, less so in Jordan, where it is viewed by many people as a partial and inaccurate retelling of history. And although Lawrence is seen today by many in the West as a romantic hero who played a key role in leading the Arab people to freedom, the view in my family of the historical record is considerably more measured. My great-grandfather King Abdullah I regarded Lawrence as a “strange character,” eager to mold people to suit his interests. In his memoir he wrote:His intrigues went as far as an attempt to influence me against my own father on the pretext that my father was obstinate. I sent his messenger back with this reply: “Tell your friend that my father is my lord and king. I shall be content with this relationship to the end of my days.” In fact Lawrence rendered the Arabs the greatest service by reiterating that my father was determined in his aims. Lawrence appeared only to require people who had no views of their own, that he might impress his personal ideas upon them.

  At the end of World War I, the fate of the Arabs was complicated by Great Power rivalries, since Britain had made secret promises not only to the sharif of Mecca but also to the French. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, modern-day Syria and Lebanon would fall under a French sphere of influence and modern-day Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, and what is now western Saudi Arabia into a British sphere. The San Remo Conference of 1920 formalized the new regional map as the French and British claimed responsibility for League of Nations mandates over these territories. On November 2, 1917, contravening promises made to the Arabs, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had publicly stated his government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

  Sharif Hussein felt that he could not in good conscience consent either to the British Mandate over Palestine or to the Balfour Declaration, as both represented a betrayal of the Arab Revolt. These pledges and arrangements would fuel the cause of Arab nationalism for several decades.

  The new regional order was in part determined by Britain’s colonial secretary, Winston Churchill. My great-grandfather Abdullah had a much higher opinion of Churchill than of Lawrence, describing him as “unique among the men Great Britain has produced in recent times.” In 1921, Abdullah became the emir of Transjordan, which encompassed the lands to the east of the Jordan River. All the lands to the west of the Jordan, comprising modern-day Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, remained under British control as the British Mandate of Palestine.

  Many thousands of Jewish immigrants began to arrive in Palestine, their movement encouraged and facilitated by the Balfour Declaration. At that time the Arabs accounted for some 90 percent of the population of Palestine. In 1897, the Zionist movement, at its first Congress in Basle, had defined its purpose as establishing “a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” By 1947, the number of Jews in Palestine had grown to about 600,000, the increase encouraged by the Zionist movement and reinforced by persecution in Europe. The large influx created tensions with the 1.2 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians. For the first time, America stepped into the arena, insisting that Palestine open its doors to 100,000 Jewish immigrants.

  In a prophetic article written in the now defunct American magazine in 1947, six months before the first Arab-Israeli war, my great-grandfather warned of the dangers of unchecked immigration:No people on earth have been less “anti-Semitic” than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West. Jews, themselves, will admit that never since the Great Dispersion did Jews develop so freely and reach such importance as in Spain when it was an Arab possession. With very minor exceptions, Jews have lived for many centuries in the Middle East, in complete peace and friendliness with their Arab neighbors. . . .

  I have the impression that many Americans believe the trouble in Palestine is very remote from them, that America had little to do with it, and that your only interest now is that of a humane bystander.

  I believe that you do not realize how directly you are, as a nation, responsible in general for the whole Zionist move and specifically for the present terrorism. I call this to your attention because I am certain that if you realize your responsibility you will act fairly to admit it and assume it.

  The present catastrophe may be laid almost entirely at your door. Your government, almost alone in the world, is insisting on the immediate admission of 100,000 more Jews into Palestine—to be followed by countless additional ones. This will have the most frightful consequences in bloody chaos beyond anything ever hinted at in Palestine before.

  I have the most complete confidence in the fair-mindedness and generosity of the American public. We Arabs ask no favors. We ask only that you know the full truth, not half of it. We ask only that when you judge the Palestine question, you put yourselves in our place. What would your answer be if some outside agency told you that you must accept in America many millions of utter strangers in your midst—enough to dominate your country—merely because they insisted on going to America, and because their forefathers had once lived there some 2,000 years ago?

  Our answer is the same.

  And what would be your action if, in spite of your refusal, this outside agency began forcing them on you?

  Ours will be the same.

  From the beginning, the conflict in Palestine has been a struggle between Jewish immigrants and the existing Arab Palestinian people, not, as it is often portrayed, the continuation of ancient hatreds between Jews and Arabs.

  Throughout the 19
30s and early 1940s the British tried to limit the number of Jewish immigrants pouring into Palestine. Zionist organizations such as Haganah, the Irgun, and Lohamei Herut Israel (also known as the Stern Gang) conducted assassinations, planted bombs, and engaged in other acts of terrorism and sabotage to scare Palestinians from their land, force the British to leave Palestine, and impose a Jewish state.

  In November 1944, the Stern Gang assassinated the British minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. Two years later, members of the Irgun planted a bomb in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which housed the British Mandate secretariat and British military intelligence headquarters. Ninety-one people were killed. And in August 1947, in retaliation for the execution of three Jewish terrorists, the Irgun kidnapped two British sergeants and hanged them from eucalyptus trees in a forest south of the coastal town of Netanya. They booby-trapped the bodies, so that when British troops tried to cut them down a bomb exploded and injured another officer. This barbaric incident was widely condemned. The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, would later go on to found the right-wing Herut Movement and become prime minister of Israel.