From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition (Studies in Middle Eastern History)

From Abdullah to Hussein Studies in Middle Eastern History Bernard Lewis, Itamar Rabinovich, and Roger Savory GENERAL EDITORS THE TURBAN FOR THE CROWN The Islamic Revolution in Iran Said Amir Arjomand LANGUAGE AND CHANGE IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST The Evolution of Modern Arabic Political Discourse Ami Ayalon IRAN'S FIRST REVOLUTION: Shi'ism ana the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909 Mangol Bayat ISLAMIC REFORM Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria, David Dean Commins KING HUSSEIN AND THE CHALLENGE OF ARAB RADICALISM Jordan, 1955-1967 Uriel Dann EGYPT, ISLAM, AND THE ARABS The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski EAST ENCOUNTERS WEST France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century Fatma Muge Gocek NASSER'S "BLESSED MOVEMENT" Egypt's Free Officers and the July Revolution Joel Gordon THE FERTILE CRESCENT, 1800-1914 A Documentary Economic History Edited by Charles Issawi THE MAKING OF SAUDI ARABIA, 1916-1936 From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State Joseph Kostiner THE IMPERIAL HAREM Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire Leslie Peirce ESTRANGED BEDFELLOWS Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War Aviel Roshwald FROM ABDULLAH TO HUSSEIN Jordan in Transition Robert B. Satloff OTHER VOLUMES ARE IN PREPARATION From Abdullah to Hussein Jordan in Transition ROBERT B. SATLOFF New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1994 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Satloff, Robert B. (Robert Barry) From Abdullah to Hussein : Jordan in transition / Robert B. SatlofF. p. cm. — (Studies in Middle Eastern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-508027-0 1. Jordan—Politics and government. 2. Hussein, King of Jordan, 1935- I. Tide. II. Series Studies in Middle Eastern history (New York, N.Y.) DS154.55.S267 1994 956.9504—dc20 92-46562 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Jennie This page intentionally left blank Preface Few modern monarchies have been as bound up with the person of their monarch as has the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Indeed, in Jordan itself, biographies of the two kings that have reigned for all but one year of the country's existence often pass for studies of the kingdom's political history. But there was a period in Jordan's history when commoners, not kings, mattered most and when without the lead of a strong monarch, the persistence of a handful of "king's men" were enough to keep the Hashemite monarchy alive. The purpose of this book is to describe and analyze that period of Jordan's history, the years following the 1951 assassination of Abdullah, the kingdom's founder. By that time, a process was already under way in which there was a considerable widening of the field of power, authority, and influence inside Jordan, and during the subsequent six years, king, palace, government, parliament, army, political parties, and popular opin- ion all emerged as important players on the political stage. Those years witnessed the country's lone period of weak monarchy, when the king— the sad Talal or the novice Hussein—was not the preeminent political actor in the land and when the fate of the regime was left in the hands of royalists who had never before wielded executive authority inside the kingdom. Although these royalists often competed among themselves for power and differed with one another on issues of tactics, they were, as a group, intensely loyal to the regime they served and provided the bridge that permitted Hussein to inherit his grandfather's kingdom. Those years also viii Preface witnessed a series of challenges to the existence of an independent Hashemite regime in Jordan—from both within and without and some- times self-inflicted. It was when Hussein distanced himself from the "king's men" in the wake of his dismissal of General Glubb in March 1956 that his hold on power was set adrift, and it was only when he turned back to them in April 1957 that the foundation of the Hashemite regime was again secured. That decision set the basis for the restoration of a regime modeled on Abdullah's traditional pattern of rule before the upheaval of the Palestine war. Jordan's story is, in many ways, just a subplot in the larger saga of Great Power rivalry and ideological fervor that gripped the Middle East in the 1950s. But it is a subplot with significance, for Jordan is the his- torical exception. Of the principal Arab participants in the Palestine fight- ing of 1948/49, Jordan's was the only regime that remained intact (albeit shaky) a decade later. Whereas royalist or liberal governments succumbed to military coups d'etat in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, in Jordan the regime outmaneuvered both its political and military adversaries and endured. How the kingdom resuscitated itself and survived—and especially the changing relationship between king and "king's men" that went far to determine Jordan's fate—is the central theme we explore here. It is important to note that this is principally a study of Jordanian domestic politics and specifically of the men (and one woman) who ruled the kingdom during its period of uncertainty. Although we touch on Jordan's relations with foreign countries—including Arab states, Israel, Britain, and the United States—those discussions are normally limited to illustrations of policies adopted by particular Jordanian leaders. Similarly, West Bank politics (or, for that matter, peculiarly East Bank politics, too) are addressed only to the extent that they shed light on the central government in Amman, not on their own merits. Such limitations reflect both the major themes of this study and the diplomatic correspondence that comprises its main source of research and documentation. By way of introduction, three general historiographical observations may be useful. The good news is that a wide range of government archives central to understanding domestic Jordanian politics in this period is open for research. British and American diplomatic traffic is especially valuable, and those charged with declassifying material under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act seem to be reasonably generous when in regard to Jordan. Israeli documents are useful first and foremost for an insight into how Israeli analysts and policymakers perceived events next door, less so for their detail. Jordanian government records have been open for several years, and despite the rudimentary classification system in place, a lode of valuable information can be mined from them, though more so in the social and economic spheres than on political and defense issues. (Many of the sensitive files from the 1950s were destroyed in the bomb blast that killed Prime Minister Hazza' al-Majali in 1960.) Before the open- Preface ix ing of these archives in recent years, virtually all studies of Jordanian history in the 1950s relied heavily on parliamentary records and newspaper reportage; such studies are now, for the most part, obsolete.1 The bad news is that the full picture will never be known with com- plete certainty until other archives are also open for research. Most promi- nent among these are the archives of the Royal Hashemite Court, but they.also include French Foreign Ministry archives and that hefty cache of Jordanian government files captured by Israel in the 1967 war that was open to researchers for two decades but has been since closed for "security reasons." Also, Soviet archives should be useful in shedding light on several key episodes. Given what is available, however, collectively these files should fill in gaps only on the margin, not at the heart of the story described here. Last, a scan of the notes and bibliography reveals that Jordanians do not, on the whole, write post-1948 Jordanian history; rather, Western- ers do. Other than biographical and autobiographical works and official, commissioned histories, there are very few works of consequence by Jor- danians that touch on the political history of the kingdom during King Hussein's early years.2 By the same token, it was a Pakistani, not a Jorda- nian, who was given access to general staff records to compile a massive, royally sanctioned history of the Jordanian army.3 To be sure, the reti- cence—government inspired or not—of Jordanians to write on their recent past is not very difficult to understand: Too much of that sensitive past is bound up in the no-less-sensitive present, and the kingdom has not yet developed a strong-enough institutional "thick skin" to stand up under the close inspection of an inquisitive citizenry. As a result, Jordanians are by and large uninformed of their own history, leaving Western histori- ans with the task of answering not only their own questions but the Jordanians', too.4 Washington, D.C. R.B.S. March 1993 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book was conceived in Oxford; researched in Britain, America, Jor- dan, and Israel; written in the towns and villages of Cameroon; and revised in Washington, DC. Along the way, I have incurred debts of gratitude to many people and institutions.

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