The King and I. A dream that’s still deferred
This article was published 27 years ago in the Long Island Jewish World, where the author penned a column for many years. He is now a resident of Riverdale.
[He] had nothing to fear from [the dream] being frustrated, because it is in the nature of a dream that it always remains in the power of the one dreaming it. —AB Yehoshua, “A Journey to the End of the Millennium”
Actually, it was the grandfather, Abdullah, who first dreamed the dream. After the First World War the British had not known quite what to do with this son of Sharif Hussein of Arabia whose support the British gratefully accepted against the Ottomans, but to whom overly grand promises were made, The British share of the vanquished Ottoman Turkish empire was vast, but the resources with which to govern it were limited; the war, though fought to a successful conclusion, had left the treasury depleted and the army, now largely demobilized, undermanned.
Someone was needed to police the territory east of the Jordan River. The makeshift idea was for Abdullah to be installed for a period, enough time for him to impose some order; in the meantime, the British hoped to come up with some long-term role for him. As things turned out, he was the emir who came to dinner: He came and never left.
From his vantage point across the Jordan River, Abdullah could observe the Jews trickling into Palestine in wavelets. He was neither afraid nor resentful. From the time of his first meeting with Chaim Weizmann in 1922 in London, until his death 29 years later, Abdullah, alone among Arab public figures, met personally and through his deputies dozens of times with Zionist representatives, struggling to deal realistically with the challenge presented by the Jews and their aspirations in the region.
Perhaps on a personal level he could identify with people who ventured from one place to another in search of a place to call home. Ethnically and religiously, he may also have felt a kinship with these fellow sons of Abraham.
Maybe he was just being practical. He envisioned the Jews, with their resources and technological expertise, being of considerable help to his emirate, and later, kingdom. As well, through them he might extend the reach of his realm from the Jordan River to the sea. In any event he appears not to have viewed the Jews as interlopers without credible ties to the land to which they were streaming.
Abdullah’s dream, however, suffered from a certain vagueness and myopia. He knew he wanted to reach some sort of entente with the Jews, but he could not quite master the means of getting there. He first tried to sell the Zionists on the idea of accepting his benevolent rule, under which he would guarantee the Jews civil and religious rights, but not national and political sovereignty. (Does this sound familiar? It should — it is the very mirror image of the “autonomy plan” long offered by the Likud to the Palestinians.) It was summarily rejected by the Jews.
But the dialogue continued, and the dream lived on.
T
hough Abdullah was never able to realize the dream, it was bequeathed to his grandson, Hussein, who witnessed his grandfather’s assassination while still a teenager and who would, within two years thereafter, ascend to the throne himself. Hussein proved to be an able and precocious student, learning fast and well the teachings of his grandfather.
Lesson Number 1: Above all, survive.
Through over a half century of rule, Hussein survived multiple assassination attempts, domestic military confrontation (from the PLO in Black September 1970) and external threats.
He survived ruling a poor land of meager resources, governing a population 60 to 70 percent Palestinian and therefore not reflexively loyal to him.
He survived despite being uncomfortably dependent on the good graces of regimes that had killed and/or supplanted his relatives (Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia) and doled out kindnesses parsimoniously.
He learned to pacify, to navigate, to modulate, to charm. Though he made some losing bets (being snookered by Nasser in 1967, and backing into Saddam’s corner in 1991), he always managed to recover. And survive.
Lesson Number 2: Survival is not an end in and of itself — it is a means to an end.
The end is multifaceted: Honor, prosperity and, yes, the dream.
Successive Israeli governments, of the right and of the left, came to understand that they could talk to King Hussein, and they did. It was an open secret, officially and formally denied but privately readily acknowledged.
The talks could never be successfully closed because there was always a gap that could not be bridged. A corollary to Lesson Number 1 was that in this neighborhood it could be fatal to get too far out in front of your constituency and allies, especially when your negotiating partner is making it clear that you must go even further.
So the dream lay dormant until Oslo and then, finally, almost anticlimactically, it sprung to life: Peace between the Hashemite Kingdom and the state of the Jews.
L
ike most people, Hussein bin Tallal was many things, some of them contradictory. Warrior and peacemaker, blunderer and visionary, Arab monarch and man of the people, patriot and citizen of the world. Survivor. Often belittled and derided, at other times venerated and, increasingly, even loved. His passing in xxxxxx elicited a pronounced and genuine sadness in places far beyond his poor, dusty kingdom and on the part of individuals of backgrounds widely at variance with his own.
I should know; I am one of them.
Three years earlier our paths crossed for about one minute. Though exceedingly brief, the encounter lasted long enough to reinforce my admiration for an embattled, courageous and sensitive man. Now, when I hear his name mentioned, I think of more than just the talking head in the news, the figure of history; I think of the man with whom I shook hands and who addressed me as “friend.” The sense of loss is personal.
It was three years ago this very month my wife and I took advantage of a three-day group trip to Jordan that supplemented a Jewish media conference. As soon as we crossed the Sheik Hussein Bridge it was clear we were in another world. As our bus driver Abdullah and our guide Sami led us through the northern Jordanian countryside, we were in a world alien and vaguely threatening to us; we seemed to have traveled back in time.
Though some of the homes we passed were rather handsome, bearing attractive stone facing, the vast majority of dwellings were primitive, made of cinder block and topped by tin roofs. We might as well have been in a section of a Yishuv theme park bearing the name, “Palestine 1930.” The rocky, windswept landscapes were punctuated by simple villages, unpaved roads and watchtowers. But this was Jordan near the close of the 20th century.
We were to visit Um Qais, one of the 10 Roman Decapolis cities, and Jerash, where we walked among the ruins of a Greco-Roman city, before reaching Amman and our hotel, the luxurious Forte Grand on Queen Noor Street (at that time also housing the Israeli embassy while its own building was being constructed).
Even these architectural sites, as fascinating as they were, were indicative of Jordan’s poor financial state. Their counterparts in Israel are slickly and modernly done up, replete with fancy signage and supplemented with multi-media presentations. By contrast, in Jordan, little appeared to have been done to retard the deterioration of the structures; the signs were old, many broken, with misspelled English words. Herds of sheep seemed to graze just about anywhere they or their shepherds pleased.
C
onflicting rumors had been circulating since early afternoon as we killed time in Amman (not an easy thing to do). The king would see us. The king would not see us. The king might see us. His Majesty had a cold or had left the country. Just when the group’s skepticism of an audience with the king reached near unanimity, the definitive word reached us. The king would indeed see us this evening.
We entered the palace grounds at exactly 6:30 pm. The sky was absolutely clear and dark and studded with stars. Soldiers surveyed us warily as we filed past a fountain to enter a wing ringed by scowling Circassian guards in their distinctive black hats and black uniforms. We sat in red-upholstered chairs in an elegant beige carpeted hall, tastefully decorated with green and beige drapery.
The buzz that pervaded the room as people chatted came to an abrupt halt as first the outer doors and then the inner doors were shut. The hush allowed me to reflect briefly on the curious impact of royalty upon us at the close of the 20th century; it has retained its ancient capacity to astonish us, almost against our will.
Security agents took their positions and then, finally, a few minutes later, Hussein appeared. After being presented with a gift, he addressed us.
The king’s speech was unremarkable. He invited us to keep returning to his country, and he hoped we would see progress with each successive visit. He expressed a sense of urgency to make up for lost time. It was an exciting moment in time, a real beginning to cooperation between peoples that he hoped would serve as an example to others. He was happy to see no more war.
“We’ve been through much over the years,” he said. “Yours is a sacred past.” He looked forward to a future full of hope.
Then he was done.
The king remained at the front of the room to take leave of us as we filed past. I approached him, extended my hand and introduced myself. His handshake was firm and his gaze locked in on my eyes.
I told him I came from New York and that it was a great honor to meet him. I wished him continued success in his efforts to help bring peace to the region. He smiled warmly at me and with that characteristic nod and tilt of his head said, “Thank you, my friend. I hope we have a chance to meet again in the future.”
I knew then, of course, that another meeting was most unlikely. Three years later, not long after willing himself out of his sickbed to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms at Wye Plantation, the king was dead.
Hussein went from teenaged tribal chieftain to world-class statesman. Along the way he stumbled, shed blood, coped, managed and built. He dispatched his fierce Arab Legion soldiers against our dear IDF boys. His killed some of ours, and ours killed some of his. When the time came, the king paid shiva calls in Bet Shemesh.
Despite all the bloodshed and death, the dream survived. His Majesty’s hope that he and I would meet in the future would go unfulfilled. But then again, he did bequeath us a future.
The king is dead; long live the king.
