Kingdom Caught in the Middle

Jordan must cope with both Israel and the P.L.O.

When King Hussein was a 15-year-old prince, a medal on his chest deflected a Palestinian radical’s bullet and saved his life. In the same fusillade, Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah was shot dead at the prince’s side while entering the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. That was a chilling lesson in the dangers of power, and the quirks of fate, for the young man who two years later would inherit the throne.

Now 46, Jordan’s monarch rules over an arid, oil-deprived, virtually landlocked country of 2.3 million inhabitants. The forces of history and geography have kept Jordan on the front line of the Middle East crisis for nearly four decades. Those same forces, along with Hussein’s instinct for political compromise, have given his country a pivotal role to play in the search for peace.

The roots of Hussein’s Hashemite dynasty are ancient, dating back to the 5th century patriarch Hashem, great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad. But the modern kingdom of Jordan is a recently contrived state with few natural boundaries and almost no tradition of nationalism. After the British wrested Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, they administered the region as a League of Nations mandate. The British put the territory east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordan, under the local rule of Hussein’s grandfather Emir Abdullah. When Abdullah first pitched his tents in Amman in 1921, he took over an impoverished desert area more than four times the size of Massachusetts that was peopled mainly by nomadic Bedouin tribes.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan left British control in 1946. The state of Israel was proclaimed two years later. In the Arab-Israeli war that followed, Abdullah’s Transjordanian Arab Legion was the only one of seven armies to make a creditable showing against the Israelis.

The seizure of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1950 had profound consequences for Jordan. Suddenly, some 900,000 West Bank Palestinians were under Jordanian rule. They, plus earlier Arab refugees from Israel, ultimately made the Palestinians the majority of Jordan’s population. In contrast to every other Arab country, the Jordanian government immediately offered the Palestinians full citizenship.

The West Bankers, generally better educated and more industrious than their neighbors across the Jordan River, soon came to play an important role in the country’s economic, political and intellectual life. Palestinians filled important government posts, created the backbone of an efficient civil service and came to dominate banking and commerce. Aided by its more favorable climate, the West Bank contributed up to 85% of Jordan’s agricultural output and 48% of its industrial production by the mid-1960s. Thus it was a tremendous loss when Hussein rashly led his army against Israel in the 1967 war and saw the enemy snatch the West Bank and East Jerusalem from his control.

The same Palestinian influence that was so helpful to Jordan also bred forces that tried to destroy it. Created in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization found a fertile recruiting and training ground in the refugee camps that contained some 40% of the 255,000 Palestinians (plus their descendants) who had escaped to the kingdom after the West Bank was captured by the Israelis. The P.L.O. openly challenged the authority of Hussein’s throne. The King finally reacted in 1970 with a brutal show of force that sent P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat and his fellow guerrillas fleeing to Lebanon. Hussein’s relations with Arafat and the other Arab leaders were further strained in 1974, when an Arab conference named the P.L.O. as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

Hussein was long suspect in the eyes of fellow Arabs for his openness to the West. He was denounced in the Arab world as a Western stooge in 1972 when he suggested a plan for a West Bank-Jordanian federation similar to the one that President Reagan proposed two weeks ago. But the King’s standing among Arabs has improved dramatically in recent years. He won points by resisting strong U.S. pressure to bring him into the Camp David process, when he saw that it would not guarantee a return of East Jerusalem and the West Bank to Arab control. Hussein will not enter negotiations with the Israelis unless he has the approval of other Arab leaders, such as Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein. King Hussein and Saddam were photographed chatting amiably at last week’s Fez summit.

Domestic opposition to Hussein’s rule has diminished over the years. At the beginning of his reign, the King permitted a large degree of democracy. But freedom bred instability, as radical Palestinian groups and supporters of Hussein’s bitter enemy, the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, sought to undermine his regime. Hussein now rules as an absolute monarch. The return of political stability has promoted an unprecedented period of prosperity. Unemployment is low; the economy, based on agriculture, mining and tourism, is growing at an annual rate of about 10%. More than half the population lives today in cities, including the Bedouin sheiks, who have largely abandoned their black rectangular tents in favor of lavish urban villas.

Despite their differences with him in the past, some top P.L.O. leaders show a qualified willingness to bring Hussein back into the peace process. “We have no problem with Hussein,” says Shafiq Hout, the P.L.O.’s representative in Beirut. Other P.L.O. activists concede that it may be a good idea to have King Hussein involved in the talks, since this would probably give the Israelis more confidence in any future settlement.

There is always a risk that Hussein could be inviting trouble if Jordan were to be associated with a Palestinian entity in the West Bank; the Palestinians might be tempted to try again to seize control of the whole country in their quest for a state of their own. But some P.L.O. radicals concede that they are reluctant to overthrow the King because, as one put it, “the minute there is an anti-Hussein coup in Amman we know the Israelis will move into Jordan, and we certainly don’t want that.” The monarch once despised by the Palestinians is now regarded as a kind of Arab insurance policy against a new Israeli blitz.

— By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Wilton Wynn/Beirut