Lion of Jordan by Avi Shlaim

Arab camp. Nasser knew and approved of Hussein’s secret talks with the enemy, provided they did not lead to a separate peace. Despite Nasser’s tacit support, it took a great deal of courage on Hussein’s part to pursue this solo diplomacy.
    The quest for a land-for-peace deal was frustrated not by Arab intransigence but by Israeli intransigence. By its actions Israel revealed that it preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Soon after the end of the1967 war it began to build settlements in the occupied territories. Building civilian settlements on occupied territory was not just illegal under international law but a major obstacle to peace. There were some early signs of flexibility on the part of the Israeli cabinet in relation to the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights but none towards the West Bank. All the major parties in the 1967–70 national unity government were united in their determination to keep at least a substantial part of the West Bank in perpetuity. There were proponents of the ‘Jordanian option’ and proponents of the ‘Palestinian option’, but in practical terms the debate was between those who did not want to return the West Bank to Jordan and those who did not want to return it to the Palestinians who lived there. Despite Hussein’s best efforts, the diplomatic deadlock persisted for another decade, until Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Sadat did what Hussein had studiously avoided, namely, a bilateral deal with Israel that left the Palestinian problem unresolved. The two countries changed places: Egypt was drummed out of the Arab League while Jordan joined the Arab mainstream.
    In the aftermath of the Lebanon War of 1982 Ronald Reagan launched a peace plan that called for the creation of a Palestinian homeland in association with Jordan. The Likud government headed by Menachem Begin flatly rejected this plan. In the mid 1980s Hussein tried a new tack. He wanted to ‘repackage’ the PLO in a way that would make it acceptable to America so that America would put pressure on Israel to negotiate. The result was the Jordan–PLO accord of 11 February 1985. But the PLO turned out to be evasive and unreliable and the peace partnership broke down the following year. In April 1987 Hussein reached an agreement with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on an international conference to which all the parties to the conflict would be invited and which would then divide up into bilateral working groups. But Itzhak Shamir, the Likud leader and prime minister, scuppered this ‘London Agreement’. Later that year the first intifada broke out. It was a full-scale revolt against Israeli rule in Gaza and the West Bank, a non-violent Palestinian war of independence. Fearing that the intifada would spread from the West Bank to the East Bank, on 31 July 1988 Hussein severed the legal and administrative links between his kingdom and the West Bank. Belatedly and reluctantly, he acknowledged that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
    Following this disengagement from the West Bank, and in a sensefrom the Palestine problem, Hussein concentrated his efforts on building a liberal, moderate Arab order. He wanted the moderates rather than the PLO and the radicals to set the tone in the Arab world and to build a pro-Western Arab coalition that would promote stability and prosperity in the region. The main achievement of this phase was the creation of the Arab Cooperation Council, consisting of Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. A second important aspect of Hussein’s foreign policy during the 1980s was the cultivation of an alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The alliance constituted some sort of a strategic counterweight to Israel and it brought rich economic rewards, but because of Saddam’s unpredictability it also carried risks. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 destroyed the emerging moderate Arab order and