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King of the Beni Hashem
By Eric Margolis,
Feb. 14, 1999
New York - King Hussein of Jordan was a splendid king,
and a true man's man, a graceful, accomplished ruler
whose noble yet unassuming character deeply impressed
all who knew him. His death last week marks the end of
an era of post-colonial Mideast history.
Hussein ibn Talal personified both what is good about
the Arabs, and, sadly, much of what is wrong with the
Mideast. Hussein lifted up his tribe, the Beni Hashem,
and left them a well-run, decent, humane country that
stands in sharp contrast to the other dreary despotism's
of the Arab World. He inherited a poor, unstable,
artificial kingdom created by British imperialism, yet
managed to build it into a remarkably successful nation
while under almost constant siege from Syria, Israel,
Egypt, and the Palestinians.
Yet during the four decades of his long reign, Hussein's
priority always remained his own royal dynasty, and his
desert tribe. Hussein was the last of the generation of
Arab "brown Englishmen" who ruled his nation as a
surrogate, or overseer, for western interests.
Hussein was put onto the throne of his tiny kingdom by
the British, and kept in power by British, American,
and, later, Israeli military protection. He became a CIA
"asset" in 1952 and continued to receive secret US
stipends until his death. The dashing king and his crack
Bedouin army - created as the famed Arab Legion by Glubb
Pasha - became one of the west's most useful allies in
the Arab World.
At the same time, Hussein played a murky, many-sided
role in the long Arab-Israeli dispute that few outside
the Mideast understood. Hussein's grandfather, King
Abdullah, secretly colluded in 1947-1948 with Israel's
leader, David Ben Gurion, to divided between them the
Palestinian state mandated by the United Nations when it
partitioned Palestine between Arabs and Jews. As a
result, Jordan became a covert ally of Israel in
suppressing the Palestinians, and denying them a state.
Two-thirds of Jordan's people are Palestinians. Hussein
ruled the kingdom through his US-supported Bedouin army
and security forces, using them to crush attempts by
Palestinians to oust the monarchy. In 1970, Hussein
unleashed his tanks against Palestinians in Amman,
killing over 3,000. All attempts by Jordan's Palestinian
majority to gain any political voice were put down
ruthlessly.
While pretending to join the Arab crusade against
Israel, Hussein more often than not secretly sided with
the Jewish state. In 1973, for example, when Egypt and
Israel were planning a surprise attack on Israel to
regain lands they had lost in the 1967 War, their
"ally," Hussein, actually went secretly to Israel to
warn Golda Meir of the impending attack. Jordan was long
used by the United States and Britain to thwart the
pan-Arabist ambitions of Egypt and Syria and to combat
Arab nationalism.
Since the early 1980's, Jordan has been a de facto
Israeli protectorate. In the long struggle between Syria
and Israel for regional domination, Israel got Jordan,
while Syria ended controlling Lebanon. This fact was
underlined last week. Tellingly, one of the largest
delegation at Hussein's funeral came from Israel. It
included Gen. Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the massacre of
thousands of Palestinians at the Shatilla and Sabra
Camps in Lebanon, and the head of Mossad, Israel's
intelligence agency, which had only recently tried to
assassinate a Palestinian Hamas leader in downtown
Amman. The obvious lack of concern by the Jordanian
government for the feelings of the majority of its
citizens, who are Palestinians, went unnoticed by the
western media.
Amid the outpouring of tributes to King Hussein, not
once was the word "democracy" ever heard. The king was
dead, but Jordan would remain a feudal monarchy, in
which the majority had no political rights or legitimate
expression. Hussein's son, Abdullah, an army general,
would rule as his father did, at least for the time
being.
The US and Britain, who so vociferously denounce denial
of democracy in China and Burma, rushed to show total
support of the new Jordanian monarchy. Democracy may be
fine for nations in which the west has no strategic
interests; but in the Mideast, the kings of Arabia, the
Gulf, Morocco, and Jordan remain the chosen instrument
of western influence and domination. If free elections
were ever held in these kingdoms, including Jordan,
their western-supported regimes would likely fall. This
will not be allowed to happen. "Stability," the current
code word for the western oil Raj in the Mideast, must
be maintained at all costs.
Arab rulers eagerly cooperate with the west in denying
their people political and human rights in return for
immense personal wealth, annual stipends, and protection
from their citizens or neighbors. Hussein, for all his
greatness as a king, and his personal decency, was a
leading example of this old school of western surrogate
rulers: to the west, he was "the good Arab." In fact, he
spent as much effort undermining fellow Arabs as he did
uplifting his own tribe.
The Mideast's people deserve better. Alas, the few Arab
regimes not controlled by the west - Syria, Iraq, Libya
- have proven even more brutal, anti-democratic, and
repressive than their feudal neighbors. The only choice
in the Mideast seems between medieval monarchs and
generals: the Arab World remains in the political Dark
Ages.
The Arab nations, as the Economist said so aptly, are
still "tribes with flags." Hussein of the Beni Hashem
was a magnificent tribal chieftain, but not, sadly, a
great leader the long-suffering, backward, bitterly
divided Arab people so badly need.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999
