The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rifai recalled. ‘He became more Jordanian Arab than British. A lot of injustice was done to him. My father had to tell Glubb to leave.’ His father found the duty distasteful. Glubb had given his professional life to Jordan within the context of his loyalty to the British Empire. I had known Glubb’s son, Fares, in Beirut in the early 1970s. Short and thin like his father, he looked like photographs of Glubb Pasha as a young man. Fares spoke flawless Bedouin Arabic, had converted to Islam and was close to the Marxists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1970 had attempted to destroy the Hashemite crown that his father had sworn to defend for thirty-five years.

‘I went as ambassador to London for a few months,’ Rifai remembered. ‘Glubb Pasha used to call on me. He always referred to King Hussein as His Majesty, or our lord – sayedna. He had contributed enormously to the establishment of the army, to administration and order in this society.’ The discipline, the starched uniforms and the army band’s bagpipes owed something to Glubb Pasha.

Back in Amman with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, Rifai went on to represent Jordan in Cairo, Beirut and London, as well as at the United Nations. In 1971, he started work in the royal palace. ‘I thought I’d have a change after all we had been through.’ What Jordan had been through included the June 1967 war, when Israel captured Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank from what had been Glubb Pasha’s army; the Arab – Israeli War of Attrition that followed; and the 1970 Black September war between Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s army.

‘The most dangerous time was the period after the ’67 war,’ Rifai said. ‘For Jordan, it wasn’t a six-day war. It was a four-year war. There was the battle of Karameh in 1968. There were daily bombardments and air raids by the Israelis. There was anarchy with the presence of Palestinian commandos. We had fifty-two commando organizations, including the Red Brigades, Baader – Meinhof and Carlos the Jackal. We had no idea they were all here until September 1970.’ He described a time of chaos, when Palestinian commandos briefly held the Western press corps hostage in the InterContinental Hotel.

‘The borders were open. We had Iraqi troops in the country. We had no idea the Palestinians were so well dug in. They planted land mines and had rocket-propelled grenades. They took control of this city. Our army was on the front lines with Israel. The Palestinian commandos put up checkpoints. They stole cars. They took donations to the cause by force. They kidnapped. They had their own newspapers. Remember their slogan, that they would liberate Jerusalem by liberating Amman. The army almost revolted. When soldiers came to spend weekends with their families in Amman, the commandos would kidnap, kill and mutilate them. Battalions in the Jordan Valley would hear what happened to fellow soldiers. The units would come up here on their own. I would go with His Majesty and Zayd Bin Shaker’ – Bin Shaker, King Hussein’s uncle, was the army commander – ‘to stop them. There was a decision by His Majesty. We waited and waited.’

On 15 September 1970, King Hussein appointed a military government to force the commandos out of Amman. The Jordanian parliament sent a delegation to ask Yasser Arafat to evacuate without a fight. Rifai’s version of Arafat’s reaction was, ‘He told them, “The situation has run out of my hands. The best I can do for you is to give King Hussein twenty-four hours to leave the country.” ’

Hussein stayed. After two weeks of intensive fighting, during which Jordan’s Bedouin troops massacred Palestinians and bombarded their camps, it was Arafat who left. Negotiations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat in Cairo may have caused the heart attack that killed Gamal Abdel Nasser the night after the two Arab chiefs left. With Nasser’s death, Arab nationalism retreated and left the field to the steady advance of political Islam.

Did Arafat, who made several attempts on Hussein’s life, reconcile with the king? ‘Oh, yes,’ Rifai said. ‘They made up. Arafat often came here. He was received as a head of state. With politics in the Middle East, you can’t afford to have a long memory. You won’t be able to talk to anyone.’

After the war, Arafat’s commandos assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tel outside the Hilton Hotel in Cairo. Someone also tried to kill Rifai, when he was ambassador in London. ‘We were in a narrow road coming from Regent’s Park,’ he said. ‘The driver was making a right turn. They were standing on a little traffic island and started shooting point-blank. I was reading the paper. The car was a big Daimler. It was The Times, I remember. I was crouching like this.’ Rifai bent forward. ‘The first bullets hit my hand and ear. I reacted quickly. I threw myself to the floor. They found forty bullets, and the fire was concentrated on the back seat. A Scotland Yard inspector said he didn’t believe a canary would survive.’ Rifai blamed the clandestine arm of Yasser Arafat’s Al Fateh, Black September, for the attack.

The Jordanians responded in kind, assassinating PLO officials in their post-Amman headquarters, Beirut.

That evening, an old friend of Rifai’s met me for a drink. I told him the story about the attempt on his life. ‘Black September?’ the friend asked. ‘Maybe. We always thought they were London gangsters trying to collect gambling debts.’

Farewell to Amman

I saw old friends in Amman, among them Riad and Zein Khoury, Prince Talal and his beautiful Lebanese wife, Princess Ghida, and the children of both couples. All of them worried, not about Jordan, but about the neighbours. They hated the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and what it was doing to the Palestinians. They hated the economic embargo of Iraq on their eastern border and the cost in lives of Iraqi children. It was a rare Jordanian who had no relations or friends west of the River Jordan or east of the great desert in Iraq. They did not love Yasser Arafat, who they said was a useless leader, or Saddam Hussein, a vicious tyrant. The United States sustained the wretchedness of Palestinians and Iraqis. America paid for Israel’s illegal settlements on illegally occupied land, and America enforced the boycott that deprived Iraq’s children of medicines and treated water. It would soon invade Iraq, making life there even worse. Yet none of my Jordanian friends dared to suggest a public gesture – boycotting American goods, severing diplomatic relations or closing an American hotel – to affect Washington’s policies.

The bullet holes I saw on my first visit here in 1973 had been erased. Monster buildings had transformed the terrain of battle between the brave fedayeen and the hardy Bedouin into a zone of combat for market share, for the greater triumph of AT&T and Sheraton and for the acquisition of newer cars and cellphones. Amman sustained the dullness from which its Hashemite monarchs, the British and several wars had not redeemed it. Its sleepy hills, in which a few thousand Circassians had lived in their huts of rock, did not welcome disturbance. It was not a land of flooding rivers or icy precipices or earthquakes. Amman perched on gentle hills, and its inhabitants closed their doors on excitement. It had been the wrong stage for the Palestinians to enact their revolutionary drama. I did not linger in Amman.

The car journey from Amman to Jerusalem should take an hour and a half. But it does not take an hour and a half. It takes many hours. If you are a Palestinian, it can take for ever. For me, it was five hours in several taxis and one bus, most of that time absorbed, not on the highway observing the wildlife, but waiting at the border.

If I curse Britain and France, despite having lived in and loved them both, it is for these borders. Travelling from Beirut to Damascus, or Damascus to Amman, or Amman to Jerusalem – all simple trips along good roads with no insuperable natural obstacles – constituted an ordeal for all travellers. So mutually suspicious were the mini-states of Greater Syria that they mistreated all who entered or left. All showed Europeans and Americans less discourtesy, and the Jordanians were more polite to Israelis. The Syrians and Lebanese would not admit Israelis or anyone with an Israeli visa in his passport. Every border policeman – Israeli, Jordanian, Syrian or Lebanese – made a point of humiliating any Arab who came his way.

On the way to the River Jordan, the road sticks to the earth’s contours, flowing like water through the easiest downward passages. The Jordan Valley was the hot land, where the wool cloaks of mountain shepherds yielded to the peasant’s light cotton robe. Here were sandy wastes, lush meadows, small farms and greenhouses dressed in plastic sheets. In December 1917, when the British captured Jerusalem, Allenby’s forces fought to link their army near here with the Hashemites who were advancing north on a parallel march. But the linking was not to be. The British were repulsed by Turkish forces north of the town of Salt, and Lawrence was unable to take Ma’an in the east. In the event, each army made its separate way up to Damascus. By then, each understood that its interests and objectives diverged from the other’s. The Arabs, Lawrence knew, were fighting for independence in all of Greater Syria. The British planned to divide the land into European colonies with one corner, western Palestine, set aside as a reserve for Europe’s Jews. Palestine’s Arabs would be sacrificed to pay for European anti-Semitism. The Arabs reached Damascus, but Britain prevailed.

Signs indicated the Dead Sea to the south and, later, the King Hussein Bridge straight ahead. A little stand at the side of the road sold boxes of oranges, as on the pre-freeway California highways of my childhood. You could buy the oranges by the box or the kilo, or a man in a straw hat would slice them in two and squeeze them into a pint glass. Nearby, other farmers stacked celery stalks and lettuces on barrel tops to sell to the few passing drivers. We came to a village where I’d have romanticized the unchanging life of donkey carts, camels and its graceful mosque but for the neon and paint logos of the Arab Bank, Sharp, Coca-Cola, the Internet Café and the Green Saloon. At the largest and dustiest roundabout, a cement frame larger than a movie screen surrounded a portrait of the late King Hussein in Prince of Mecca garb: white robes and white keffiyeh, the keffiyeh held by a black egal tied around his head, the robes offset by a belt with a curved dagger in a golden sheath. It was not a poster. Someone had painted the fresco onto wet cement. King Hussein had not been dead long. A complicated man, he had saved his throne from overthrow by socialists, nationalists, communists, Palestinians and Muslim fundamentalists. Like a true Bedouin chief, he had never severed contact with his enemies – whether Nasserite, Israeli or Palestinian – and was wary of his friends – the other Arab monarchs and the Americans. He had outlived the dictators of Syria and Egypt, who had once sworn to replace all the Arab kingdoms with republics like their own. The republican dictators instead adopted regal succession, appointing their sons to replace them when they died. Could it have been otherwise? The Ram ad-Dar, the head of the household, did not leave the fate of the tribe to the masses, as if they could choose a leader with wisdom and strength to lead them. That decision was his, and the only one he could train to confront the world’s cunning and evil ways was his son.

Monarchy went against my beliefs. I knew about Jordan’s prisons. The best that could be said of them was that they were probably not as bad as those in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. People were repressed, but less so than elsewhere in the region. Palestinians in Jordan had a difficult time, but no one stole their homes and threatened to expel them en masse as in Israel and the territories it occupied. No state official prevented them from taking jobs, as in Lebanon. They were not denied passports, as in Syria and Lebanon. The crown that Hussein had passed to his son left Jordan more peaceful than its neighbours.

Beyond the valley’s villages were the Bedouin tents, rows of them in white, beside white sheep and a tethered white donkey. About five miles short of the river was Jordan’s lazy border post. Within its walls, a triangular yard was bounded by an arrival hall, a departure hall and a café. A rusting bus waited in the middle to deliver the day’s last shipment of travellers to the other side. I made the mistake of walking into the departure building, whose offices were locked and whose windows for three different categories of traveller – Arab, Jordanian, non-Arab – were shut. A policeman in starched khaki guided me to the arrivals building. Since the intifadah began in September 2000, one room served both purposes. I filled in forms and a polite official stamped my passport. I paid the five Jordanian dinar departure tax and boarded the unlit bus with a driver and three other passengers: an old man in a white keffiyeh; his wife in a white scarf and a beautiful olive dress embroidered in scarlet eagles’ wings and pink rosebuds; and a younger man in a lightweight business suit. He called the old man ‘Haj’, a title of respect for someone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Christians who had gone to Jerusalem were also called ‘Haj’.

At five o’clock, the driver pulled the door shut. After a few warm-ups, the engine started. As the bus turned to leave the post, we saw the last royal portrait, of the two kings, father and son, Hussein and Abdallah. A gold crown hovered in a fair blue sky above them, a trinity whose spirit might pass from head to head but was eternal in its protection of the people, of the family, of the tribe.

I was thinking of something Prince Talal had said to me the night before. Talal, like his uncle, the late king, and his first cousin, King Abdallah, had received his formal education abroad. His school was Harrow, and his undergraduate and graduate degrees were from Georgetown. He rode motorcycles and liked Western music. He was a crack shot and a good horseman. He said that Western politicians who met people like himself thought of them as ‘good Arabs’. I paraphrase what he said, because I did not write it down. It went something like this: ‘I dress like them. So they think I am not really an Arab. It’s like being an honorary white. But I am as much an Arab as any Bedouin who has never left the desert. And, if I have to choose, I choose to be an Arab.’

He had just told me that Jordan had arrested some of the Islamic fundamentalists of Osama bin Laden, who had tried to blow up a Jordanian phosphate plant. The Jordanians were passing information about threats to Americans in the US and the Middle East to Washington. They wanted to help, especially when the fanatics were as opposed to the Hashemite throne as to the American government. But they could not go all the way, as President George Bush demanded with his ‘You’re either with us or against us’ speech. Nor could Jordan support General Sharon’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ that was a war on Palestinians under military occupation. Jordan could not, however much it disapproved of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, favour the sanctions that deprived Iraq’s people of medicine and of equipment for the restoration of sewage treatment and other basic services. To Talal, there were no good and no bad Arabs, measured on a scale of Americanization. There were good and bad people based on their humanity.

The sky in the king’s fresco was a clearer blue than the one towards which our bus rumbled across the deserted plain. We came to sets of metal gates and a long runway, as if we would fly into the darkening horizon over the River Jordan and into Canaan in our sweet chariot. This was no-man’s-land, the nether-world that separated each state of Greater Syria from the other. No one lived here. No one governed the tribal buffer. No farmers farmed, no livestock grazed and no trees cast shadows to obstruct the view from either side of the other. Concrete pillars – dragon’s teeth, in American military parlance – stood sentry at intervals of ten yards on both sides of the highway. I don’t know if the land was mined against infiltrators, but nothing grew out of that cement-powder soil. Two miles of protected desolation brought the bus at last to the ‘Police Security Directorship – Bridge Security’. Metal screamed on metal, as the ancient brakes of our border shuttle stopped us crashing into the gates. A Jordanian policeman boarded and collected vouchers that confirmed we had paid the departure tax. The driver slammed the doors, fired up the engine again and released the brake. We rolled past a sign, the last I would see in Jordan. It wished us all ‘Bon Voyage’.

The first Israeli fence was a little further. We stopped. We waited. We waited a long time. The old man sitting in front of me, who had been patient for a quarter of an hour, was the first to speak. ‘Why are we waiting?’ ‘Who knows?’ the driver answered. His daily route between the two border stations had accustomed him to waiting. This was his last trip of the day, and he would return empty. The old Haj repeated his question: ‘Why do they make us wait so long?’ The other passenger, the man in the suit, told him, ‘Be patient, Haj.’ The Haj looked at his wife, who smiled at him, and shrugged. The driver got out and opened all the luggage compartments for inspection by two Israeli soldiers. He drove on to a second gate, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to the Allenby Bridge Crossing Point’. We were still on the East Bank, waiting to cross a tiny suspension bridge that the Israelis, following the British, named for General Allenby and the Jordanians called the King Hussein Bridge.

Impatient, the driver took the bus up to the gate and said to a woman soldier inside the guard post, ‘This is the last bus.’ She told him to reverse to where he had been. He backed up to our original position twenty yards away, with the perilous grinding of old gears and brakes. The moment he stopped, the woman soldier waved to him to come forward again. At last, we were going through.

FOUR

Over Jordan

‘Palestine, formed and surrounded as it is, is a land of

tribes. That it can ever belong to one nation, even

though this were the Jews, is contrary to Nature

and Scripture.’

REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)

On the West Bank

INSIDE THE ISRAELI BORDER SHED the old Haj asked me to fill in his forms. At this crossing between an Arab country and occupied Arab land, there were no Arabic entry cards. All were in Hebrew and English. The old man gave me his and his wife’s Jordanian passports and I wrote their names and addresses on the questionnaire. He was born in 1932. City of birth: Bethlehem. I hesitated at country, wanting not to complicate his entry, before writing what it said in the passport: Palestine. The purpose of their visit was to see their daughter. They thanked me and went ahead to the passport booth, where a young policewoman was polite to them both. The man laughed at something she said and then, taking his wife’s hand and wheeling his smart new suitcase, walked outside to a taxi.

Next at the passport counter came the man in the suit. After presenting his American passport, he answered the policewoman’s questions in an amiable but apprehensive way. Born in the West Bank in 1960, he now worked as a businessman in Jordan. The purpose of his visit was to see business associates in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, his passport had stamps from many trips to Europe. The Israelis took him apart, first the suitcases, then his dignity. Israeli police did not treat American citizens of Arab origin as they did other Americans. They looked on them as security risks. This man would have a hard time. I had done a story the year before about another Arab American, a young man named Anwar Mohammed, from Florida. The police had arrested him as he was leaving via this same border. They took him to the Moscobieh, the security headquarters in Jerusalem known in English as the Russian Compound. He was chained to a chair, interrogated, abused, held for two months and released without charge. He was lucky, saved perhaps by the cockiness that came from his youth, his karate black belt, his belief in his American passport and, just as important, the fact that there was no evidence against him. If he had been a Palestinian with no passport, only a refugee identity card, he might have stayed for years. The American Embassy lodged no protests on his behalf. An American diplomat pointed to a warning on the State Department website that Israel did not necessarily respect the American citizenship of Arabs born in Arab countries, Israel or the occupied territories. The State Department permitted the Israeli police to determine who was and who was not an American citizen.

Outside, in the dark car park, I found an Israeli taxi driver and asked him to take me to Jerusalem. The road from the Allenby – Hussein Bridge cut through the occupied – disputed Jordan Valley, knocking aside all obstacles in its straight path. Jericho, whose walls came tumbling down, sparkled on the dark horizon. ‘That her walls fell at the sound of Joshua’s trumpet,’ the Reverend George Adam Smith wrote in 1894, ‘is a summary of her history.’ No one had ever defended Jericho. Her low-lying position on the frontier between eastern desert and western mountain was indefensible and prey to raiders from both directions. Under the Oslo accords of 1993, Jericho was the first town that Israel allowed the new Palestinian administration to govern for itself, within limits.

As the road had created its way through the plain, it resculpted the hills beyond. On the Jordanian side, it had rambled with the land like the rolling English road’s drunken path of no resistance. Israel’s was an American highway for which mountains and villages and forests made way, a proud, broad road that would have me in Jerusalem for dinner. ‘There is no water,’ Reverend Smith wrote, ‘from Jericho till you reach the roots of the Mount of Olives.’ There was no traffic either. Israeli settlers were afraid to drive at night, and the Israeli army kept the Palestinians confined to their towns.

Daughter of the Final Solution

Lily Galili had asked me to meet her in front of the American Consulate in West Jerusalem at 7.15 in the evening. An Arab taxi took me from the American Colony Hotel across the ‘seam’, as Israelis called the old Green Line between east and west, to the consulate. The car stopped opposite the late-nineteenth-century consular building, and security guards raced out of their post towards the car. I asked the driver to go another hundred yards uphill to avoid an hour’s questioning. I got out and walked towards the consulate. An Israeli security guard asked me what I wanted. I was meeting a friend. What was the friend’s name? What was my name? I ignored him, standing as I was on a public pavement, and walked further down the hill in search of Lily. Another security guard, a young woman, followed and said, ‘Lily said she would wait for you at the corner.’

Lily’s corner was dark, out of range of the consulate’s spotlights, near a passage between two stone houses that led to her friend’s flat. She apologized for choosing the consulate as our rendezvous. She had forgotten about America’s security worries. We talked a bit in the dark, catching up before we went to the dinner. Her voice was like a precocious child’s, whose judgements, criticisms, observations and stories were astute and unexpected. She was leaving soon for Krakow, the city of her birth where she said her spirit was most at home, to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday. Lily looked a good ten years younger than I did, and I was fifty. She was a journalist at Ha’aretz, a Tel Aviv daily that employed more talent – among them Danny Rubinstein, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Daniel Ben Simon – than the top ten Western newspapers combined. Lily and I had met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. My friends Bernard Avishai and Sidra Ezrahi had taken me to a dinner that Lily cooked at her place, and we became friends. She once called me from London on my British cellphone, when I happened to be in a kosher restaurant in Krakow’s old ghetto. Klezmer music played behind me, and she told me about her love affair with Poland’s most beautiful Renaissance city. After the war, her family had returned to Krakow. Her mother brought her to Israel in 1956. She was ten.