“We bow our heads in respect and admiration for this heroic people which has dealt such a painful blow to imperialism!” Major Salah Salem, commenting thus in the Cairo daily Ash Shaab on the eclipse of British influence in Jordan, was, of course, indulging his customary hyperbole; but he was well on target. The blow really hurt. In deciding that even dependence on precarious Saudi-Syrian-Egyptian charity was preferable to maintaining their lucrative tie with Britain, the Jordanians hit Whitehall in a most sensitive spot. “It’s their sheer barefaced perfidy, their utter disloyalty, that gets me,” a young British official in Amman exclaimed. He was trying to digest a statement by Jordanian Premier Suleiman Nabulsi to the effect that whereas Saudi-Syrian-Egyptian financial aid would be a fundamentally fraternal transaction, British subsidies were “doled out condescendingly, month by month, as if they were a favor.”

Political, economic, and even strategic realities never impinged more than superficially upon the Anglo-Jordanian relationship—whether at palace, government, embassy, or army level. It was a paternalistic, man-to-man relationship, in which the terms of a mere treaty were less important than the personalities of the Jordanian monarch and the small Anglo-Arab circle centered on him. “Loyalty” was the linchpin, and “loyalty” and “disloyalty” the only sociopolitical criteria. On one’s first visit to Amman one would be shown the Emir (later King) Abdullah’s palace dominating the town. Then the British Residency (now the embassy) would come into view—overlooking the palace. This was always good for a chuckle; but after a minute or so one’s companion would clear his throat and say solemnly: “Not that this particular layout is necessary, of course: the old man’s loyal as the day is long. . . .”

In 1949 a former pro-Nazi, Musa el-Husseini, who had spent much of the Second World War in Hitler’s Germany (he was a kinsman of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini), joined the staff of an important British government information service in the Levant. This seemed an odd appointment for even the local representatives of the Attlee-Bevin administration to make, and I asked a question about it in an appropriate quarter. “Well, Musa’s sown a few wild oats, undoubtedly,” I was told, “but that’s over and done with. There’s no doubt about his loyalty now.” In 1955 a correspondent asked a British officer in Jordan about a rumor that Colonel (later General) Ahmed el-Jundi, the Jordan army’s highest-ranking Arab officer, was impatient to step into Glubb’s shoes. “Not a word of truth in it,” came the reply (naturally enough). “El-Jundi’s as loyal an old warhorse as you’d find anywhere.”

But what, in this sort of context, did the catchwords “loyal” and “loyalty” really mean? Fundamental as the question was to Anglo-Jordanian relations, no one on the British side ever asked it. Arab thinking on such matters took less for granted, as I suddenly realized one day when three Jordanian Moslem friends who called on me found me reading a book entitled Four Studies in Loyalty by the British writer Christopher Sykes. The title baffled them. One flipped over the pages, frowning, as I tried to explain Sykes’s theme. At last he exclaimed: “But it’s idiotic! A man can only be loyal to a particular person or organization, for a definite purpose, and usually for a limited period. There’s nothing abstract about loyalty. And why should it be considered a virtue? It must serve the interests of the person who gives it no less than of the one who receives it, otherwise it would be pointless.” The others agreed.

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In Western society, on the other hand, loyalty is still generally considered a virtue, admirable per se. It may be inspired in the first place by some friendly act or fruitful association, such as T. E. Lawrence’s support of the Sharifians or Eden’s co-sponsorship of the Arab League, but thereafter, the Western code insists, it should be self-perpetuating and as nearly altruistic as possible. This was the kind of loyalty successive British governments seriously expected of the Arabs—of the Jordanians in particular—and it was on the assumption that it would be forthcoming (or could be assured once certain extraneous irritants had been minimized) that Whitehall’s Near Eastern policy was based from 1920 to 1950. The traditional temporizing, Vicar-of-Bray role of the Levant throughout history was overlooked; in any case, British officials would remind one dryly, the men who mattered were not the mercurial Levantine mob but its stable, hard-headed rulers, who were, of course, “true Arabs.”

At the same time a curious ambivalence was discernible in Whitehall’s approach. It is “one of the peculiarities” of the “true Arab”—in the words of Major C. S. Jarvis, onetime British governor of Sinai—that “throughout the ages he has managed to exist on subsidies . . . hush-money paid to him by the governments of peaceful countries in return for keeping the peace—monies handed over, not in return for doing something, but solely to refrain from doing something.”¹ And while British officials talked airily of Arab loyalty and tried to convince themselves that the Arab ruling classes really did love Britain, deeply and altruistically, for her own sake, they saw nothing inconsistent—let alone insulting—in doling out subsidies and “hush-money” on a massive scale. Transjordan—the largely barren oddment left over from the scramble for the estates of the last Ottoman sultan, made a principality by Winston Churchill and a kingdom by Ernest Bevin—consequently achieved the melancholy distinction of becoming the modern world’s first sovereign state wholly dependent on such baksheesh.

The British officials responsible for this development disregarded its inherent economic and psychological perils. It merely meant, as one of the most senior of them put it, that Jordan was “all sewn up”: subsidies would, presumably, make Anglophiles even of such benighted Levantines as failed to respond to the call of “loyalty.” Hence Whitehall’s fantastic over-confidence and self-delusion, a typical harmonic of which was this description (in an article by a correspondent closely attuned to the official line) of King Abdullah’s mentally unhinged and virulently anti-British son Talal, who had only a short while before threatened his father with a dagger, attempted to murder his own wife, and taken a potshot at General Glubb: “Talal is a level-headed man and has derived advantages from a small group of intelligent and far-seeing British friends. . . . Despite wretched memories of a most unhappy period at Sandhurst, Talal is fervently pro-British, progressive, and, it is felt, capable. . . .”² Hence, too, the acuteness of the shock to British officialdom When the plausible Musa el-Husseini exploited the facilities his new job provided to organize the assassination of King Abdullah; when the loyal old warhorse el-Jundi was discovered to be intriguing with the Egyptians against Glubb; and when Suleiman Nabulsi, once a trusted ambassador at the Court of St. James, won the October 1956 election on a pledge to abrogate the Anglo-Jordan treaty—and confounded embassy wiseacres by fulfilling his pledge.

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Among Musa el-Husseini’s personal papers was found a clipping from the London Times, a eulogistic, editorial-page piece dated sometime in 1949 and headlined “Stability of Transjordan.” The first paragraph read: “The Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan can be compared to an English eighteenth-century squirearchy. There is a strong personal bond between king and people, and a formalism and personal graciousness winch are reminders of that period. There is also a real social democracy, not to be found in political textbooks, which lifts the nomads and peasants above the fellahin level, and often makes the visitor review previous ideas of democracy conceived in terms of the vote, the arbitration council, and protective legislation.”

Some day, someone will write a monograph on the contribution of the London Times to the spread of Anglophobia in the Near East. The “real social democracy, not to be found in political textbooks,” included such trimmings as rigged elections, a government appointed by and responsible only to the king, a ban on anti-government parties and newspapers, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and a grim internment camp out in the desert at El Bayir for persistent critics of the regime. Out of every dollar lavished on the country by the British Labor government between Abdullah’s coronation and assassination, or raised by the local authorities from internal resources, fifty-eight cents were spent on the army, ten on police and prisons, and two on education. One-third of all privately owned land was (and is) held by about fifty big landowners, another third by 350 smaller ones, and the remainder by the rest of the population. An American Quaker mission was recently appalled to discover that the normal living standard of Jordanian villagers in an area which had never been affected by the Arab-Israeli dispute was lower than that maintained by UN relief among Gaza refugees. The other Arab states, with the exception of Lebanon, were no better off. But what enraged Jordanian “intellectuals” like Musa el-Husseini was less authoritarianism as such (most of them had once been pro-Nazi) than what they took to be Whitehall’s pretense that the tight little “squirearchy” in Amman was a new Arab ersatz for democracy, a blueprint for the Arab world as a whole. Unfortunately for Britain as well as Jordan, Whitehall was not pretending. From Bevin down, it believed that in Jordan it had evolved the perfect formula, and regarded the Anglo-Jordanian treaty as a model of its kind. I remember Glubb scoffing (good-humoredly) one day at the French for their crazy, if well-intentioned, idea of installing republican forms of government and the trappings of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity in Syria and Lebanon. In doing so they had dug their own grave and brought the Syrians and Lebanese to the brink of anarchy. What the Arab most appreciated in politics was a sort of sheikhly paternalism, a just but firm hand. . . .

Glubb might still have been holding down his job, and the Foreign Office’s Arab experts cherishing at least a few of their illusions, had they not, in their zeal to spread the benefits of sheikhly paternalism, encouraged King Abdullah to annex the eastern half of Palestine, which, under the 1947 UN partition plan, should have formed the nucleus of an independent Palestine-Arab state. Overnight, Transjordan, with a population of 400,000, became Jordan, with a population of 1,400,000. About one-half of its new citizens were refugees—embittered, irreconcilable, nihilistic. Many were half-educated city-dwellers, well versed in the arts of agitation, who had seen the bright lights of New Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv, and were contemptuous of Abdullah’s shaggy Ruritania with its “overgrown village” capital. It was inevitable that their mores and mentality should dominate those of the largely illiterate Transjordanians, rather than, as London apparently hoped, the other way round. The British in their turn had dug themselves a grave—and one for Abdullah, too.

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Not all King Abdullah’s horses nor all Glubb’s men could have preserved even the old Transjordan indefinitely. Sociopolitical evolution was bound one day to undermine the Amman “squirearchy”—and with it Britain’s foothold—though the process might have been slow and would probably have allowed the Anglo-Jordan treaty to survive six or eight years longer. The annexation of eastern Palestine accelerated it frenetically, impelling it to anarchic and xenophobic extremes. Worse, Whitehall’s miscalculation plunged Jordan into the vortex of impassioned inter-Arab rivalry and intrigue.

Transjordan as such had not been worth quarreling over (though Ibn Saud claimed Ma’an and Aqaba). A Jordan which included eastern Palestine, and would undoubtedly absorb Israel when (as Arab opinion expected) the Jewish state collapsed from economic inanition, was an attractive prize indeed. The old Hashemite-Saudi feud flared up afresh, with Egypt supporting the Saudis, and Syria changing sides according to who organized her last coup d’état. King Abdullah had ambitions of his own, of course, and informed one of his closest confidants in the fall of 1950 that when his army next marched it would be southwards (against Ibn Saud) not westwards (against Israel). But the whole Near East—outside Amman—knew he was doomed: Haj Amin’s entourage in Cairo boasted of the coming payoff, and even in Tel Aviv; in the spring of 1951, I met an Israel Foreign Ministry official who was worrying about what would happen in Jordan “when” Abdullah was assassinated.

The blow fell in July 1951. Talal succeeded his father in an atmosphere of popular rejoicing, and approved a new, more nearly democratic constitution. Nationalist circles crowed that he would have the British out within a year. As it happened, it was Talal who was out first, declared insane and succeeded by his seventeen-year-old son Hussein the following summer.

Hussein was hastily packed off on the by now traditional kingship course—Harrow and Sandhurst—which Whitehall prescribes for Near Eastern princelings; and in 1954 the first election of his reign was held under the aegis of Tawfiq Abul-Huda, one of the Hashemite family’s most faithful old retainers. Pro-government candidates were helped to victory by the judicious distribution of “army votes.” (A candidate representing the leading refugee group told me that Premier Abul-Huda asked him openly: “Would you like me to get Glubb to send you a box of soldiers’ votes?”) Of the 40 seats in the new parliament, 35 went to pro-government candidates. Yet, such was the pressure of Jordan’s emergent public opinion, in a little over a year these same hand-picked deputies were clamoring for abrogation of the Anglo-Jordan treaty.

The British themselves touched off the clamor. Whitehall had begun to suspect Secretary of State John Foster Dulles of toying with the idea of “working through the Turks” in the Moslem world and disregarding Britain’s admittedly battered claim to Near Eastern expertise. Turkey had for years maintained friendly relations with Israel; but now, suddenly, her leaders were pandering to anti-Israel fanaticism in the Arab states. President Celal Bayar, visiting Jordan in November 1955, even declared that Turkish troops would fight side by side with the Jordanians against Israel if the need arose—and urged Jordan to join the Baghdad Pact. Hereupon, Whitehall decided to take a hand. If Secretary Dulles really wanted Jordan in the Baghdad Pact, Britain would give him a showroom demonstration of how such things ought to be done.

The British ambassador and General Glubb pronounced the omens propitious. No less a recruiting sergeant than the Chief of the Imperial Staff in person, General Sir Gerald Templer, was assigned to the operation. The inducements he was authorized to offer were lavish. In the words of a Jordanian cabinet minister, “they would have solved all our immediate economic and military problems.” Hints were dropped in Amman political circles to the effect that, once the Jordanian and Iraqi armies had been built up, the Tripartite Declaration (guaranteeing the Arab-Israel status quo) would be annulled—thereby, by implication, leaving Israel at their mercy, since Israel was still to be denied Western arms. Kites bearing the same marking were flown in London by the Economist and Times.

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But it was an end to British influence in Jordan, and the kind of regime Britain had maintained, that articulate Jordanian opinion wanted—even more urgently, it seemed, than an end to Israel. Jordanian leaders of all political colors rallied to a common pledge not to allow themselves to be diverted from the struggle for “true national freedom” by these “typical imperialist maneuvers”: priority must be given, they declared, to abrogation of the Anglo-Jordan treaty and the dismissal of Glubb and other British officers. Even Foreign Minister Samir er-Rifai, for long considered in Amman an instrument of British policy, associated himself with this stand and criticized General Templer’s table-pounding. “Such tactics,” he said, “may still work in Iraq, but Jordan has evolved more than the West appears to realize.” Whitehall, however, refused to take the hint. “It is not true to say that Jordanian opinion is opposed to the Baghdad Pact,” bleated Lord John Hope, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, to the House of Commons.

Egyptian and Communist agitation and Saudi money undoubtedly helped aggravate the rioting the Templer mission touched off; but no competent observer could doubt the genuine intensity of native Jordanian feeling. Troops mutinied, officials went on strike, communications were disrupted, and two governments fell in quick succession. “Please ignore the shooting,” the Jordanian commander of Old Jerusalem said in a message to his Israeli opposite number. “This is a strictly domestic affair.” Westerners were stoned and Western consulates attacked. The Turkish consulate in Old Jerusalem was set on fire: its staff, like many British, French, and American officials, had to be evacuated for safety—to Israel. (So much for President Bayar’s descent into neo-Bevinism.) A few weeks later, to round off the episode, King Hussein dismissed General Glubb and delivered effective control of his army to an embryonic junta of young Palestinian officers headed by thirty-four-year-old General Ali Abu-Nuwar.

General Abu-Nuwar owed his promotion partly to his knowledge of Parisian night life, partly to his skill in playing on the young king’s inferiority complex vis-à-vis the British. Marked down as “a bit Bolshie” by a British brother-officer, he had been posted to Paris as military attaché to get him out of the way. There, in due course, he met Hussein, over on a brief private visit, and volunteered to show him the sights. During the sightseeing he told the king the whole Jordanian army was counting on him to save its honor by “Arabizing” it.

No one had ever taken the sensitive, highly strung Hussein seriously before. With Glubb and the condescending “old gang” politicians in Amman he was pathetically ill at ease. Even his marriage had been announced by a court official before he had made up his mind; and even his wife, eight years his senior, was so notoriously his intellectual superior that Amman wags jeered that she gave him lessons at home. Abu-Nuwar’s confidence undoubtedly touched and flattered him, and shortly afterwards the young attaché” was recalled to Amman as the king’s senior aide.

Glubb’s dismissal slaked Hussein’s thirst for British blood; and Abu-Nuwar, now army commander, needed time and calm in which to consolidate his new position. Both were willing to settle for an increased British subsidy—which London agreed to pay—and a period of tranquillity. But Hussein’s own extravagant tub-thumping, in the flush of his triumph over Glubb, had fanned the expectations of the mob to an inflammatory heat. “After Glubb, the treaty!” chanted Amman agitators. “Abrogation!” roared hitherto docile deputies, prisoners of the popular mood. Desperate to gain time, the wavering “old gang” government of Said el-Mufti advised King Hussein to dissolve parliament and call a general election. The vote was held on October 21, 1956. Its outcome was the shout that brought down the Sinai-Suez avalanche.

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There was no question this time of tilting the scales with “army votes.” Glubb’s services were no longer available. Tawfiq Abul-Huda committed suicide in the first week of the electoral campaign, and his political associates, grouped in the previously “loyal” Constitutionalist Bloc, startled the British embassy by announcing that they, too, now favored abrogation of the Anglo-Jordan treaty. Treaty abrogation was advocated by eight candidates out of ten; the only other issue was that of closer ties with Egypt.

Whitehall, however, appeared not only to have learned nothing from a decade of debacles but to be intent on flaunting its refusal to learn. Once again its information services pulled out of the same depleted bag of tricks the same weary old bogey. The Anglo-Jordan treaty, they cried, is Jordan’s first line of defense against Israel: the need of the hour is not abrogation but national unity against the Jews. King Hussein collaborated by declaring that the UN truce chief, General Burns, had warned him the Israelis were massing troops for an invasion. General Burns’s HQ denied that any such warning had been issued, but at once Iraqi Premier Nuri es-Said chimed in with a statement that the Iraqi army was standing by to rush to Jordan’s aid in the event of Israeli aggression. Jordanian opinion was unimpressed: it knew Nuri was looking for a pretext to send his troops into Jordan and either manipulate the election to his liking or (as some British officials favored) postpone it altogether. Israel, however, declared that she would regard an Iraqi move into Jordan as a hostile act, since Iraq had never signed an armistice with her. This was the cue for Whitehall to announce that if Israeli forces entered Jordan to forestall an Iraqi occupation, Britain would go to Jordan’s defense.

For the next few days the Levant buzzed with rumors of an impending Anglo-Israeli war, and a whole battery of instruments of British policy appeared suddenly to have been assigned to the task of making them sound convincing. Whitehall’s “covert” Arabic-language Near East Broadcasting Station (Sharq el-Adna) on Cyprus turned up the volume of its anti-Israel output. British troops in Jordan began manipulating guns in sites where they could be seen by the greatest number of passers-by. Hunter jet-fighters were sent to Cyprus to scream across the rooftops of Amman the implication that they were there for possible action against Israel. (Both these stunts backfired to some extent when Egyptian propaganda alleged that the British aim was to intimidate the Jordanian electorate.)

To the observer who was in the Near East during Bevin’s heyday all this seemed grimly familiar. It was as if the calendar had suddenly been put back eight or nine years. And yet, somehow, it failed to convince—even in the context of a Jordanian general election. It was all too shrill; everyone was trying too hard; and it went on for far too long. A week after the election Sharq el-Adna was still calling for “Arab unity to destroy Israel.” “The British embassy must have forgotten to inform Cyprus that our election is over,” commented one of the station’s own Jordanian employees. Forty-eight hours later Israeli forces were driving deep into Sinai; and Sharq el-Adna, after announcing that it had been “requisitioned,” was broadcasting communiqués warning Egyptian civilians to keep clear of military targets.

The Jordanian election result had served notice on Israel and Britain that the Near Eastern power balance was tilting sharply against them. It returned to the Amman parliament a pro-Egyptian majority committed to abrogation of the Anglo-Jordan treaty. It emboldened Colonel Abdel Nasser imperiously to bundle Jordan into his Egyptian-dominated tripartite (Egypt-Syria-Jordan) military command—without even waiting for a new Jordanian government to be formed. “A noose has been completed with which we shall strangle Israel,” a Cairo government daily commented. The command agreement also provided for intensified Egyptian-organized fedayeen raids into Israel from Jordanian territory. And when the victorious National Socialist leader Suleiman Nabulsi did at last form his “left nationalist” government, he announced that on all basic issues he would closely follow Cairo’s lead.

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Suleiman Nabulsi has already fulfilled his essential election promises. He will probably go down in Jordanian history—if Jordan survives long enough to have a history—as the country’s first prime minister to do so. But very soon now he will have to come face to face with reality, a phenomenon his election campaign overlooked.

The thirty-six million dollars a year promised Jordan by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria to replace British subsidies amounts to little more than just another mirage. The same states have failed in the recent past to redeem pledges to finance a potash industry for Jordan costing only eleven million dollars at the northern end of the Dead Sea, and to contribute to the upkeep of the Jordanian National Guard. Syria herself is in debt to Saudi Arabia, and both she and Egypt are cutting imports to make ends meet. Even King Saud owes several months’ overdrawn royalties to Aramco and, as this is written, is passing round a golden begging bowl in Washington. A high proportion of the promised Saudi-Syrian-Egyptian aid, moreover, will take the form of obsolescent military equipment. All this is cold comfort for a state whose budget has never yet been balanced without external aid and whose imports exceed its exports in value by seven to one.

Voices have already been raised in Damascus demanding that Syria’s share of the proposed Arab subsidy to Jordan be withheld until King Hussein has “clarified” the anti-Communist statement he made at the beginning of February. This was a violation of the strictly neutralist principles animating the Cairo Pact countries, Syrian leftists say, and implied acceptance of the Western argument in the Cold War.

Spokesmen for King Hussein have assured strictly Arab gatherings that the statement—like the decree issued two days later banning the circulation of Communist propaganda media in the country—was considered advisable in order to induce the United States Point Four administration to hasten consideration of a Jordanian request for thirty million dollars in economic aid. It did not mean that the king favored a political or military rapprochement with America, though he would be pleased to go to Washington, if invited, to do what he could to speed up the flow of dollars. But those Jordanians who voted last October for the government National Socialist and Socialist Resurrection parties are more likely to be alienated than reconciled by such assurances. This section of Jordanian opinion is increasingly republican in sentiment, considering Hussein’s expensive court, cars, and capers an unjustifiable burden on the country’s economy, and has opened a campaign for union with Syria, where the Socialist Resurrection party is paramount. No mention is made of Hussein in its campaign slogans but those who subscribe to them realize that the only kind of union acceptable to Syrians would be a republican one. The Jordanian and Syrian foreign ministers, both Socialist Resurrectionists, admit that they are feeling their way toward “a union of some kind.” Recently they agreed on a partial fusion of the Syrian and Jordanian diplomatic services (the latter has already been severely purged), with the result that Syrian diplomats will in the near future also represent Jordanian interests in all but four or five major capitals. They have also planned an economic union, but before this could be realized Jordan would have to leave the sterling area, a step which the king is opposing.

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The British, meanwhile, are hard at work packing their crates. Even the officials who fought last year’s rear-guard action appear more relieved than distressed to be rid of a commitment which, in the end, was no more than a financial burden and a politico-military embarrassment. The Amman airfield was evacuated, under Jordanian pressure, last fall. At Aqaba, in the extreme south, fewer than 1,300 troops remain. Britain’s only other “asset” is her costly incomplete base at Mafraq. This is now admitted to be a strategic white elephant. Its construction was more a political demonstration than a military necessity. Its very site—only ten miles from Jordan’s wide-open frontier with unstable Syria—proclaims the quality of Whitehall’s thinking on the subject. Even for fuel Mafraq is dependent on Syrian good will, and the services of civilian contractors who must transport it from Lebanon over vertiginous mountain roads. Water is brought in by truck from Zerka, twenty miles to the south. Last November a truck drivers’ strike deprived Mafraq of water for ten days and forced stringent rationing on the base. An RAF staff officer said afterwards: “One Communist driver could have poisoned the lot of us.” Once the British leave, Mafraq’s 3,000-yard runways, in their turn, may be expected in due course to play host to Soviet-built Migs. For the likeliest long-term outlook for the northern half of Jordan, at least, is a merger with Syria, even if the current union campaign achieves nothing substantial. Southern Jordan (Ma’an and Aqaba) seems destined to go to Saudi-Arabia unless the Iraqis move in first. Saudi propagandists are already hard at work to convince the southern population that the roads of Arabia are paved with Aramco gold. Union with Iraq has many advocates in the upper strata of Jordanian society, but it would only find favor with the masses if the present Iraqi oligarchy were overthrown and replaced by a “left-nationalist” Syrian-type regime. For the time being, Iraq is reduced to shouting on the sidelines. Baghdad radio is loudly accusing the Socialist Resurrectionists, the Syrians, the Egyptians, and General Abu-Nuwar and his friends of preparing to overthrow King Hussein. It would be surprising if some of them weren’t.

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¹ C. S. Jarvis, Arab Command (London, 1942). American aid to King Saud would appear to fall into this category.

² The London Economist, July 15, 1950. The Economist is now a reformed character.

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