THE REIGN OF ABDULLAH I

King Abdullah I, courtesy, Wikipedia

Have you ever wondered how “Jordan” got to be “Jordan”? Well in fact, one would have to go back only 100 years at a time when the Arabs were beginning their quest to take over the entire Middle East and North Africa at the expense of the region’s non-Arab indigenous peoples – something they hadn’t done since the 7^th century. (This quest, BTW, is still going on today, although to a somewhat lesser extent.) As far as Jordan was concerned, it was Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, the son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, who led the Arab takeover of that part of the Middle East. In 1921, he became the founder and ruler of the, now separated, eastern portion of the British Mandate of Palestine, otherwise known as Transjordan, and was officially styled “Emir” beginning the local Hashemite dynasty. In 1946, Transjordan became independent and Abdullah was styled “King”, and ruled in that capacity until his assassination in 1951 in, what was then, Arab-occupied East Jerusalem.

Born in Mecca in the Hejaz region of Arabia, Abdullah was the second of four sons of Hussein bin Ali and his first wife, Abdiyya bint Abdullah and was educated in Istanbul and Hejaz. As a member of the Hashemites, Abdullah was a 38th-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. He had three wives – all at the same time. He married his first wife in 1904, Musbah bint Nasser at Stinia Palace in Istanbul. He married his second wife Suzdil Khanum, also in Istanbul, becoming a “sister wife” to the first. Finally, in 1949, he married his third wife Nahda bint Uman, in Amman, and she became “sister wife” to the other two. Altogether, Abdullah fathered six children.

Early in the 20^th century, Abdullah persuaded his father to stand, successfully, for Grand Sharif of Mecca, a post for which Hussein acquired British support. Hussein was known to advocate for independence from Ottoman rule and the creation of a free Arab state in the ancestral homeland Arabia but stretching from Yemen to Damascus, a historically Syriac city long occupied and colonized by Arabs. In 1909, Abdullah became deputy for Mecca in the Ottoman parliament, serving until 1914, and acting as an intermediary between his father and the government. In 1914, he paid a clandestine visit to Cairo to meet Lord Kitchener to seek British support for his father's ambitions in Arabia. Abdullah maintained contact with the British throughout the First World War and in 1915 encouraged his father to enter into correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, about Arab independence from Turkish rule. This correspondence in turn led to the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans which lasted from 1916 to 1918. During the revolt, Abdullah commanded the Arab Eastern Army, and began by attacking the Ottoman garrison at Ta'if on June 10. The garrison consisted of 3,000 men with ten 75-mm Krupp guns. Abdullah led a force of 5,000 tribesmen but they did not have the weapons or discipline for a full attack. Instead, he laid siege to the town. In July, he received reinforcements from Egypt in the form of howitzer batteries manned by Egyptian Arab personnel. He then joined the siege of Medina commanding a force of 4,000 men based to the east and north-east of the town. In early 1917, Abdullah ambushed an Ottoman convoy in the desert, and captured £20,000 worth of gold coins that were intended to bribe the Bedouin into loyalty to the Sultan. In August 1917, Abdullah worked closely with the French Captain Muhammand Ould Ali Raho in sabotaging the Hejaz Railway. Abdullah's relations with the British Captain T. E. Lawrence, on the other hand, were not good, and as a result, Lawrence spent most of his time in the Hejaz serving with Abdullah's brother, Faisal, who commanded the Arab Northern Army. After the war, in March 1920, Faisal was proclaimed, in Damascus, king of Syria, a position he held until July of that year when French forces captured Damascus at the Battle of Maysalun and expelled him, thus proclaiming a French Mandate. Abdullah then moved his forces from Hejaz into eastern Palestine with a view to “liberating” Damascus. But having heard of his plans, Winston Churchill, at that time, British diplomat and minister serving in the cabinet of Prime Minister Lloyd-George, invited him to a famous "tea party", where he convinced him to abandon his plans, telling him that French forces were superior to his and that the British did not want any trouble with the French.

So on March 8, 1920, an Arab Congress in Baghdad proclaimed Abdullah King of Iraq, a newly-established kingdom created on top of Assyrian and Kurdish lands. He refused however so they therefore chose Faisal. Instead. Abdullah had his sights on the British Mandate of Palestine. With British assistance, he tore Palestine’s eastern section away from the west and established a separate emirate to be called “Transjordan”. He then set about the task of building this new, artificial country with the help of a reserve force headed by British Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Peake, who was seconded from the Palestine police in 1921. The following year, the separation of east from west Palestine was approved by the League of Nations but still under a British Mandate. Illustrating the contradictions in his reign, both he and the British Mandate authorities banned Jews from living in “Transjordan”. On the other hand, he would often have a team of Jewish bodyguards, mainly members of the Sofer family, both the Palestinian and Yemenite Habani branches, who were known as tall, muscular and fierce warriors. (He also used Circassian bodyguards.) In 1932, he cooperated with the Jews in inaugurating the major hydro-electric power plant in Naharayim located on the Transjordan side of the Jordan-Yarmuk River confluence. This Jewish project was headed by Pinhas Ruttenberg, the founder of the Palestine Electric Company. The joint project required security cooperation between the two sides to protect the plant and power lines. 

Typical of many Arabs, both during that time and since, Abdullah believed the myth that there were no people on earth who were historically less anti-Semitic than the Arabs, stating that the persecution of the Jews was confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West. Holding up the example of medieval Muslim Spain, he claimed the Jews had never developed so freely and reached such high positions in society as they had under Arab and Muslim rule, ignoring the massacres that happened from time to time in Spain and other Muslim lands, preferring to call them “minor exceptions”.

In 1923, the Transjordan Arab army, which was made up of veterans of the Arab Revolt, was renamed the Arab Legion. Abdullah’s dream that, one day, his dynasty, who had ruled over Mecca for many centuries, would return there and take their rightful place over the holy places, was dashed in 1925 when Ibn Saud seized the Hejaz. Although he established a legislative council in Amman in 1928, its role remained advisory, leaving him to rule as an autocrat. His Prime Ministers formed 18 governments during the 23 years of the Emirate. Beginning in 1930, the Arab Legion was led by British Col. John Bagot Glubb, popularly known later as “Glubb Pasha”.  Abdullah supported the Peel Commission in 1937, which proposed that (western) Palestine be partitioned into a small Jewish state (20 percent) with the remaining land to be annexed into Transjordan. The Arabs within Palestine and the surrounding “Arab” countries objected to the Peel Commission while the Jews accepted it reluctantly. Ultimately, the Commission’s recommendation was not adopted.

Talal, courtesy, Wikipedia

During World War II, Abdullah was a faithful British ally, maintaining strict order within Transjordan, and helping to suppress a pro-Axis uprising in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, the Hashemites experienced a spate of royal family intrigues. Abdullah had two sons: Prince Talal, an outspoken advocate against the British, and Prince Naif, a very pro-British advocate. Talal, being the eldest, was considered the "natural heir to the throne". However, his troubled relationship with his father led to his removal from the line of succession in a secret royal decree. After the war however, their relationship improved and Talal was publicly declared heir apparent. On May 25, 1946, the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan proclaimed its independence. On the same day, Abdullah was crowned king in Amman. In the period 1946–48, he supported various partition plans for western Palestine. In 1947, when the UN voted for a partition, Abdullah was the only Arab leader supporting the decision. His desire was that the Arab allocated areas of western Palestine could be annexed into Transjordan as well as the territories of Arab-occupied Lebanon and Syria of which would result in a “Greater Syria”, ruled by the Hashemites with its capital in Damascus. He even went so far as to have secret meetings with Jewish Agency officials including Golda Meir and Ezra Danin, and they came to a mutually agreed upon partition plan independent of that of the UN and stated that he would prefer to annex all of Palestine but would settle for the Arab-populated parts as a minimum. This partition plan was supported by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin who preferred to see Abdullah's territory increase rather than risk the creation of another Palestinian state, headed by the Nazi-allied Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammad Amin al-Husayni. And it is possible that he might have been willing to sign a separate peace agreement with Israel, were it not for the Arab League's militant opposition to any independent Jewish state. Because of his dream for a Greater Syria, many Arab countries distrusted Abdullah and saw him as both a collaborator with the Europeans and a threat to the independence of their countries. As it turned out, the distrust was mutual.  

Meanwhile, tension between Abdullah and Talal resurfaced, especially after Talal had been "compiling huge, unexplainable debts". As a result, both Abdullah and Prime Minister Samir Al-Rifai were in favor of Talal's removal as heir apparent and replacement with his brother Naif. However, the British resident Alec Kirkbride warned Abdullah against such a "public rebuke of the heir to the throne", a warning which Abdullah reluctantly accepted. He then proceeded to appoint Talal as regent when he was on leave. Behind the scenes though, Kirkbride sent Talal to a Beirut mental hospital, stating that he was suffering from severe mental illness. Many local Arabs believed that there was "nothing wrong with Talal and that the wily British fabricated the story about his madness in order to get him out of the way." Because of the widespread popularity of Talal, Prince Naif was not given British support to succeed as Emir. The conflicts between his two sons led Abdullah to seek a secret union with Hashemite Iraq, in which his nephew Faysal II would rule Jordan after his death. This idea received some positive reception among the British, but it was ultimately rejected as Baghdad's domination of Transjordan was viewed as unfavorable by the British Foreign Office due to fear of "Arab republicanism".

On May 4, 1948, ten days before Israel’s declaration of independence and in the midst of the Arab war of annihilation against Israel, Abdullah, as a part of the effort to seize as much of Palestine as possible, sent in the Arab Legion to attack the Jewish area south of Jerusalem known as the Etzion Bloc. He met with Golda Meir one last time on May 11, 1948 when he said, "Why are you in such a hurry to proclaim your state? Why don't you wait a few years? I will take over the whole country and you will be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well and there will be no war". Abdullah proposed to Meir the creation "of an autonomous Jewish canton within the Hashemite kingdom," but so soon after the Holocaust, Meir stood her ground for an independent Jewish state. Depressed by the unavoidable war that would come between Jordan and the Yishuv, one Jewish Agency representative wrote, "[Abdullah] will not remain faithful to the November 29 [UN Partition] borders, but [he] will not attempt to conquer all of our state [either]." Abdullah too found the coming war to be unfortunate, in part because he "preferred a Jewish state [as Transjordan's neighbour] to an Arab state run by the mufti." On May 14, 1948, 10 minutes after Israel declared its independence, the local Arabs, the neighboring Arab states, the promise of the expansion of territory and the goal to conquer Jerusalem finally pressured Abdullah into joining them in an "all-Arab military intervention". Their intention was to embark on a war of annihilation and finish what Hitler started. On May 29^th, welcomed by the local Arabs, Abdallah’s Arab Legion conquered the eastern parts of Jerusalem and proceeded to ethnically cleanse the city’s generations-old Jewish population. He used the military intervention to restore his prestige in the Arab world, which had grown suspicious of his relatively good relationship with Western and Jewish leaders. Abdullah was especially anxious to take Jerusalem as compensation for the loss of the guardianship of Mecca. He saw himself as the "supreme commander of the Arab forces" and "persuaded the Arab League to appoint him" to this position. His forces under Glubb Pasha did not approach the area set aside for the Jewish state, though they clashed with the Yishuv forces around Jerusalem, intended to be an international zone. After conquering the rest of Judea and Samaria at the end of the war, King Abdullah tried to suppress any trace of opposition to his rule.

In 1949, Abdullah entered into secret peace talks with Israel, including with Moshe Dayan, the Military commander of the liberated part of Jerusalem, and other senior Israelis. News of the negotiations provoked a strong reaction from other Arab States and Abdullah agreed to discontinue the meetings in return for Arab acceptance of his annexation of Judea and Samaria. With no acceptance forthcoming, in 1949, Abdullah officially annexed the occupied territories anyway and the kingdom was then renamed “Jordan”. The annexation angered the Arab and Arab-occupied countries including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Abdullah’s popularity declined, and in 1951 he was assassinated in Jerusalem by an angry western Palestinian Arab while attending Friday prayers at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa mosque on Arab-occupied Temple Mount. He was succeeded briefly by his eldest son Talal. The following year, his brother Hussein succeeded to the throne.