BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND ANNE HOWIE
JERICHO, West Bank - As the death of Hussein ibn Talal,
King of Jordan, approached in early February, and the big-
business media worldwide was filling up with eulogies to this
most loyal servant of imperialism, Palestinian workers here
reflected on his regime's true, murderous record.
On February 5, two days before the monarch passed away, these reporters found ourselves on the outskirts of this Palestinian city, on the West Bank of the Jordan river, within a slingshot's range of the Israeli-Jordanian border. On most news programs Hussein's state was the talk of the day.
Mohammed Barakat, a former hotel worker who now drives a minivan/taxi, referred to the hoopla in the news. "They try to give the impression that most people in Jordan loved `their' king," he said, sipping coffee during that rainy afternoon. "I don't doubt he may be popular among many. But the media often fail to mention that the majority of the population in Jordan are Palestinians. And Palestinians who are refugees there, and many of us here, have different memories. We remember what happened in 1970, when King Hussein's government ordered the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian liberation fighters."
This was a common view. "The people don't forget," said Hamad Mahmoud, a falafel vendor in Ramallah, referring to events of Black September, which is what Barakat was talking about. That was the offensive organized in 1970 by Hussein that left over 8,000 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded.
Nor do Palestinians forget that, while Hussein may have posed as defender of the Palestinians, at every opportunity he had instead betrayed them. The Jerusalem Post quoted a lawyer from Jenin, in the West Bank, who said "most of us believe Hussein's grandfather committed treason against Palestine. He sold out the Palestinians and Hussein continued to sell us out."
"I hate everything that King Hussein did," said a businessman from East Jerusalem. "He did everything in his power to save his own neck and kingdom. He was the only Arab leader who gave Palestinians passports, not because he loved us, but because he needed to increase the population of Jordan."
Ramallah street vendor Mohammed Ceder agreed. "Would you give up your land for a passport?"
The Kingdom of Transjordan was created in 1921 when it was split off from Palestine, which was then under British rule, as part of carving up the region between British and French imperialism. Transjordan was also intended to create a safety- valve to ease the pressure created by Jewish settlers into the western part of Palestine and was itself closed to Jewish immigration. Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary of the British government, claimed he created the country "in an afternoon." British imperialism installed Abdullah ibn Hussein as king. In 1946 Transjordan was granted formal independence. But even its flag was artificial - designed by Mark Sykes, a British foreign service officer, and produced by his army's shop in Cairo. Two years later, its rulers changed its name to Jordan.
In 1947, the United Nations, under U.S. government pressure, agreed to a resolution dividing what had been British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. In the 1948 war, during which Israeli forces extended and consolidated the colonial settler state of Israel, Jordanian troops struck a further blow against Palestinian sovereignty by taking possession of the parts of Palestine on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which had not been conquered by Israeli forces. Along with the Egyptian occupation of Gaza, this meant the entire territory promised to the Palestinian state under the UN resolution had been completely swallowed up.
One result of the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, along with the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees into Jordan, was that the majority of the Jordanian population was now Palestinian. The Palestinians inside and outside the wretched camps provided for the refugees - overwhelmingly peasants and workers uprooted from their villages by the Zionist occupiers - began to demand democratic rights and as a result they were granted Jordanian citizenship and half the seats in parliament. Opposition to Abdullah's rule was fueled by evidence that he was negotiating with Tel Aviv. Abdullah was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951. He was succeeded, first briefly by his son Talal, and then in 1952 by his grandson Hussein.
During the 1950s many of the regimes put in place by the colonial powers in the 1920s were swept aside by popular anti- imperialist mobilizations. Hussein's rule was defended by London, however, when the British rulers sent 2,000 troops to prop up his monarchy in 1958.
Through the 1967 six-day war Israeli troops occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Tel Aviv also seized the Gaza strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria.
The Zionist victory in the 1967 war spurred a renewed growth of the Palestinian movement that progressively became less dependent on the Arab regimes in the region. In Jordan this began to undermine the autocratic rule of Hussein. The Palestinian fighters were an obstacle to his reaching an accommodation with Tel Aviv, through which Hussein aimed eventually to reclaim all or part of the West Bank. Palestinians also demanded democratic and political rights within Jordan.
Throughout 1970, a struggle mounted against Hussein. Palestinian guerrilla fighters were joined by thousands of armed citizens who were supported by a popular movement among the 1 million Palestinian refugees. A decisive section of the non-Palestinian Jordanians also sided with the Palestinians and condemned the corrupt, despotic, and backward Hussein regime.
In September 1970 - known as Black September - Hussein launched an all-out attack on the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan's capital, Amman. The weeks that followed saw a bloodbath against Palestinians across the country as the British-trained Jordanian army seized control of Palestinian communities and camps. At least 8,000 Palestinians were killed and tens of thousands wounded. Two-thirds of the capital was completely destroyed, as well as large sections of other heavily populated towns. Outgunned, the resistance was defeated and over the next months the Palestinian fighters were driven out of Jordan.
In 1973, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and entered Israeli-occupied Sinai. Simultaneously a Syrian force began moving down the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Although the Egyptian and Syrian forces were driven back at the end, their sharply improved showing over the 1967 defeat gave a big lift to the morale of Palestinians and other Arabs, and dealt a blow to the Israeli image of invincibility.
"In the last 20 years, a number of generals in the Israeli army have made it plain that during the 1973 war, while the Israeli air force and army divisions concentrated their fire on Syrian troops in the north and the Egyptian army in the south, the Jordanian army could have easily marched west and reached Tel Aviv within hours," said Barakat. "But Hussein refused to do that."
Since then, the Jordanian monarchy has continued its balancing act, bolstered by economic aid from Washington and pressured by its majority Palestinian population. In 1986 Hussein attempted to get the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to unconditionally accept the legitimacy of the Israeli regime, and also Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When the PLO leadership refused, its offices were closed down in Jordan, and Hussein threatened to cut economic aid to the West Bank and remove Jordanian passports from Palestinians there.
At every turn of events, it was the Palestinian people's struggle for self-determination that scored some advances in the fight for a homeland, despite the actions of the Hussein regime. That was the case when the intifada, the rebellion by Palestinians inside the West Bank and Gaza against the Israeli occupation, erupted in 1987. A year later Hussein formally dropped his claim to sovereignty over the West Bank and recognized the PLO as the only representative of Palestinians there. His government took this step without consulting the PLO and presented it as a pretext for proposing to cancel financial aid and other ties that Jordan had maintained with the people of the West Bank.
Hussein's action was a recognition of the blow the intifada had dealt to the hopes of the U.S. and Israeli rulers that a deal could be reached with Jordan concerning the West Bank, at the expense of the Palestinian people.
The future of Jordan and the evolution of the class struggle in that country continues to be completely linked to the struggle of Palestinian people for a homeland. Thousands of Palestinians were among the working people who rebelled against Hussein's austerity measures during the August 1996 "bread riots" in Jordan, for example. That was when Hussein imposed a curfew and suspended parliament as toiling masses rebelled against government-imposed price hikes on bread and other foodstuffs, first in the city of Kerak, 55 miles south of Amman, and then elsewhere in the country.
The parade of presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, and other beneficiaries of world capitalism who turned out for the funeral of Hussein ibn Talal indicate the importance for imperialism of services rendered by the Jordanian monarchy. Among Palestinians, on the other hand, tens of thousands have not forgotten and are prepared to act against this legacy.
Anne Howie is a member of the Transport and General Workers Union in Manchester, England.