Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [14]
Throughout the evening of June 5 and into the next day our soldiers and tank drivers, including the 40th Armoured Brigade in which I would later serve as a young soldier, showed great courage, but they were helpless under the bombardment of Israeli fighters. Most of their tanks were destroyed by Israeli bombs. My father later described the battle, saying, “That night was hell. It was clear as day. The sky and the earth glowed with the light of the rockets and the constant explosions of the bombs pouring from Israeli planes.”
The war was disastrous for Jordan and for other Arab states. When the fighting stopped on June 10, Israel had taken the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Much of the territory it seized in 1967 is still illegally occupied by Israel today. Some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Palestinians crossed to the East Bank of the River Jordan, increasing the total number of Palestinian refugees in Jordan to around three-quarters of a million. The Jordanian Armed Forces were devastated. Seven hundred were killed and some six thousand wounded, and we lost all of our air force and most of our tanks. Following the end of the war, Jordan’s weakened armed forces underwent a vigorous program of restructuring and retraining, assisted by a Pakistani advisory mission headed by Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq, who later became president of Pakistan.
Seizing the West Bank was in no way necessary if Israel simply intended to respond to a perceived threat from Egypt. But Israeli leaders wanted defense in depth, as they put it, so when the chance arose to acquire more territory, they took it. And once they had it, they were determined to hang on to it.
The consequences of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue to resonate across the region and the world to this day. The loss of Jerusalem was particularly painful to my father. My family belongs to the Prophet Mohammad’s branch of the Quraish tribe and directly descends from the Prophet through the male line of his elder grandson, Al Hasan. (“Hashem” was actually the great-grandfather of the Prophet; hence the family name, “Hashemites.”) From AD 965 until 1925 the Hashemites ruled the Hijaz in western Arabia and served as the guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, making us the second-oldest ruling dynasty in the world after the Japanese imperial family. As the head of the Hashemite family, responsible for safeguarding Jerusalem, my father was devastated by his inability to protect Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of the three holiest sites in Islam, from the encroaching Israeli army.
As soon as the war ended, the negotiations for peace began. The Arab Summit in Khartoum in late August, though famous for its “three nos”—no to peace, no to recognition of Israel, and no to negotiation with Israel—had in fact provided a framework for the pursuit of diplomacy. Talks in November continued at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, home of the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, who hosted private meetings between the Israeli, Egyptian, and Jordanian delegations. A former justice of the Supreme Court, the ambassador was a prominent supporter of Israel and as such was viewed with suspicion by my father and the Egyptians. Their suspicion turned out to be justified.
According to notes from one of my father’s close advisers who was involved in the discussions, Goldberg sent an oral message to my father that if the Arabs would accept a UN Security Council resolution, the United States would push for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and that any changes to the prewar borders would be “minor, reciprocal border