Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [18]
Tensions had been growing between my father and the guerrilla forces. As Arafat stepped up his efforts to seize control of Jordan, his men began to turn their attention to its king.
In September 1970, as my father headed into Amman accompanied by Zaid Rifai, the stately Harvard-educated chief of the Royal Court, and Sharif Nasser bin Jamil, a heavy, barrel-chested man who at that time was chief of staff of the Jordanian army, he was stopped at a crossroads by a roadblock. When one of his men got out to move the roadblock, guerrillas who had been hiding in the hills opened fire with a variety of weapons, including a Russian-made Dushka heavy machine gun. The soldier trying to remove the barricade was killed, and my father saw the bullets coming closer, hitting the ground like hail. Everybody piled out and began to return fire. My father shouted, “Shame on them!”—which may seem like an odd thing to say when you are being attacked, but he had a strong sense of personal honor and believed that his assailants were nothing more than cowardly bandits. Zaid Rifai and Sharif Nasser pleaded with him to take shelter in a nearby ditch. When the attackers saw my father take cover, they swung the heavy machine gun around to target him. Zaid Rifai and the commander of the Royal Guard dove to protect him, colliding in midair, and both fell on top of him. My father felt his back buckle under the weight.
Once they had beaten back the attackers, my father and his men jumped back into their cars. My father was in the front seat when he realized his beret had fallen off and was lying in the dirt. He was so furious about being ambushed that he got out and, with bullets flying, strode over to pick it up. He placed it on his head, then calmly got back into his car and drove off. As they headed back to our house in Hummar he turned to Zaid Rifai and said, “Next time, I’ll take my chances with the fedayeen. You two did more damage than they did!” From that point on, he often complained of a bad back.
By this time, following two failed cease-fires, it was clear that Jordan could not coexist with Arafat’s guerrillas. At the time, the PLO and its affiliates numbered around 100,000 men: 25,000 full-time fighters and some 75,000 armed militia. And they kept getting bolder. On September 6, 1970, the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three international airliners that had taken off from Frankfurt, Zurich, and Amsterdam en route to New York and diverted two of them to Dawson’s Field, a remote airfield in the desert in the Azraq area in northeast Jordan—the third was diverted to Cairo and blown up. Three days later, a third civilian airliner was hijacked to the same strip. The guerrillas demanded the release of Palestinian militants held in European jails. When their demands were not met, on September 12, under the gaze of the world media, the guerrillas blew up the three planes after releasing all the passengers. Two days later the PLO called for the establishment of a “national authority” in Jordan.
For my father, this was the final straw. Eight days later, on September 17, he ordered the army to move aggressively against the fedayeen in Amman and other cities. It would be a mistake to characterize this confrontation as a civil war between Jordanians and Palestinians. Many Jordanians of Palestinian origin fought bravely in the army. And some Jordanians from the East Bank had joined the guerrilla forces fighting against the army. As chief of staff of the army, Sharif Nasser led the struggle. A powerful man and a fierce warrior, he looked like he could punch a horse and knock it out cold. One of his favorite tricks was