Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [60]
My father told me that he had been thinking about the matter a lot. Then he said, “I have decided to change the line of succession.” I nodded, and he continued, “I hope you understand that this will be difficult for many in Amman, but I believe you will be up to the task. I will be expecting things from you.” He didn’t specify who he intended to choose, and I didn’t press him. My father was tired from his treatments, and this was clearly a very difficult conversation for him. He left it at that and said, “Why don’t you go out and have a good time.”
My head was spinning as I headed to Morton’s restaurant in Georgetown with a family friend for a steak. Perhaps my uncle’s prediction was about to come true. If my father intended to change the line of succession, then clearly my uncle would not become king. But then who? If he was planning to make Hamzah crown prince, why hadn’t he told me? I was not yet ready to accept that my father was dying, let alone that he might intend to choose me as his successor.
The signing ceremony between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Yasser Arafat was scheduled at the White House late in the afternoon of the next day. My father spoke a few words at the ceremony.
“We quarrel, we agree; we are friendly, we are not friendly,” he said. “But we have no right to dictate through irresponsible action or narrow-mindedness the future of our children and their children’s children. There has been enough destruction, enough death, enough waste. It is time that, together, we occupy a place beyond ourselves, our peoples, that is worthy of them under the sun . . . the descendants of the children of Abraham.”
After the event, I waited for my father at our embassy in Washington, where he would soon begin to receive senior members of the Jordanian government who were visiting. Usually he saw such delegations at his house, but by holding the meetings at the embassy he was making a public statement. He held a series of private meetings with visiting dignitaries, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, a delegation from Crown Prince Hassan’s office, and two former prime ministers. All of the visitors were sitting together in the waiting room outside the ambassador’s office. My father walked into the waiting room and, in front of everybody, embraced one of the former prime ministers, Abdul Karim Kabariti, who was known to be opposed to Prince Hassan. My father then met with each delegation individually in the ambassador’s office. In every meeting, I later learned, he said that he planned to make “major changes” when he returned to Jordan—a message he would reiterate in public for the first time in late November.
That fall, the speculation surrounding the succession intensified, and the gossip was no longer confined to Amman. “Jordan’s Feuding Queens Fight Over Succession,” proclaimed a headline in the London Sunday Times. “King Hussein Ails; His Brother Waits,” said the New York Times. Papers all over the world joined the game. In Canada the Calgary Herald ran a story headlined “Princes Jostle for Hussein’s Crown,” which alleged a feud between Queen Noor and Crown Prince Hassan’s wife, Princess Sarvath, accusing both women of trying to manipulate the succession. It was very painful to read all of this in the press and to see details of my father’s illness and our family dynamics debated openly in public. I was dismayed to see our private grief splashed over the front pages.
A rare spot of good news came in late November, when we heard that my father had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In a curious anomaly, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister