Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [66]
After the ceremony was finished, an aide came up to me and said, “Your Majesty, this way.” Out of habit, I looked around for my father, and saw his portrait looking down at me. For nearly half a century my father had ruled Jordan, sometimes fighting wars, sometimes negotiating peace treaties, and always encouraging others to lay down their weapons and place hope above fear. Now it would be my job to manage these conflicts and warring parties on Jordan’s borders, and to honor my father’s memory by continuing his ceaseless quest for peace.
Chapter 13
Becoming King
The days and weeks after my father’s death were an extraordinarily sad time. The nation mourned its king, the only leader most Jordanians had ever known, and I grappled with the loss of my father, who had always been such a firm and guiding presence in my life. But I had little time for personal grief. The night before his funeral I went to bed with a family of four, and I woke up the next morning with a family of five million. If there was one thing that my father had taught me, it was that a king must not command so much as watch over his people.
After being sworn in, one of my first acts as king was to issue a decree naming my brother Hamzah the crown prince. Five years later, I relieved him of this responsibility. Although the months before my father’s death had been tense, our family gathered together to support one another, and our shared grief brought many of us closer. I was very grateful for their love and support, but I knew that there were many outside the country, and some inside, who were watching and waiting for me to falter. As the rumors continued to circulate in the salons of West Amman, I heard that some people whom I had thought of as good friends were saying, “He won’t last more than three months.”
While I was awed by the task before me, it slowly dawned on me that my father had been preparing me for this all along. Although for most of my life I was not the crown prince, my father had taken me along with him on countless state visits, important foreign policy missions, and on trips to every corner of Jordan. Without the public scrutiny of being the heir apparent, I was given a golden opportunity to watch him as he navigated the perilous waters of international diplomacy. Plucked from my army postings for short trips with my father, I sometimes felt that I was present when history was being made.
Just three weeks after my father’s funeral, I received one of my first official visitors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, accompanied by his foreign minister, Ariel Sharon. Interactions between our countries were tense at that time, and this particular prime minister had sometimes stretched the relationship to the breaking point.
In 1996, the year after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel on the heels of a wave of suicide bombings, believed to be the work of Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement), which killed some sixty Israelis. On September 25 the following year he hit back at a Hamas leader then residing in Jordan.
Hamas had agreed that they would not conduct any political or military activity from Jordan and would only establish a media relations office. Over time, they went back on their commitment. Khaled Meshaal, a senior member of the political wing of Hamas, was walking toward his office in Amman one morning when Israeli intelligence agents leaped out of their car and squirted a mysterious substance into his ear. Meshaal suddenly became deathly ill. Two of the Mossad agents were chased across Amman by one of Meshaal’s bodyguards and eventually captured by police. Four other members of the assassination squad made a dash for the Israeli