The Haj - Leon Uris [183]
Trans-Jordan, later to become the Kingdom of Jordan, continued to languish as a godforsaken, broiling, destitute land of fewer than a half million lethargic and dispirited inhabitants. It was a land of nothing: no cultural facilities, no literature, no university, no acceptable medical facility.
Abdullah proved as patient as he was ambitious. By placing the Legion at the disposal of the British in the Second World War, he was the only Arab leader to cast his lot with the Allies and used their victory as a springboard for his long-smoldering desires.
What were Abdullah’s desires, you ask Ishmael? No more and no less than his father’s and his brother Faisal’s: to be the ruler of a Greater Arab Nation encompassing Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. As you can see, his dreams were not small, nor particularly disguised.
My father, Haj Ibrahim, often said Abdullah was his own worst enemy, for he could not control his tongue. Abdullah openly boasted that there was no Jordan, and no Palestine, but only a Greater Syria, which the Hashemites were destined to lead.
Although the Arab League, our council of nations, seethed at the audacity of the little king in his ridiculous capital of Amman, it could not move against him, for he was well hidden behind the skirts of the British lion.
Everyone hated Abdullah. The Egyptians, who considered themselves the heart and elite of the Arab world. The Saudis, who quaked at the thought of the vengeance he would seek for the ejection of the Hashemites from Arabia. The Syrians, who were targeted by Abdullah to take over their country. The Mufti, who had considered Palestine his personal domain. And they all plotted his demise.
Abdullah came out of the war with the Jews alone among the Arab nations with victories, territory, and his flag planted over East Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock.
Moreover, with the flight of the Palestinians, he ended up inheriting a population twice the size of his own kingdom, a half million West Bank Palestinians and a half million who crossed the river into Jordan.
Most were illiterate and destitute peasants. However, there were many thousands of educated Palestinians, all the right kind of people who had been missing from Jordan’s society. These were to give the backward land a sudden infusion of education, trade, and finance that cracked open the curtain of the modern world.
Abdullah seized the opportunity by granting the refugees citizenship and freedom of movement. Many of the elite Palestinians were appointed to high positions in the Jordanian Government to legitimize his creeping annexation of the West Bank. He glued on a thin veneer of a constitutional government with half Palestinians in his Parliament. It was a fraud, for the king retained the right to appoint and dismiss anyone, veto any law, and dissolve the Parliament at his whim.
The Arab League, the formal association of all Arab nations, renounced the annexation attempt and vowed never to recognize it. This left Abdullah isolated in a sea of hostile neighbors.
Abdullah’s long-time enemy, the Mufti of Jerusalem, had fled to Gaza, where he attempted to counter the king’s claims. But the Mufti’s glory days were over.
It surfaced that during World War II, when the Mufti was a Nazi agent, he had visited Poland to examine the extermination camps. Feeling that German conquest of Palestine was inevitable, he presented Hitler with a plan to set up gas chambers in the Dothan Valley north of Nablus. Here he would exterminate the Jews of any and all lands the Germans conquered in the Middle East.
Egypt alone recognized the Mufti’s claim on Palestine but its support was weak and insincere. In truth, he had outlived value to the Arab cause. Haj Amin al Heusseini was to finish his life as a revered man in various Arab locales, but his political star was burned out.
Also in powerful opposition to Abdullah’s annexation plans were many Palestinians themselves. The king was shocked to learn