ABSTRACT
Abdullah Ibn Hussein became the first ruler of Jordan as a ‘gift’ from Great Britain as compensation for the failed unified Arab state under his brother, Faisal. Jordan was an artificial creation, was largely uninhabited and mostly Bedouin. The fledgling Jordanian army, the Arab Legion, spent its early years trying to forcibly settle the nomadic population. That the creation of Jordan lacked legitimacy was recognized by the new ‘king’ who himself viewed his territory as part of Greater Syria. This was a feeling shared by other Arab rulers and certainly the populations of mandated Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and in Palestine. It was in this setting - that the state was illegitimate, was only part of Syria, and it engendered hostility from other Arabs-that Abdullah sought links with the Zionists. He perceived this alliance as lending authenticity to his monarchy and believed it would also allow him to begin the process of recreating
the Greater Syrian state destroyed by the French and British in 1920. This secret alliance, which included a failure to use the Arab Legion effectively in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, engendered enmity from the Palestinians and opprobrium in the rest of the Arab world. As a result he was assassinated in 1951 for his perceived perfidy. Despite the death of Abdullah, Jordan’s political circumstances had not changed when Hussein Ibn Talal ascended the throne: Jordan continued to lack legitimacy, was home to a restless Palestinian refugee population, and seemingly surrounded by hostile Arab nations. Thus, despite the threats that the policy posed to his personal safety and his regime, Hussein chose to continue his grandfather’s tactic of covert relations with Israel.
