Jordan’s ruling Hashemite dynasty maintained secret ties with Israel since the foundation of the Zionist state so much so that King Hussein met Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to warn her that an attack was imminent ahead of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war
In April 2024, Jordan’s downing of drones targeting Israel in retaliation for the attack on an Iranian consulate in Syria sparked public anger across the Middle East. The drones were shot down even as thousands, including Palestinian refugees, were demonstrating outside the US embassy in Jordan’s capital of Amman against American support for Israel, which has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in the besieged Palestinian Gaza Strip since October 2023.
The anger over the Jordanian action spilled online, where images depicting Jordan’s King Abdullah II as a traitor wearing the Israeli flag and posters asking the Jordanian army to heed the calls of Gaza’s children and women went viral. Jordan defended the downing, calling it a matter of self-defense and sovereignty.
The justification was met with skepticism given the ties with Israel of Jordan’s ruling Hashemite dynasty, which traces its ancestry back to the Prophet and ruled Islam’s holiest city Mecca for seven centuries until 1925 when the Saudi forces seized it. The ties date back to Israel’s creation in 1948. They were so significant that King Hussein bin Talal secretly met Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who infamously denied the existence of Palestinians, to warn her that an attack was imminent ahead of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
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King Hussein, who was seeking a settlement with Israel, followed in the footsteps of his grandfather, Abdullah bin Hussein, son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, whose rebellion against the Ottomans sparked the Arab nationalist movement before the British and the French carved up the region into their spheres of influence. Abdullah bin Hussein became the Emir of Transjordan, the other Hashemite monarchy other than Iraq that the British created.
Transjordan, which was renamed Jordan in 1949, was granted independence in 1946 partly due to its contribution to the Allied war effort. Emir Abdullah ibn Hussein was accordingly re-designated as its king. He immediately began secret dealings with Israel and struck a clandestine pact with the nascent state to take over the areas of Palestine granted to the Arabs when the British divided the region for Israel’s creation in 1948.
Jordan would claim the West Bank after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The move sparked opposition from Arab nationalists and Abdullah ibn Hussein was assassinated three years later as he entered Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque in 1951. King Hussein, who was 16 then and accompanied his grandfather, had a miraculous escape. A bullet aimed at him struck a medal in his uniform. His grandfather had given him the medal a day earlier.
Hussein, who fell but escaped unhurt and saw his grandfather’s bloodstained turban roll the al-Aqsa mosque’s floor, was designated as Crown Prince and sent to England to study at Harrow. His father, Talal Talal bin Abdullah, became king despite his deteriorating mental health. King Hussein replaced his father as the king in 1952 at 17.
A regency council ruled the Hashemite dynasty kingdom until Hussein, who was sent to England for a military course at Sandhurst, was coronated at 18 in May 1953. In its obituary of King Hussein in February 1999, The Telegraph noted one of the principles he learned from his grandfather was Israel’s determination to survive at all costs. It added King Abdullah bin Hussein sought to come to terms with Israel and the principle guided his grandson throughout his reign as Jordan’s king (1953 to 1999).
Palestinians driven out of their homeland for Israel’s creation had since in 1948 outnumbered Jordan’s population. Raids of Palestinian guerrillas over the following decades in Israel would provoke heavy retaliation. Jordanian inaction coincided with King Hussein’s secret understanding with Israeli leaders.
The 1967 Arab-Israel war, meanwhile, triggered a fresh influx of about 200,000 Palestinian refugees into Jordan even as it lost the West Bank to Israel. The Palestinians separately formed the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and called for the overthrow of the Hashemite dynasty as a first step in Palestine’s liberation. In September 1970, King Hussein cracked down on Palestinians. The Black September civil war that followed lasted for 10 days and left 3,400 people killed.
Hussein consolidated power by ending PLO’s presence in Jordan while maintaining Jordan’s claim over the West Bank even as the Palestinians sought an independent state. He renounced the claim after the Palestinian outbreak of intifada or the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hussein’s secret meeting with Golda Meir to warn her of imminent attack ahead of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was one of many he had with Israeli leaders until Menachem Begin-led Likud Party’s rise to power in 1977 reduced the chances of achieving a settlement. Jordan eventually signed the first formal treaty with Israel in 1994 and became the second Arab state to do so. A year later, King Hussein delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin after the Israeli Prime Minister’s assassination in 1995.
King Hussein signed the 1994 treaty with Rabin, whom he had marked as a man he might do business, with during clandestine contacts with Israel. His secret meetings with Israeli leaders including Meir and Rabin since the 1960s were until then held mostly in London or Europe at the initiative of Jordan’s king. He gained the confidence to renew the ties with the Zionists, which led to his grandfather’s assassination, after consolidating his power over the first decade of his reign.
Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sent Yaacov Herzog, the director-general of his office, to London to meet Hussein after the king sent a message to the Israelis in 1963. Emanuel Herbert, a Jew and Hussein’s physician, hosted Herzog and the king’s meeting. King Hussein asked Herzog, who remained his Israeli liaison until he died in 1972, to help him get US military aid. Israelis promised to put in a good word in Washington at a follow-up meeting between King Hussein and Golda Meir, the then-Israeli foreign minister, in Paris in exchange for a share of the Jordan River water.
King Hussein met Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban London in May 1968 a year after the Hashemite dynasty lost half of Jerusalem and territory on the Western Bank in the 1967 war despite clandestine cooperation with Israelis. In September 1968, he met Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon.
‘Operation Lift’ was the code used to coordinate the meetings. In a September 1987 Washington Post article titled ‘Hussein’s covert Israeli connection’, Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman wrote the meetings also took place in a tent, in a desert trailer, on Coral Island near the Israeli-occupied Sinai, aboard an Israeli missile boat in the Gulf of Eilat, and a guest house near Tel Aviv.
The Jordanian king clandestinely visited Israel first in 1971 to renew his acquaintance with Meir, who had since taken over as the prime minister. Hussein, who received indirect, tactical support against PLO during the 1970 ‘Black September’ uprising from the US and Israel, flew his helicopter to Israel’s side of the Dead Sea.
Hussein was reportedly allowed to make a pass over Jerusalem, where the Hashemite dynasty once controlled the Al Aqsa mosques, one of Islam’s holiest. He gifted Israelis gold pens topped with the symbol of the Hashemite crown and a German-made G-3 assault rifle. In August 1986, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin met King Hussein on the outskirts of the Jordanian city of Aqaba after travelling on a light aircraft and a patrol boat.
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman wrote King Hussein seemed to accord particular respect to Meir and Moshe Dayan, an Israeli commander whose vision of a purely Jewish state with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was at the heart of the European Zionist movement. They wrote the two were ‘were living links to the abortive but farsighted peace program pursued by the king’s grandfather, Abdullah’, which Hussein fructified even if it meant reaching tactical agreements with Israelis to fight against Palestinians.
