Glubb Pasha and His Arabs

...In more immediate times, Israel and the Israelis continue to be obdurately on the wrong side of every page in Glubb's ledger...

...The wonder is that not once does Glubb draw the obvious conclusion that he himself must have been singularly misguided to have linked his name and fortune so long and loyally with such clearly impossible chaps as the Arabs are by his own firm description...

...Perhaps for generations to come," this remarkable memoirist writes wistfully, "the history books in most Arab countries will teach that Glubb Pasha betrayed the Arabs...

...In fact, he consistently finds the other fellow wrong on each level of argument: the Israelis in their discords with the Arabs, the other Arabs in their discords with his Arabs—and the other Jordanians in their discords with his Jordanians and with himself...

...For King Abdullah, King Hussein and even the poor feeble-minded King Tellal he retains the humble reverence of "an old family retainer...

...Finally, Israel has had her last chance to prevail by force: "She must either conciliate Asia or, sooner or later, Asia will overwhelm her...

...Of all the Arab armies, Abdullah's alone held its own against the Israelis...

...It embellishes political history with glimpses of events and relationships in the Middle Eastern diplomatic bazaar only suspected before or not known at all...

...Such an oppressively one-way plodding across the landscape of Arab-Israel controversy tends to shake confidence in the author's reliability, to put it mildly...

...The creator of the Arab Legion, hitherto believed a tight-lipped and mysterious personage wedded to absolute taciturnity, reveals himself to be a devoted husband and father, God-fearing, soft in the heart while cool in the head, and a fair hand at prose only occasionally purple...

...Except his own soldiers and his own employers...

...Perhaps more engaging than any of these aspects is the book's acid exposure of Arab eccentricities, frailties and knaveries by a presumably expert observer whose entire previous career has been based on the hypothesis that such massive wickedness simply does not exist...

...For every Arab vice listed, Glubb piles up abundant first-hand testimony, not sparing even Prime Ministers and other notables of Jordan, all in a bland and almost deadpan manner...

...They are, he solemnly demonstrates through a rare stock of precise illustrations, treacherous, foolish, absurd, lethargic, bumbling and ridiculous (especially the Egyptians, and most especially Gamal Abdel Nasser —-"personally charming delightfully frank . . but nearly always telling lies...

...Toward the former he felt, and still feels in exile, the genuine affection of a good leader for good men...

...The Grand Mufti's "Holy War" army had to be disarmed behind the Legion's lines because it blocked Jordanian communications and threatened the country's security...

...At one point Glubb earnestly describes them as "angels...

...Before partition, they ^refused to sit together in the same room" with Arab negotiators...

...The Arab League made Glubb an advance payment on sums pledged to finance Jordan's war effort, but withheld the balance because of displeasure with King Abdullah's policies on matters not involving the war...

...It must be presumed, however, that Glubb as an observer of Arabs (among whom he lived his life) is probably sounder than as an observer of Israelis (whom he saw only at the other end of his cannon...

...He gives constant free rein to a most unsoldierly emotionalism: in his schoolboyish weakness for thumping-ly dramatic chapter headings ("The Slide to Chaos," "We Stand Alone,' "A Sea of Troubles," "The Frontier of Hate...

...Though he "failed hopelessly," though intrigue and plain malice "destroyed" a lifetime of his labor "in a few hours," he loves those Arabs still...

...Why do such things have to happen...

...Nevertheless, Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb can rip manfully into any transgressor—even that cherished England which he left so long ago to serve an adopted land...

...They, not the Arabs (not the Arab Legion, at least), were provocative on the armistice frontiers...

...They were distastefully belligerent and anti-Christian...

...Not even the most hardbitten alumnus of the Haganah, Irgun or Stern Gang schools could have mixed a stronger brew...

...So much for Abraham, Solomon and later chronicles...

...Abdullah he adored with the fervor of hero-worship...

...Jordanian "Free Officer" pamphlets circulating inside Legion garrisons to provoke mutiny were published in Cairo...

...They "drove a million Arabs from their homes.'-They won the war mainly because they had more weapons than the Arabs and more fighting men...

...Nothing the Jews in the Holy Land ever did or argued was apparently right, even from the start in the mists of history...

...in his outcry over the corpse of a little girl killed by mortar fire ("God...

...Worse than nearsighted, London was deceitful and almost villainous in leaving pledges and commitments to Jordan allegedly half-honored or wholly ignored...

...It will be, rather, for the cruel mirror he has now held up to the Arabs at the end of his long corridor of frustration...

...While a battle is raging on the other end of his command telephone, he can enjoy his children's delight over the discovery of new kittens...

...The National Guard which Glubb formed to patrol Israel's infiltrated border was so efficient that other Arab governments tried to seduce it away from Amman's control...

...Glubb makes equally one-track evaluations of all disputes between Jordan and her fellow-Arab states...

...They were sly, ruthless and bloodthirsty in their reprisals (though Glubb derives obvious satisfaction from counting Jewish bodies in engagements the Israelis lost...

...It adds to military history with an authoritative account, through an Arab Legion spyglass, of the 1948 war with Israel...

...in the unabashed adoration he shows his royal master (as crowds cheered King Abdullah, "one or two tears ran down my cheeks...

...Financed from Egypt and Syria, a plot of military adventurers, Communists and Palestinians narrowly failed to kidnap young King Hussein and make Jordan a republic...

...It is a curiously touching self-disclosure of a legendary man of iron in various postures of emotional undress...

...Palestine became Arab, then Christian, then Arab again—but never Jewish...

...They were widely dispersed into insignificant islands long before the destruction of their Temple...

...The Egyptians, for instance, pinched from a British ship an ammunition cargo anxiously awaited by the Legion for use against the Israelis...

...It tells poignantly the story of Glubb Pasha's 36-year-long love affair with the army and dynasty of the Hashemites, terminated by a polite request to get out of Jordan by morning...

...I loved them," Glubb says of his Arabs more than once, not with bitterness but tenderly...

...As I lay in bed before falling asleep, I could hear above me the whisper of the palms, and outside the window, the rhythmic plash of the Red Sea on the shingly beach...

...Hussein, who he admits was personally responsible for the outrageous decision to cashier him, is a brave young prince with the seeds of greatness— provided he survives riots and assassins...

...They never controlled the whole country in antiquity, despite their Bible-based assertions...

...British policy was myopic, as he reads the record, in its suicidal friendship for Zionism and in its antagonism toward the Arabs...

...If so, A Soldier With the Arabs throws much light on what went wrong among his associates before, during and after their 1948 showdown with Zionism...

...Glubb has written a more damaging, relentless expose of the Arabs than any deliberate anti-Arab tract this reviewer can recall...

...Israel: The Beginning and Tomorrow'' This is a memorable book on a rich variety of counts...

...If so, I suspect, it will not be for his generalship or lack of personal integrity, which are truly above question...

...Throughout, Glubb Pasha pursues an unrelenting indictment of Palestinian Jewry and of Israel, though all the time professing an objective calm...

...They were savage when they arrived in civilized Palestine...

...They perpetrated the profound folly of trying to establish a "nation" in the heterogeneous Middle East instead of "sharing" Palestine...

...At no juncture, apparently, were his Legionnaires ever anything but impeccable...