Hussein on the Hot Seat

...Significantly, where Fatah insists that all ideological considerations must be subordinated to the elimination of Israel, the Popular Front and General Command openly proclaim that the "Palestine Liberation Struggle" is the spearhead of a larger Arab revolution...

...Should the extremists ultimately succeed in overthrowing Hussein, and even manage to set up some sort of government in Amman, Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian troops would rush in to "protect" the country against Israel...

...The effects of the extremists' ascendancy were perhaps most dramatically demonstrated during last month's crisis in Jordan...

...Their refusal to "donate" quickly deteriorated into an exchange of fire and set off the fighting that almost toppled the King...

...Nevertheless, he sits on his throne by the grace of the terrorists and of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus????All of whose graces are often short-lived and volatile...

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...But they continued to feel discriminated Eliahu Salpeter, a past contributor to these pages, is a member of the editorial board of Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers...

...When Arab guerrilla leaders realized they could not establish an effective resistance movement in the Israeli-held West Bank territories, they moved across to the East Bank to set up permanent bases, training camps and advance posts for hit-and-run attacks...

...Neither man considers himself bound by the Palestine Armed Struggle Command, the coordinating committee for the terrorist organizations currently chaired by Arafat...

...That, however, was only the beginning of Hussein's latest troubles...

...Hussein's capitulation dealt a severe blow to the morale of the Jordanian Army, where the dismissal of two loyal generals was viewed as a betrayal of its own loyalty to the King????by the King himself...

...With the influx from the West Bank that followed the Six Day War, the Palestinians became close to a majority????if not actually a majority, as some maintain????on the East Bank, Hussein's traditional stronghold...

...And this was again underscored last week with the announcement of a new Jordanian "Cabinet of Reconciliation" that for the first time includes many supporters of the Palestinian commandos...

...Probably both theories are right...

...Some attribute this to his essentially irresolute character...

...In return, it was promised, not an inch of Jordanian territory would be touched...

...But the King, in what may prove to be the worst of his many miscalculations, wanted to be in on what he thought would be a quick Arab kill????And so lost the western half of his kingdom in four days...

...And each "agreement" involved a further erosion of the palace's tenuous authority...

...Led by the avowed Marxist and Maoist, Dr...

...Jordan, he declared repeatedly, was the country of the Palestinians...

...His own supporters were almost without exception staunchly conservative...

...The Popular Front and General Command promptly rejected it, forcing Arafat to escalate his demands...

...Yasir Arafat's Al Fatah, strongest of the fed-ayeen groups, "opinion maker" among the Palestinians and chief challenger of Hussein's authority, gradually began losing ground to the smaller, more extremist organizations????particularly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the General Command...

...Hussein, having annexed sections of what was to be the UN-sponsored Arab State of Palestine after occupying them in 1948, was the only Arab leader to grant full citizenship to both the permanent residents and refugees...

...As their number and popularity grew they became an increasing threat to the Amman regime, finally challenging it openly...

...In practice, though, he concentrated on developing Trans-jordan rather than the West Bank, and was careful to assign key posts in the Cabinet, Army, police, and security services to members of prominent Bedouin families loyal to the Crown...

...Always among the best educated, most agile Arabs, the Palestinians waged an uphill battle and slowly managed to capture important political positions...

...others believe pressure from Egypt, Syria and Iraq stayed his hand...

...George Habash, the Popular Front sees Israel as merely a tool of American imperialism...

...Under the circumstances, Fatah units felt bound to assist the extremists...

...It is widely assumed here that Jerusalem would not sit idly by as Arab troops not only moved up to the cease-fire line but within shooting range of settlements and towns in the Galilee and the Negev?including Eilat, Israel's only port east of the Suez Canal...

...The General Command, which split away from the Front to specialize in such acts of "heroism" as blowing up a Swissair jet en route to Tel Aviv, is run by Ahmed Jibril...

...APPEASING THE TERRORISTS Hussein on the Hot Seat BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv On the eve of the Six Day War in June 1967, the late Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, using the good offices of the United States embassies in Israel and Jordan, pleaded with King Hussein to stay out of the fighting...

...Thus his new citizens soon labeled him "the Bedoui King," Bedoui being close to an insult...

...In short order, the violent street demonstrations against the King that had been frequent in the Old City of Jerusalem, Nablus and Ramallah turned into armed clashes with the Jordanian Army and Security Forces in Amman, Zarka and Aqaba...

...Events took still another ominous turn six months ago...

...Whatever the case, successive confrontations between the terrorists and the throne inevitably ended with an "agreement to eliminate the misunderstandings...

...Within 48 hours, Arafat reached still another "agreement" with Hussein...

...It brought into sharp focus, too, the growing influence of extremist groups that do not share Fa-tah's desire to keep Hussein on his throne as a Western-supported shield against large-scale Israeli retaliation operations...

...It started as a minor incident when General Command members collecting "voluntary" contributions in an Amman marketplace approached several soldiers standing nearby...

...the King's suspicions of them, meanwhile, were nourished by the fact that their intellectual ranks included Leftists and outright Communists...

...The Jordan Security Forces and some of the tougher Army elements apparently considered the incident an opportunity to settle old accounts with the extreme Leftists, and possibly eliminate them altogether...

...Ultimately, they seek to replace not only "reactionary" rulers like Hussein, but "bourgeois nationalist" regimes like Gamal Abdel Nasser's in the United Arab Republic...

...Conceivably, Hussein's domestic and foreign Arab opponents will be sufficiently restrained by the chain reaction that could be set off with his removal to retain him as at least nominal head of Jordan...

...Until June '67, Royal compromises reflected a shifting balance be-tween Palestinians and Transjordan-ians in the Hashemite Kingdom...

...Hussein made several half-hearted attempts to curb them, yet always stopped short of meaningful action...

...After some hesitation, the King agreed to fire the Commander of the Army (his uncle) and the Commander of Jordan's Armored Division (his cousin) , both known for their loyalty to the Crown and their hostility to the terrorists who are eager to undermine it...

...The various commando groups also replaced the politicians as spokesmen for the Palestinians...