Israeli
Foreign Policies, August 1994
8 August 1994
The scope of Israeli foreign policies can be said to be truly
worldwide. This is especially the case when, in the wake of recent
terrorist assaults against Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos
Aires and London, the Israeli government professed the eradication
of all such terror in the entire world as its aim. At the same
time, however, due to Israeli automatic attribution of
responsibility for all those assaults to Iran, Israeli foreign
policies are also firmly anchored in the region of the Middle
East. It can even be conjectured that the primary purpose of the
Washington treaty with Jordan recently signed by Rabin and King
Hussein was not so much to make peace as to seek to use Jordanian
territory for action against Iran. And the same purpose was by no
means absent from the `peace process' pursued earlier with Arafat.
Here I will deal with the Israeli anti-Iranian propaganda campaign
which is being intensified: its policy context clearly being the
Middle East in the widest possible meaning of that term, that is,
extending from Afghanistan to Morocco, the Muslim republics of the
former USSR included.
Let me proceed to discuss the strategic significance of the
Israeli Accord with Jordan. It is both defensive and offensive.
Jordan commits itself not to allow and third state's army to enter
its territory. (But there is no mention of a possible entry of the
Israeli Army into Jordan.) Most Israeli commentators understood
this stipulation as precluding the threat of the so-called
`Eastern Front', that is, of allied Arab armies attacking Israel
from the east. Even though Israel's border with Jordan is more
difficult to defend than its Egyptian border, the whole notion has
in my view long belonged to the realm of fiction. With the
Jordanian border secure and a firm peace with Egypt, only the
borders with Syria and Lebanon remain hostile. They are relatively
short, allowing for heavy concentrations of troops and fire, the
preferred Israeli method of warfare. The prospect of so shortening
the potential front line has been discussed for a long time in
professional military magazines of the Israeli Army. But Israeli
strategists are also keenly aware of the two-fold importance of
the Irbid area of Jordan, located just south of the Golan Heights
and Syria. By penetrating this area, the Syrian Army could
outflank the Israeli troops deployed in the Golan Heights. By
penetrating the same area, however, the Israeli Army could
outflank the bulk of the Syrian Army, entrenched in its
fortifications opposite the Golan Heights, and speedily advance
toward Damascus. Now, the Israeli military alliance with Jordan
(which is what the agreement with that country amounts to),
precludes the former prospect while enhancing the likelihood of
the latter. All too clearly, it poses a major threat to Syria.
Still, the most likely target of a possible Israeli armed
attack is at the present moment Iran. Oren (Davar, 7 January 1994)
views the agreement with Jordan primarily in that context: `The
agreement is intended to establish a military alliance between
Israel and Jordan and thus extend the boundary of Israel's
military presence to the eastern tip of the Jordanian desert.
Israel's undisguised military presence there, right on the border
of Iraq, means that the route of its war planes to Iran will be
hundreds of kilometres shorter.' Had they had to take off from
Israeli territory, only the most advanced Israeli planes,
practically only the F-15s, could reach Iran without refuelling in
the air. A glance of the map of the Middle East will suffice to
show that the Iraqi-Jordanian border area is alread7 quite close
to Iran: close enough to let Israel use its plentiful older model
planes (or missiles) for bombing raids on Iran after overflying
the Iraqi territory. Oren does expect Jordan `to grant the Israeli
Air Force the tight to overfly its territory, at least in
emergency situations.' Sure enough, the use of Jordanian territory
for a possible assault of Iran implies the existence of a tacit
Iraqi complicity with Israel. Oren must imply no less than that
when he says that once Israeli alliance with Jordan is fully
operational, `Rafsanjani will be compelled to approach Israel with
greater restraint than to date.' In more general terms Oren opines
that `just as Israel had opened the flow of American dollars to
Sadat and enabled the Egyptian Air Force to receive advanced
planes from the US within no more than year and a half after
Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, so the Rabin government which enabled
Jordan to receive not a few US dollars, will feel entitled to use
its agreement with Jordan not just for the sake of the military
status quo, but in order to improve Israel's military strength
considerably, to the point of letting the Israeli Air Force and
eventually Intelligence reach the western boundary of Iraq.' In my
view, this crucial change in strategic configurations in the
Middle East either has already occurred or is likely to occur in
the coming months.
I feel tempted at this point to digress in order to recount
some new revelations about the past relations oC the Zionist
movement and the State of Israel with the Hashemite regime in
Jordan. A veteran of Haganah's Intelligence Service, Yo'av Gelber,
recently published a book bearing the title The Roots of the Lily,
(the lily being the emblem of Israeli Military Intelligence),
which heavily relies on documents declassified only in recent
years. According to Gelber, King Hussein's grandfather, Abdullah,
was recruited as a spy for the Zionist movement in the early
1920s, soon after being appointed `Emir of Trans-Jordan' by the
British. He was instructed to spy on all sorts of Arab leaders,
but his main task was to spy on his British masters. Heaps of
documents depict Zionist intra-agency squabbles over whether
Abdullah's demands for payment for each rendered service should be
fully respected or subject io some bargaining, the late Moshe
Sharett being a consistent advocate of the latter. All payments to
Abdullah were in cash directly delivered to him. Other
intra-agency disputes were over Abdullah's occasional demands to
be paid not in banknotes, but in gold coins. In addition to .his,
one of Abdullah's wives was put on the Zionist pa7roh to spv on
her husband. Gelber boasts that the British discovered the whole
scheme only after more than twenty years, in 1946. Their reaction
was not only to offer Abdullah more money than the Zionist
movement could possibly pay, but also to give more military aid
for Abdullah's army. Most importantly, however, they dangled
before him a vision of becoming king of `the greater Syria' -
Syria, Lebanon and Palestine together. This displeased Ben-Gurion
greatly, and relations between the Zionist movement and
subsequently the State of Israel with Jordan dwindled to a
coordination of policy directed, as Oren defines it, `against
their common enemy, Palestinian nationalism'.
A fuller cooperation between Israel and Jordan was revived by
King Hussein in 1958, right after the revolution in Iraq in which
his close relatives from the Iraqi royal family perished. As Oren
puts it, Hussein `sent his Armenian Intelligence advisor to
Israel' with dispatch. On the Jordanian side cooperation with
Israel was carried through solely by the kingdom's Armenian or
Circassian functionaries. Azarya Alon (Davar, 28 July) informs us
that one unit guarding King Hussein is comprised solely of
Circassians and considers this fact advantageous to Israel.
The Israeli alliance with King Hussein endured until 1965. Oren
points out that, as subsequently revealed by declassified American
documents, George Bush, acting in capacity of CIA Director had in
that year offered King Hussein personal payment. Bush's scheme was
considered in Israel hostile and it was recalled when he became
President. But Hussein again became subservient to Israel before
the `Black September' of 1970. After that date he became a virtual
Israeli spy, as his grandfather had been. As is well known, it was
he who in September 1973 forewarned Golda Meir about the incipient
attack of Egypt and Syria on Israel, although he was not believed.
Good relations have been maintained since, regardless of which
party ruled Israel. As was reported by the Hebrew press on the
occasion of the present Washington Accord, Shamir had met King
Hussein in London even during the Gulf Crisis, in November 1990,
in order to assure him that unless Iraqi land forces are let into
Jordan, Israel was not going to invade it, even in the case of it
launching hostilities against Iraq. The present Israeli-Jordanian
alliance is therefore the crowning point of decades of thinly
disguised cooperation.
