COMMENTARY: King Hussein: a true original

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Rabbi A. James Rudin is national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ King Hussein of Jordan is another vivid reminder that warriors-turned-peacemakers are always more revered in death than the world’s greatest soldiers. His passing on Feb. 7 robs the world, and especially the Middle East, […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi A. James Rudin is national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ King Hussein of Jordan is another vivid reminder that warriors-turned-peacemakers are always more revered in death than the world’s greatest soldiers. His passing on Feb. 7 robs the world, and especially the Middle East, of a true original, a unique charismatic leader whose likes we will not soon see again.


Like his beloved friend, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, Jordan’s king came to understand that even a fragile peace is better than war, and pragmatic moderation is far better than ideological purity and religious extremism. Sadly, that kind of leadership is in desperately short supply in today’s world.

But Hussein, who ruled his country since 1952, had to learn those lessons first hand in extremely painful ways. He was only 16 years old in 1951 when he personally witnessed an Arab extremist assassinate his grandfather, King Abdullah, at a Muslim holy place in Jerusalem.

That brutal event traumatized the young Hussein and made him a permanent foe of all forms of religious and political fanaticism. Indeed, antagonism to extremism was a hallmark of his long reign which began when Harry Truman was the U.S. president.

In June 1967 Hussein learned another important lesson when he made a fateful error in judgment _ one he regretted the rest of his life _ by joining Syria and Egypt in a losing war against Israel even though Israel urged him not to join in the hostilities. But the 32-year-old Jordanian monarch was either unable or unwilling to resist the strong pressures from Cairo and Damascus and in a rash act, Hussein attacked Israel.

The Arab-Israeli 1967 war lasted only six days, but at the end of hostilities, Hussein had lost much of his armed forces, Jordan’s half of Jerusalem and the entire West Bank, the area west of the Jordan river. It was a colossal mistake, one that Hussein did not repeat in the later Middle East wars that involved Israel in 1973 and 1982.

Hussein’s greatest legacy is the remarkable model of leadership he offered to both his fellow Arabs and his Jewish neighbors in Israel. Hussein was an ardent Arab nationalist and a devout Muslim, but in the last years of his life he reached out to Israel in peace.

He was living proof that a successful Arab leader did not have to hate Jews or Israel in order to survive. Indeed, his small kingdom of Jordan, which has few natural resources, is currently prospering because of Hussein’s policies. He showed his fellow Arab rulers that more can be gained from a policy of peace and accommodation than by following a path of confrontation and warfare.

For Israelis, Hussein represented something special: an Arab ruler who did not preach or practice hostility. For decades Hussein met secretly with a series of Israeli leaders in a quest for peace. Although those many back-channel conversations were known in Israel and throughout the Arab world, the political realities of the Middle East prevented a formal Jordan-Israel peace treaty until negotiations began between the Jewish state and the Palestinians.


Once that process began in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, Hussein and Rabin were free to go public and they formally signed the long-desired peace treaty a year later.

Jews throughout the world warmly remember two extraordinary moments in Hussein’s life.

The first came in November 1995 when he delivered a poignant and eloquent oration at the Jerusalem funeral of Rabin, killed by a Jewish assassin. Wearing a traditional Arab headdress and business suit, Hussein swore on the fresh grave of his friend to pursue peace with Israel”for all times to come.” A few years later, a Jordanian soldier went on a shooting rampage and killed seven Israeli children at a usually peaceful picnic site on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Distraught by his soldier’s murderous action, Hussein visited the Israeli families of the youthful victims to express his personal condolences for the tragedy. The picture of the Arab king kneeling in front of grieving Jewish parents is indelibly etched in Israel’s collective national memory.

It is hoped that Abdullah, Hussein’s eldest son and successor to the throne, will not have to learn his father’s hard-won lessons through his own personal tragedy and armed conflicts. And it is hoped the new king of Jordan will not have to endure assassinations and lost wars to grasp the ultimate and transcendent meaning of his father’s passionate commitment to peace.

In fact, the transmission of that commitment to his son may be Hussein’s most important and final contribution to peace.

DEA END RUDIN

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