Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Read Online Free PDF Page B

had lost one of her legs. Gently cradling her, he ran to a nearby ambulance, but it was too late. She died in his arms.
    We lived in a small, tree-lined compound in a district called Hummar, twenty minutes up into the hills outside of Amman. The relative seclusion provided some protection from those who wanted to hurt us, but not from Israeli planes: for that we had to rely on four .50 caliber quad guns mounted on turrets in the garden. The soldiers manning the guns kindly allowed my four-year-old brother, Feisal, and me to think we were part of the defensive effort. Our job was to carry oil cans and lubricate the guns if they started firing. We enjoyed our role as the most junior members of the military unit—an association that came to an abrupt halt when someone showed my mother a photo of us posing by the guns with cigarettes dangling from our mouths. My mother still lives in that house, but the area where the anti-aircraft guns were is now a vegetable garden; one gun was mounted on what is now a compost heap.
    Although as a child I could perceive the emotional impact of the war, at that time I had little idea of its meaning and implications.
     
    In the spring of 1967 it was already clear to many in the region that Israel and its Arab neighbors were racing headlong toward a collision. In November 1966 Israeli forces launched a devastating attack on Samu, a village near Hebron, as a reprisal for the killing by landmine of three soldiers, raising concerns in Amman about Israeli intentions. In early May, President Nasser deployed troops in the Sinai Peninsula and requested that the UN remove its peacekeeping troops (the United Nations Emergency Force, UNEF) from the Sinai, where they had been positioned since the Suez crisis more than a decade earlier. Not long after that, he closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only access to the Red Sea, to Israeli shipping.
    The Arab forces were not a cohesive army but a collection of separate national armies that had recently joined together. Following a series of failed attempts at closer political union among the Arab states during the 1960s, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Iraqis had joined their militaries together to form the United Arab Command in 1964. Egypt and Syria then signed a defense treaty in November 1966.
    In late May 1967, sensing the looming possibility of a conflict, and given the highly charged Arab nationalist sentiment at the time, my father felt he had no choice but to announce his support for Arab leaders in the face of Israeli aggression. He went to Cairo and, in a fateful decision, committed Jordan to a mutual defense treaty with Egypt. From then on, the Jordanian Armed Forces would be under the command of an Egyptian officer, General Abdul Monim Riad. The Israelis decided on a preemptive strike, claiming that Nasser was planning to attack. They had already prepared the way.
    At that time, the Middle East was a focus of intense competition between the rival superpowers locked in a cold war. The region was divided into two broad areas of influence: a pro-Soviet camp, led by Nasser and the Egyptians, and a pro-Western camp, to which my father belonged. According to declassified U.S. documents, on June 1, 1967, General Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, visited Washington, D.C., and met with Richard Helms, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Drawing upon American fears of Soviet expansionism, Amit portrayed Egypt and Nasser as a threat not just to Israel but to the whole region. According to Helms, Amit’s view was that the Egyptian president would, if left unimpeded, draw the entire Middle East into the Soviet sphere of influence. Jordan’s forced accommodation with Egypt was by this logic a sign of things to come. Saudi Arabia and Lebanon would be next, after which it would be the turn of Turkey and Iran. Even Tunisia and Morocco would eventually topple to Nasser. Summarizing their conversation in