Hussein of Jordan

Hussein of Jordan reigned for forty-six years over a state that almost every calculation said would not survive, and survived at least a dozen attempts on his life. He was fifteen and standing beside his grandfather King Abdullah I at the al-Aqsa mosque in 1951 when a gunman killed him; a medal on Hussein's chest is said to have deflected the bullet aimed at him. His father Talal was removed for mental illness within the year, and Hussein took the throne at seventeen, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. He dismissed the British commander of the Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, in 1956 to answer Nasserist pressure, and put down a coup attempt by his own officers in 1957. In 1967 he joined Egypt in the Six-Day War against his own better judgement and lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which he called the worst decision of his life; the loss doubled his refugee population and put Palestinian guerrilla organisations inside his borders. The confrontation came in September 1970, when after multiple aircraft hijackings to a Jordanian airstrip he sent the army against the fedayeen; several thousand died in the fighting known as Black September, and the PLO leadership left for Lebanon. He warned Israel privately before the 1973 war and kept Jordan largely out of it. He backed Iraq in 1990, which cost him Gulf subsidies and American goodwill, and recovered both. In 1994 he signed a peace treaty with Israel, the second Arab state to do so, and in 1997 he went in person to the homes of seven Jordanian schoolgirls shot by a Jordanian soldier and knelt before their families. He died of lymphoma in 1999, having changed the succession from his brother to his son Abdullah days before.

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