As a foreign journalist working in Israel in 1994, some doors were more open to me than others. And so were some bridges.
It was July when I received a call from the JC in London. The then editor, Ned Temko, had arranged for me to go from Jerusalem to Amman, to interview King Hussein’s brother, Crown Prince Hassan.
To say I was excited was an understatement. On July 25 the king went to Washington to sign a peace treaty, together with Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the avuncular gaze of President Bill Clinton.
Two weeks earlier, I was on my way to Amman in a world without mobile phones to keep us in constant touch or social media to give a running commentary on every cough or facial gesture.
As a British citizen my route to Amman was simple: via the Allenby Bridge, the closest crossing point to Jerusalem. In those days the bridge was a fairly simple structure, with some young Israeli soldiers on one side and Jordanians on the other.
I got a taxi from Jerusalem to the Israeli side and was picked up — to raucous hoots of laughter from the IDF — in a huge limo at the Jordanian end and whisked off to Amman.
Since the news desk had no means of reaching me other than via the Jordanian Information Bureau, I was on my own. I was taken to the complex of royal palaces and left to my own devices while I waited to be summoned to the royal presence.
I remember enormous anxiety as I had never met any sort of prince before. I was panicked as to what to call the diminutive Crown Prince — eventually I settled for “Sir”, and he seemed fine with that.
First, however, I had to get past the palace guards outside his suite. They were dressed in black with, apparently, silver bullet casings as frogging on their uniforms — and very, very shiny knee-high boots.
Looking now at my report from the August 5 1994 edition of the JC, I am struck by the prescience of Hassan, then 47.
He felt “elated on one hand and saddened on the other — by the huge loss of life and the dispossession that the peoples of the area have had to suffer for decades”.
He said he hoped that the meeting of his brother, the king, with Prime Minister Rabin on the White House lawn would not be “yet another round of dolly daydreaming” — a wonderfully idiomatic legacy from his education at Harrow and Oxford.
And my report included what surely must be one of the first mentions of “Islamophobia” — the prince’s take on the joint battle of combatting anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racism.
Some hopes were never fulfilled, such as his dream of a regional economic structure for the Middle East. But his conclusion still bears repeating: “Who would have imagined six weeks ago that we would be having this discussion? When you’ve worked for something for years and years —sometimes I wonder, ‘Is this me, or is it Hassan through the Looking Glass?’”
Just over a year later, Rabin was assassinated and King Hussein died from cancer in 1999. But the peace of 25 years ago between Israel and Jordan still holds. It was not a dolly daydream.
