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In 1948, when war broke out between the Arabs and Jews over Palestine, the armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel. Abdullah's Arab Legion moved with them. In the short, sharp fighting that followed, only the highly disciplined Bedouins of Abdullah's Arab Legion stood up to Israeli attacks. Seeing how weak his allies were, Abdullah agreed to a truce and annexed those parts of Palestine that his troops occupied.
For Abdullah and Jordan it was a dubious victory. By greedily biting off the chunk of Palestine bordering on the Jordan River, Abdullah incurred the enmity of all the other Arab countries, and swallowed a poison that may destroy Hussein.
For at one stroke Jordan was converted from a small Bedouin kingdom into a nation of refugees. The ex-Palestinians outnumbered the old Bedouin population two to one. They felt no loyalty to the Hashemite throne or to its British protectors. They were more sophisticated, better educated, more worldly-wise than the desert people. They took over Jordan's trade. They demanded and got the right to vote, the right to elect half the members of Parliament. They growled that Jordan was a slave state, that King Abdullah had sold them out to the Jews. One day in 1951 Abdullah went to pray at Jerusalem's Mosque of the Rock. A Palestinian refugee stepped from behind a pillar, fired a rapid succession of shots at the King. Abdullah dropped dead. One of the assassin's bullets ripped a medal from the chest of 15-year-old Hussein as he walked beside his grandfather.
"Brazen Hussy." Hussein's father, the neurotic Talal, was installed as King. Hussein's strong-minded mother Queen Zain packed him off for a year at Harrow. There, when he was not attending court levees in London, Hussein lingered around the local tuck-shop, sipping Cokes with his cousin and classmate, Iraq's Prince Feisal, also 17. "He was very lonely and, I thought, unhappy," remembers the tuckshop owner. Barely a year later his moody father was deposed and retired to Istanbul. A recent visitor says he has forgotten that he once was King.
Hussein stayed on for a six-month spell at Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, where fellow cadets named him "brazen Hussy" the instant they saw him with his uniform and medals on. ("All he got at Sandhurst was a military bearing," admits one British diplomat.) In April 1953 he went home to take over his job. On the same day his cousin Feisal was installed on the Hashemite throne in Baghdad.
Hussein had already picked a pretty wife for himself. Seven years his senior, serious-minded Dina Abdel Hamid is a member of an Egyptian branch of the Hashemite clan, grew up in Cairo, took an M.A. at Cambridge and returned to teach English literature in Egypt. The royal couple settled down in Hussein's three small hilltop palaces. Two months ago Dina bore Hussein's first child, a daughter, Alia. (The Israelis jeer that the baby's first gurgle was "Glubb-Glubb.")