Hussein I of Jordan (14 November 1935-7 February 1999) was King of Jordan from 11 August 1952 to 7 February 1999, succeeding Talal of Jordan and preceding Abdullah II of Jordan.
Biography[]
King Hussein in an interview in 1970
Hussein was born on 14 November 1935 in Amman, Jordan, the son of King Talal of Jordan and Princess Zein al-Sharaf Talal. He was schooled in the United Kingdom with his cousin, the future King Faisal II of Iraq, who would be assassinated in the July 14 Revolution in 1958; on 20 July 1951, Hussein witnessed his grandfather Abdullah I of Jordan be killed by a Palestinian nationalist. Hussein chased the assassin and deflected a bullet with a medal on his uniform. On 9 September, he became crown prince after his father became king, and Talal abdicated only thirteen months later due to having schizophrenia. Hussein became the new king of Jordan on 11 August 1952.
Hussein made Jordan a fully-independent country in March 1956 when he dismissed Glubb Pasha and all of the British Army officers in command of the Jordanian Army, and all of the British officers were replaced with Jordanians. During the 1960s, he made efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict peacefully by negotiating with Israel. He also wanted to force the Fatah guerrillas out of his country, a common cause with Israel. However, other Arab leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and fellow nationalist leaders were angry at King Hussein for attempting to make peace with Israel, and in 1967 he was forced into signing an alliance with Egypt to maintain Jordan's credibility. In the ensuing Six-Day War, Jordan lost the West Bank to Israel, and the country was overrun with more Palestinian refugees. Hussein's central authority was undermined as the Palestinians set up a state within a state in their refugee camps, with Fatah and the PLO ruling over their camps with armed guards and having their own laws. In September 1970, he ordered the expulsion of the PLO, leading to Black September; with the help of Pakistan, he defeated the PLO guerrillas and their Syrian allies by May 1971.
In 1973, he refused to take part in the Yom Kippur War so that Israel would not be able to take any more land from Jordan, and he negotiated peace with Israel over the next two decades, agreeing to a 1994 peace treaty that ended Jordan's role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He had befriended Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin while making peace, and he spoke at Rabin's funeral after a Jewish extremist killed him in 1995. Hussein died of lymphoma in 1998, and his son Abdullah II of Jordan succeeded him as king.