Regally Blonde

“Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life” (Miramax, 2003), theautobiography of Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan, has been on The New YorkTimes Best-Seller List for six weeks now. This week it was number one. MoreAmericans might get their news from ABC, but these days many Americans aregetting their history from Queen Noor.

And that’s too bad.

Alongside languorous accounts of various holidays in England, Austria andWyoming (Gee, it’s good to be queen), the book is threaded with a grosslyinaccurate version of Middle East history. By the end of the last chapter,readers will have ingested a negative, one-sided view of Israel.

This is a particularly dangerous brand of propaganda. The queen, staringback at readers from the book’s cover, looks sincere and caring, with cleargreen eyes and her blonde hair cut network anchorwoman style. Why would JanePauley lie?

Between the covers, the queen constantly recites her progressivecredentials, and they’re solid. Born Lisa Halaby and raised part of herchildhood in Santa Monica, she earned a degree in architecture and urbanplanning from Princeton in 1974 and devoted her early adulthood todo-gooderism. After marrying King Hussein in 1978, she worked hard on behalfof women and children’s rights, against land mines, and for, as she writes,building “bridges between cultures to promote constructive dialogue.”

Her husband, who inherited his throne in 1952, was more supportive of theOslo peace process than any other Arab ruler. The king and queen wept atYitzhak Rabin’s funeral, and though she doesn’t mention the fact in herbook, both were card-carrying members of the Museum of Tolerance — really.These, in short, are the good guys.

All of which makes it more depressing to read her autobiography. I don’texpect Queen Noor to be a Zionist, any more than I expect the memoirs ofnotable Israelis to be pro-Palestinian. Memoirs are politics by other means,and for Noor to be anything less than anti-Israel would, given theanti-Western mood back in her adopted homeland these days, seriouslythreaten her family business. But if her aim is to promote dialogue, whytell lies and half-truths about the people you need to be speaking with?

Noor accuses Israel of undermining international intentions for aPalestinian homeland in 1948. In fact, it was the Arabs who rejected the1937 Peel Commission decision to grant them 80 percent of the land inPalestine. Israel has killed, dispossessed and oppressed hundreds ofthousands of Palestinians, according to Noor. The fact that her husband’scountry occupied the West Bank for 19 years, itself suppressing Palestiniannationalism, goes unmentioned. She writes that her husband did everything hecould to avoid war in 1967, but “one fact is indisputable: Israel struck thefirst blow.” Somewhat closer to the truth, as historian Michael Oren writesin “Six Days of War” (Oxford, 2002), is that King Hussein’s capitulation toa militant Egypt and Syria compelled Israel to strike. Later, she writes,her husband disapproved of any peace that infringed upon Jordan’s “historicguardianship of the holy sites” of Jerusalem. Historic? How about ignoble?Jordanians barred Israelis from entering those holy sites from 1948-1967,destroyed Old City synagogues and built latrines from Jewish tombstones.

These are just a few examples of Noor’s “Zionism for Dummies.”

Sadder than the fact that she thinks sowing such falsehoods (and that isjust a sample) helps any bridges get built, is the fact that she just maybelieve her own book.

The Arab elite’s obsession with Israel has crippled their good sense, writesTunisian intellectual Al-Afif Al Akhdar, a former columnist for theinfluential Arab-language daily Al-Hayat, in a recent essay translated atmemri.org. To a shameful extent, Noor’s book carries echoes of thisobsession. She can recount Yasser Arafat’s venality and blame the PLO foralmost toppling the Hashemites, but somehow she expects Israel to yield tohim. She spends page after page trashing Israel, but spends two briefparagraphs at the end of her book addressing Jordan’s legal practice ofhonor killings, which enables Jordanian men to kill with impunity a femalerelative they suspect of having immoral sexual relations. Nor does sheaddress the suppression of political opposition and free speech in Jordan.Israel, for all its faults, is a democracy, not a dynasty.

“The intellectual class has only itself to blame,” writes Fouad Ajami in”The Dream Palace of the Arabs” (Pantheon, 1998). “It had not looked realityin the face; it had not sought to describe the political world as it was.”

Ajami goes on to note that the Hashemite dynasty paid a significant pricefor stepping out of the dream palace and acting pragmatically toward Israel.Noor doesn’t need to be told this.

But her book was an opportunity to back up such actions with words. That,unfortunately, is one leap of faith the queen couldn’t make.