My first business trip was to Jordan, in October of 1982. John accompanied me for the first two days, then left me in the hands of the local distributor. Just before leaving, I received an urgent call from Buenos Aires. It was Paul. He said that he had received the letter in which I told him that my first P&G assignment was on Jordan. He was terrified that I might be sent to visit this country. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m leaving for Amman in two hours.’ ‘You can’t go!’ he said. ‘They’ll figure out that you have a Jewish name. The Jordanians will put you in prison or just kill you on the spot.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I responded, and left for the airport.

At the time, Jordan represented a small business for P&G and the expansion possibilities were limited, due to severe government restrictions on imports. Nevertheless, John thought it would be a good idea for me to spend a full ten days in Jordan, ‘in order to get acquainted with P&G’s way of operating on the ground’. 

Ali, the representative from Petra Trading, the local distributor, was a slow, affable and kind man. He decided that the best way for me to understand the business was to visit as many customers as possible. So, on our first day ‘in the field’, we went to Amman’s biggest souk. While we were wandering around, Ali said: ‘We’re going to visit Muhammad now. He’s a really big customer. Please, when he speaks to you, be particularly engaged and very attentive.’ ‘Of course,’ I said.

After wading through huge displays of Tide detergent, Fairy Liquid washing-up liquid and Drene shampoo, we found a little man sitting in front of a diminutive table. It was Muhammad. Ali said a few words to him in Arabic and Muhammad waved me to sit down. ‘What is your name?’ he asked me. ‘Pedro,’ I said. ‘What is your name, please, I did not understand,’ Muhammad said. ‘Pedro,’ I said. ‘Please repeat,’ Muhammad said. ‘PEDRO,’ I said again, this time with a loud voice. ‘Ah,’ Muhammad said with a broad smile, ‘PETROL, a very nice name for the Middle East. Welcome, welcome PETROL!’ So, for the rest of my time in the Middle East, I became Mr. Petrol (pronounced Bedrol). To this day, people from the region who remember me from that time, still call me ‘Mr. Bedrol’.

One of the most revealing moments of my initial trip to Jordan was my visit to Palestinian refugee camps. Over 1 million Palestinians were living in camps at the time in Jordan. They were the descendants of those who had fled or were forced to leave during the 1948 and 1967 Israeli-Arab wars. The densely populated camps were a major source of business for P&G, so Ali and I visited six or seven of them. Some camps, like Marka and Amman New Camp, were close to the capital, but others, like Irbid, were far away and took several hours to reach.

I was shocked by what I saw: all of the camps (originally tents, which had gradually morphed into prefabricated buildings) were filled with destitute people. Some of the camps did not have running water and almost none had any kind of healthcare system. The people I spoke to came from Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem or Beersheba. They told stories of uprooting and a yearning for a return to their home towns.

After a while, it became clear that my family was of Jewish descent, and that my parents had had to flee Vienna because they were Jews. The Palestinians I met in the camps and elsewhere all said the same to me: it’s good that your family are Austrian Jews, they will understand better than others why we suffer so much! But at least they can return to see their homeland every now and again, we can’t even do that.

Nobody I met had any trouble with me coming from a Jewish family. On the contrary, I was frequently greeted with the words: ‘So we are cousins!’ Of course, many complained about the inflexibility of the Israeli government, and the fact that the international community did too little to ease the plight of the refugees, but I never once heard anyone say that the Jewish people should be annihilated. What the Palestinians I met wanted was a fair solution, one in which their dignity would be restored. Most of them understood that they would never been able to live permanently again in the towns where they had been born, but they hoped for some kind of financial compensation and the possibility of visiting their hometown every now and again. 

I was completely shaken by my experience in the refugee camps, especially since it stood in such contrast to the racist comments I had heard from Ernst Mandler during my visit to Israel in 1975. 

The following December, when I saw Paul again, I told him about my experience in Jordan and how I felt that a fair solution was needed for the Palestinian people. I didn’t get very far. Paul was completely shocked by my statement. I received a long lecture about how all Arabs were ‘the enemy’ and that I was being naïve believing the stories of the Palestinians. I suggested to Paul that he visit Jordan and see for himself, but he brushed off my suggestion, saying that he would never set a foot in ‘enemy territory’. I understood how sensitive the subject was for Paul. From then on, I became very careful about what I said concerning Israel and the Middle East conflict and for the rest of my time in Jordan, and later Kuwait, mostly kept my observations about Arabs, and especially Palestinians, to myself.

During my initial trip to Jordan, I had not taken my running gear, but for my second trip, which happened at the end of November 1982, I decided to go for runs in the morning, before heading to Petra Trading’s office.

I was staying at the Sheraton, a few km outside the centre of town. It wasn’t easy to run in Amman. There weren’t many green spaces and I was mostly running by the road. It often happened that cars would drive close to me and the driver would shout out of the window: ‘Where are you running to?? Please stop, I am happy to drive you to wherever you have to go!’ 

On one of my morning runs I took a new road. I passed by an area that had high walls. I ran around it and discovered an entrance, ran through it and was soon in the middle of lush gardens and beautiful open spaces. This is my running spot, I said to myself, I’ve finally found it! I ran around the beautifully kept park and then saw a magnificent building at the end of an alley. Curious, I ran towards it. When I was a few meters from the building and before I could circle it to gain a closer look, I heard sirens blazing and about six armed guards started rushing towards me, pointing their guns. I stopped and raised my arms. The soldiers stopped running, but continued pointing their machine guns at me and yelling orders in Arabic. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand Arabic.’ ‘What are you doing here??’ One of them finally said. ‘I was just running around,’ I said. ‘Keep your hands up,’ another one yelled.

A few minutes later, a large army vehicle arrived, all sirens blazing. I was handcuffed, thrown into the back and whisked off to a prison about five km away. There, I was unceremoniously thrown into a very dark cell. I asked if I could call someone, but no one understood or cared to understand me, and I spent the next few hours just sitting on the ground of the cell and wondering what had happened.

A few hours later, the cell door opened and the usually affable Ali from Petra Trading, with a stern face, entered. He was flanked by two armed guards. ‘Have you lost your mind?’ he wanted to know. ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘How do you dare,’ he said, ‘to enter the royal palace like that!’

I had been running around the complex of buildings and gardens housing King Hussein and the royal family. Unluckily, I had run straight towards the building where the king happened to be sleeping and was very close to his bedroom when the guards had detained me. I had to explain several times that there was no ill intention on my part, that I was just running.

‘Running?’ the interrogation team said in chorus. ‘Running? But why and where were you running to? Jordan is not a third world country,’ one of them said, ‘if you’re in a hurry, we have taxis here, you know, and they know their way. You don’t need to run anywhere,’ I was told before they finally let me go. Ali received a stern lecture, warning him that if anything like this ever happened again, Petra Trading would be shut down and no P&G products would ever be allowed into Jordan again.

It was to be my last run in Jordan, and my last visit to Amman. My assignment to Jordan was changed in early January 1983, not because of my inauspicious visit to King Hussein’s palace, but because John Langdell left the company and P&G’s management thought it would be better if I worked on Kuwait. As for my palace adventure, I’m not sure if P&G ever heard about it, but if they did, it was never discussed with me. I guess that the matter was quietly put aside.