Will Jordan be the new Palestine?
Douglas Davis says that George W. Bush’s drive for global democracy may hand the Hashemite kingdom over to Hamas If unintended consequences are the progeny of political activism, then the fate of King Abdullah of Jordan is a lesson to us all. The West’s best friend in the Arab world is now the region’s most vulnerable monarch.
It was, after all, America’s war against Saddam Hussein that produced Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, al-Qa’eda’s main man in Iraq and a sworn enemy of the Hashemite throne in his native Jordan. And it was America’s drive to bring democracy to the Middle East that propelled the Palestinians to the polls and produced the Hamas victory. As Jordan’s strategic planners survey the terrain, they must be alarmed at the pincer of radical Islamism, fuelled by a resurgent Iran, which is closing in on them from east and west.
I discovered just how acute are Hashemite insecurities when I wrote an exposé for the Jerusalem Post on the deeply corrupt relationship between Jordan’s young monarch and Saddam’s family. Almost as soon as the paper hit the streets, my then editor received an urgent invitation for coffee from a top Mossad official. There was no question about the accuracy of the piece, whose central detail had been corroborated by senior officials in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. What concerned the Mossad official was that I was preparing a follow-up article. He implored my editor not to publish it. The original piece, he said, had already caused a crisis in the palace; a second piece could place an unbearable strain on Israel’s relations with Jordan. To his credit, my editor, unaware that I had no plans for a second piece, declined to set Mossad minds at ease.
Last week General Ya’ir Naveh stepped into the snake pit, calling into question the viability not only of the fragile kingdom but also, by extension, of the king himself. The difference was that Naveh is one of Israel’s most senior serving officers and privy to the thoughts of Israel’s intelligence analysts and policy-makers at the highest levels. He told a supposedly closed-door meeting at a Jerusalem think-tank, ‘Hamas is gathering strength and a dangerous axis, starting in Iran and continuing through Iraq and Jordan, is forming.’ He was, he said, ‘not sure there will be another king after Abdullah’. In other words, the Hashemite throne was listing badly. To Jordanian ears, such talk was tantamount to a diplomatic casus belli. When reports of the remarks appeared in the Israeli media, Amman responded with a rhetorical broadside, while a Jordanian diplomat was hastily wheeled out to warn Israel that relations would be downgraded unless the general was fired. By the end of the week, after fulsome apologies from Israel’s top political and military brass, diplomatic feathers were smoothed and Jordan announced that it had accepted Israel’s ‘clarifications’.
But unsaying things does not always make them untrue. It is precisely because Jordan’s royals are so sensitive to their vulnerability that they reacted so strongly to the intimations of their mortality. The reality in this unreal kingdom is that the desert sands are shifting under Abdullah’s fragile throne.
For years, Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, transformed Jordan’s weakness into a strength, making his country an asset to powerful allies, notably the United States and Israel, and attracting them to his side. But the son is not the father. Hussein had mastered the art of treading between the raindrops of Arab unity and Western interests; the Sandhurst-trained Abdullah has failed to master the skills. So, while the diplomatic crisis with Israel is over, the strategic crisis for Jordan remains a hot issue.
Nothing is guaranteed in the harsh world of geopolitics, but to a significant degree Israel remains Jordan’s best bet for survival, a role it assumed in 1970 when it acted to force the Syrians to halt their tank columns and abort an invasion of the kingdom. Now Israeli leaders regularly assuage Jordanian angst — as they did over the Naveh affair last week — with public assurances that the stability of the Hashemite throne represents a vital strategic interest for Israel.
In spite of Abdullah’s unsavoury links to Saddam and his sons, Jordan did serve as an effective buffer between Israel and Iraq while Saddam was in power (although its strategic value for Israel will have diminished in the post-Saddam environment). At the same time, Israel continues to be central to Jordan’s strategic interests, not only because it offers protection from predatory neighbours, but also because Israel is host to a Palestinian population that might otherwise overwhelm Jordan. The abiding nightmare of the royal family in Amman, and of Jordan’s privileged Bedouin minority, is that discontent in the West Bank and Gaza will spill across the Jordan river and inflame Jordan’s own Palestinian majority, which is estimated to constitute up to 80 per cent of its population. There is also anxiety in Jordan that instability in the Palestinian territories could trigger a mass exodus into Jordan, an event that would pose a substantial, perhaps fatal, challenge to Bedouin power and to the Hashemite throne itself.
That challenge is growing, and Abdullah could soon face the sternest test of his seven-year rule. From Iraq, the danger was heightened late last year by al-Qa’eda’s triple suicide bombings of hotels in Amman, coupled with lurid threats from alZarkawi against the Hashemite throne. From the Palestinian areas, the advent of Hamas, which carries the seeds of serious internecine strife within the Palestinian community, has accentuated Jordan’s uncertainties about the fate of the Palestinian territories and their occupants.
There is indeed much in common between the peoples of the West Bank and Jordan in terms of ethnicity, culture, religion, identity and social heritage. And there are close cross-border family links. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the West Bank was, as its name suggests, the west bank of Jordan, King Hussein was fond of telling visitors, ‘Jordan is Palestine, and Palestine is Jordan.’ Now, in an apparent attempt to keep the Palestinians where they are in the West Bank and Gaza, the Jordanians recently revived the idea of a confederation between the kingdom and a future Palestine. There is unlikely to be much enthusiasm about such a prospect, even among the pre-Hamas nationalists. The boot is on the other foot. Palestinian eyes are firmly fixed on Jordan — and not in a way that should encourage Abdullah to sleep soundly at night.
One leading Palestinian intellectual, a member of Yasser Arafat’s old negotiating team with Israel, told me with unshakeable confidence that Jordan would form part of the future Palestine. ‘Then,’ he said, rather bluntly, ‘the Hashemites can go back to Saudi Arabia where they came from.’ Jordan, in the view of many Palestinians, will simply be subsumed by their new state.
The tragedy for the Middle East is that democracy does not seem to be working. Elections have brought neither peace nor stability. On the contrary, where even limited democracy has been tried — from Egypt to Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan and, most of all, the Palestinian areas — it is the antiWestern, anti-democratic Islamists that have made the tectonic plates move. It would be a cruel irony if pro-Western, prodemocratic Jordan were to become the first victim of George W. Bush’s big idea.
Douglas Davis is a member of the Middle East Writers’ Group.
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