Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

In last week’s issue we suggested that not enough attention was being paid to Jordan, with the destabilizing combination of increasing pressure for political reform, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the long-term anxieties of native Jordanians that their privileged position will be usurped by Jordanians of Palestinian descent, who make up at least half the population but have very little political power.  Last week-end’s visit to Jordan by Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal has increased the tensions at a time when Palestinian-Israeli negotiations remain stalled.

Meshal is looking for a new home for the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas now that Damascus is no longer a safe-haven, and some within the organization hope that Jordan can provide that home.  On 1 November Jordan’s Prime Minister Awn al-Khasawinah had said that the expulsion of Meshal and his advisors from Jordan 12 years ago was a political mistake made illegally.  However, the attitude of some Jordanians to Meshal’s visit has been both hostile and instructive.

Writing in the Jordanian daily al-Arab al-Yawm on 30 January, one commentator warned that the Hamas leader’s visit to Amman in the capacity of head of a Palestinian movement “implies recognition, and at the highest level, that Khaled Meshal and his colleagues are both Jordanian citizens and Palestinian leaders at the same time, and this duality by extension also applies to Hamas as an organization”.  The commentator goes on to warn: “This is the key to a track that will complicate the Jordanian national equation in an extremely dangerous manner.”  The problem for this commentator is that Meshal needs to chose between his Jordanian citizenship and his membership of a Palestinian organization, “for combining the two means that Jordan is, after all, Palestine”.  One doesn’t have to buy-in to the logic of this argument to accept how it reflects deep-seated fears about the future of Jordan.

The reason these fears are surfacing so regularly at this time is because of the Arab Spring and the rising demand for genuine democracy.  Al-Arab al-Yawm’s commentator warned about “collusion between the official Jordanian/Palestinian parties, including Hamas, in resettling (and politically resettling) the Palestinians in Jordan in the light of the American/[Muslim] Brotherhood demand for an electoral system on a popular basis”.

The problems faced by the Jordanian regime of King Abdallah are not going to be solved by Israel, judging by the failure of the exploratory talks in Amman between Israel and the Palestinians to restart substantive peace negotiations.  Israel is showing no inclination to compromise on any of the key issues.  One of these is a continuing Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley, to which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recommitted this week.  He said on 30 January: “I will sign a permanent agreement only if it includes Israel’s remaining in the Jordan Valley.”  Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on the other hand, has said repeatedly that he would not agree to a single Israeli soldier remaining in a future Palestinian state.

Abbas held post-mortem talks at the beginning of this week with the Fateh Central Committee and with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, and he will continue these consultations with the Arab Follow-Up Committee in the Arab League’s headquarters next week.

Sources close to Fateh, the mainstream PLO faction, say that it is “inclined” to move towards an escalation of popular resistance in the West Bank.  This might, of course, suit Jordan very well as a means of diverting attention from its own Palestinian problem.