Abdullah's right royal question
Israel should heed the gloomy views expressed by the king of Jordan
King Abdullah will be meeting Barack Obama in Washington next week. Photograph: Ali Jarekji/Reuters
It's been a long time since Jordan has played a leading role in the Arab conflict with Israel: the 1994 peace treaty put an end to the state of war that had existed between the two countries since 1948 – the logical next step after King Hussein withdrew his claim to the West Bank in favour of the PLO. Still, what happens matters to Jordan – not least because the majority of its people are Palestinians. King Abdullah's latest interview is a timely reminder of how things look from Amman and what is at stake.
The Wall Street Journal headlined its story "a rebuke to Israel". It was, though, a fairly mild one and was couched more in sorrow than in anger. Abdullah said he had high hopes of Binyamin Netanyahu a year ago (really?) but was dismayed at recent tensions over East Jerusalem. These, he warned "could ignite Muslim frustration and anger, which we do not need today". Now he was "extremely sceptical" about the prospects for progress towards peace, a worrying characterisation given that he was "probably one of the more optimistic people you will meet in this part of the world".
The king will be meeting Barack Obama in Washington next week so there was a familiar message-sending ritual going on here: Jordan would dearly like the US finally to get tough with Israel about the terms and time-frame for negotiations with the Palestinians. And it may be that Obama, frustrated and angered by Netanyahu's stonewalling over settlements and Arab disappointment with his own Middle Eastern performance so far, is ready to do just that.
Now, Jordan may be a peripheral player but it does enjoy a special status with regard to Jerusalem, acknowledged in the 1994 treaty – and a reminder that the Hashemites have historic responsibilities to care for the holy places, just like their old rivals the House of Saud. Thus the king's warning last month that the city and especially the al-Aqsa mosque constituted "a red line" for the international community. Left unchecked, Netanyahu's policies risk transforming what has hitherto been a complex but diplomatically soluble nationalist struggle into an intractable religious conflict – clearly not a good idea.
Abdullah, like his father before him, has credit in the White House and was Obama's first Arab guest, the loyal and pliable representative of the "moderate" pro-western camp. The recent case involving Jordanian intelligence co-operation with the CIA to penetrate al-Qaida in Afghanistan provided a rare (though unhappy) glimpse of a discreet special relationship. US concerns about Israel, security and stability still trump any concerns about Jordanian democracy: Abdullah's style is authoritarian lite but getting worse, though he is still more popular personally than other Arab kings or the presidents of the increasingly dynastic secular republics.
And his warning that Jordanian-Israeli relations are at an all-time low is not an idle one. Last October, the 15th anniversary of the 1994 peace treaty, polling by a pro-Israeli organisation showed less than a quarter of Jordanians felt Israel had the right to exist while three-quarters thought Israel was "not necessarily here to stay as a permanent Jewish state". That was hardly surprising in the wake of the war on Gaza, which saw rare demonstrations in the streets of Amman. It was a similar story in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak inherited the first Arab peace treaty with Israel.
Abdullah, whose primary concern is the survival of his own regime, is right to worry about unhappy Palestinians and anything that bolsters Islamist groups either at home or in the region. (The Jordanians thought it was a terrible mistake to allow Hamas to take part in the 2006 Palestinian elections, though they later hedged their bets by reaching out to them.)
So it was striking that Abdullah chose to couch his argument to the US in terms not of justice for the Palestinians or of stability for Jordan but of Israel's own self-interest. "Wouldn't it be better today when you're in a stronger position, to make peace not only with your neighbours but with the whole Arab-Islamic world than kicking his problem down the road two or three years where your options become reduced?" he asked.
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