Jordan could pay a steep price for Netanyahu's endless war on Gaza

David Hearst

The kingdom's delicate balancing act is at risk of crashing down, with potentially catastrophic regional implications

With each failed round of negotiations, it is becoming clearer to a global audience where the obstacle to a ceasefire in Gaza lies: in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brain.

It’s even clearer to Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, and David Barnea, the director of Mossad, who heads the Israeli negotiating team.

A ceasefire deal on the lines of US President Joe Biden’s statement and the ensuing UN resolution, close to the one Hamas has already approved, would do two things: bring down Netanyahu’s government and deprive him of the power to wage a permanent intermittent war. 

Even if, on paper, a ceasefire could allow him to resume the war at the end of the first phase of hostage and prisoner release, if Israel were to sabotage negotiations, in reality, such an opportunity would diminish after six weeks of peace. 

It is now emerging that the only way for Netanyahu to continue in power, and in freedom, is to keep Israel on the warpath, in a permanent low-level state of conflict on all of its borders. 

A state of war is his Iron Dome, his get-out-of-jail card from the reckoning he has yet to face for 7 October and an 11-month operation in Gaza that has patently failed to bring Hamas to its knees.

War is his protection from losing the crown to the young pretender, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and from a possible prison sentence on multiple charges of corruption.

With the incumbent, or indeed any future US president unable and unwilling to use real levers to curb Israel, such as cutting off its arms supply - the US has just approved another $20bn of arms - Netanyahu is being consistent. 

The only direction of travel is to the next front line, and already, the Gaza operation is being wound down as units are redeployed to the next war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. All other routes lead to perdition for Netanyahu.

But allowing this man to continue a conflict on five fronts indefinitely comes at a high price. 

Israel's genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza presented King Abdullah with a huge dilemma

The clearest and quickest way of counting the costs of allowing Netanyahu to continue in power can be seen in Jordan, a buffer zone that has soaked up refugees from decades of war in the region. 

The tired and cynical way of thinking about Jordan, is to say the kingdom makes a good living out of crisis, its hands permanently stretched out for foreign aid. 

That blithely assumes that the Hashemite kingdom will continue to operate no matter what mayhem its neighbours cook. This today is a big assumption. 

The western world should instead be asking itself: how would the region look if Jordan became a battleground again, as it was during its civil war with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1970?

Existential threat

The biggest threat to Jordan exists in Israeli heads. 

It’s the idea that “Jordan is Palestine”. There have been various versions of this, including the Allon Plan, named after Israeli politician Yigal Allon, which called for swathes of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel and for the rest to become part of Jordan. This plan appeals to the self-styled “moderates” on the Israeli political spectrum.

Likud has called for Israel to take all of the West Bank and simply declare Jordan as a Palestinian state.

More recently, former US President Donald Trump’s team raised the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation.

The crudest version of this plan entails direct threats to the Palestinian villages and towns of the occupied West Bank to leave or be burned out by settlers.

 The “Jordan option” never disappeared from Israeli discourse. In 2010, a year of relative peace and security for Israel, around half of the 120-member Knesset submitted a proposal for discussion on “two states for two peoples on both sides of the River Jordan” - meaning the mass expulsion of Palestinians to Jordan. 

A Knesset resolution passed just before Netanyahu’s latest visit to the US to outlaw a future Palestinian state was similarly specific in its language.

It read: “The Israeli Knesset opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state on any piece of land west of the Jordan River. The existence of a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel will pose an existential threat to the State of Israel and its citizens, will further extend the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict and be a source of destabilisation for the entire region.”

To any Jordanian, the words 'any piece of land west of the Jordan River' are brutally clear

The resolution was passed by 68 votes to nine, a majority including all members of the ruling coalition and most members of the opposition. 

To any Jordanian, the words “any piece of land west of the Jordan River” are brutally clear. It means the only place Israel will tolerate a Palestinian state will be in Jordan.

Not for nothing did Jordan’s King Abdullah pronounce this week that the region will “not accept having the region’s future held hostage to the policies of the extremist Israeli government”.

But his problems in keeping the loyalty of his people and the sovereignty of his kingdom intact have only just started.

Abdullah's high-wire act

Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza presented Abdullah with a huge dilemma. His response so far has been to swing wildly between two contradictory policies. This dangerous high-wire balancing act passes for stability in Jordan. 

The first and obvious response is to see what is happening in the occupied West Bank under the leadership of Ben Gvir as an existential threat to the kingdom. 

The arming of settlers, frequent attacks on Palestinian villages and towns, raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, and most recently Ben Gvir’s statement that Jewish prayer is allowed at the mosque, have only one purpose: to push as many Palestinians as will leave their homes eastwards.

Ben Gvir is deliberately humiliating the Hashemite kingdom’s custodianship of the holy sites in Jerusalem. 

This was the one internationally recognised duty that Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, insisted on keeping when he severed all legal and administrative ties to the West Bank in July 1988.

This has created a strong current of opinion in the royal court, which has been expressed by the foreign minister, a post that traditionally reflects the views of the king. And Ayman Safadi has not held back; he has continually sounded the alarm.

Safadi has said that an Israeli push for the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza could propel the region towards the abyss of a regional conflict. He called Israel a rogue state after the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

And after his Israeli counterpart, Foreign Minister Israel Katz, renewed his call to build a wall along the border with Jordan to prevent “smuggling” through the border, Safadi said: “Neither the fabricated allegations nor the lies spread by extremist Israeli officials, including those targeting Jordan, can hide the fact that Israel’s aggression on Gaza, its violations of international law, and its violation of the rights of the Palestinian people are the greatest threat to the security and stability of the region.”

Queen Rania, herself Palestinian, is the other leading voice of this current. She condemned mass hunger in Gaza, telling CNN it was “shameful”.

Blaming Iran

The opposite current in Jordan is to see all that is happening as the work of Iran. This is the view of Jordan’s all-powerful intelligence service, an organisation so extensive that it functions as a parallel government. Tutored by MI6, it is linked to Israeli and western intelligence services and to the Emirates, the newest member of the club.

The Jordanian mukhabarat is in perpetual fear of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, viewing the wild popularity of the military wing of Hamas on the streets of Jordan since 7 October as a national threat.

Consequently, it does everything in its power to suppress popular protests. Jordanian authorities recently extended the range and definition of a cybercrime to include “spreading fake news”, “provoking strife”, “threatening societal peace” and “contempt for religions”, a weapon used exclusively against pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Scores have been arrested under this provision, according to Human Rights Watch. 

Powers like this only provoke. There was outrage when Jordanian security forces assaulted and arrested Saraa al-Thahir and her mother simply for raising a banner that questioned the Hashemite guardianship over Al-Aqsa after raids on the mosque led by Ben Gvir.

The mukhabarat is only serving a foreign master that despises them.

Israel assumes a position of natural superiority over its allies in the Arab world, and needlessly embarrasses its secret backers with revelations in the Israeli media that betray the real level of economic and military cooperation that is going on. 

There is currently a shortage of tomatoes in Israel, because Turkey has stopped sending them as part of the boycott of trade over Gaza. Israel has also stopped the import of tomatoes from Jordan over fears that they could be infected with cholera.

Such incidents weaken the king and make life extremely difficult for those in Jordan who want to keep cooperating with Israel under the table

The Israeli announcement calling for a halt to tomatoes from Jordan came as a salutary reminder to Jordanians that the trade was still continuing. Agriculture Minister Khaled Hneifat had only just announced the export would be phased out to ensure a supply to local markets.

Similarly, Israel continues to drop Jordan in it by insisting its airforce has access to Jordanian airspace in the event of an attack of missiles and drones from Iran.

No sooner did Channel 12 quote an official claiming that Jordan would allow Israeli warplanes to use its airspace to foil the expected attack from Iran in response to Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran, than Jordanian authorities were forced to issue hot - and empty - denials.

The Jordanian state-owned Al-Mamlaka TV quoted an informed source who said the kingdom would not allow using its airspace “under any circumstances to any party, and won’t allow a military response for any belligerent party currently”.

Which of the two statements do Jordanians believe? The Israeli one, of course - because everyone knows that Jordan does not have the power to stop Israel or the US from using its airspace.

Such incidents weaken the king and make life extremely difficult for those in Jordan who want to keep cooperating with Israel under the table.

Israel rubs salt into this wound at every possible opportunity, even though it’s in Tel Aviv’s interests to keep quiet.

Porous border

All of this has an immediate consequence. Israel’s longest and traditionally most peaceful border is becoming more and more porous each week.

According to a report in Maariv, more than 4,000 people infiltrated the border with Israel in recent weeks - and Israeli authorities catch only a fraction of them.

The motives vary. They could be seeking jobs or running drugs. But some are also smuggling arms into the occupied West Bank.

Yitzhak Wasserlauf, the Israeli minister for the Negev and the Galilee, recently called for a plenary session of the government to discuss what he called “mass infiltration from Jordan”.

 According to a Maariv report, he added: “It’s not just about a demographic problem … It is a real threat to the integrity of the state of Israel. The open borders are used as a channel for smuggling weapons, drugs and dangerous materials, and allow our enemies to infiltrate our territory.”

So Israel’s response will be to build another wall and militarise the border. 

Israeli Army Radio recently reported that the army’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, was thinking of creating a new military division to be deployed for hundreds of kilometres along the Jordanian border.

When Hezbollah and Iran vowed to retaliate for the assassinations of Haniyeh and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, Safadi flew to Tehran to avoid a repeat of what happened over Jordan’s skies in April, when Israeli and US warplanes shot down drones before they could reach Israel. 

It was the first official visit by a Jordanian foreign minister to Iran in two decades, but in reality, his visit only demonstrated how difficult it is to maintain the current balance.

Not even the mukhabarat’s top news anchors are being listened to anymore when they use sectarian language against the Palestinian people by reminding them of what happened in 1970. The East Bankers who once used to soak up this rhetoric are looking to Hamas for leadership.

Israel has no power to stop this. It only has the power to bring war and conflict to an area much larger than Gaza and the West Bank.

Allow Netanyahu to continue on his current mission to settle the Palestinian issue by force, and the balancing act going on in Jordan will be impossible to maintain.

The crash will be felt far and wide.