Tag: Jordan

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A TEST FOR KING ABDULLAH

The terrorists were freed on condition that they did not engage in either terrorism or incitement of terrorism subsequent to their release.

Ahlam Tamimi is a mass murdering monster.

And today she is living the good life, as a “journalist,” inciting jihad in Jordan under the protection of the King Abdullah.

On August 9, 2001, in the service of Hamas, Tamimi led a suicide bomber to the Sbarro Pizzeria in central Jerusalem. It was summer vacation. The streets were filled with children and parents.

Sbarro was filled with children and their parents.

Tamimi had scouted out the location of the bombing ahead of time. She chose Sbarro because it was a popular destination for families with young kids.

Tamimi brought the bomber to the restaurant. His bomb, hidden in a guitar case, weighed 5-10 kilos. It was surrounded by nails to puncture the flesh and internal organs of the victims, maximizing their pain and bodily damage.

Fifteen people, including seven young children and a pregnant woman were killed in the blast.

Another 130 were wounded. Chana Nachenberg, today 47, was 31 at the time. She was torn apart by the blast, only to survive, hospitalized in a vegetative state ever since.

Tamimi was sentenced to 16 consecutive life sentences and 15 more years in prison for her crime.

She was released in 2011 as part of the ransom deal Hamas coerced the government to accept to secure the freedom of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit. Schalit had been held hostage and incommunicado by Hamas in Gaza since he was abducted from Israel in 2006.

Tamimi, like the other thousand terrorists she was freed with, was not pardoned. Israel’s release was a conditional commutation. The terrorists were freed on condition that they did not engage in either terrorism or incitement of terrorism subsequent to their release.

Dozens of terrorists released under the Schalit ransom deal have been returned to prison to serve out the remainders of the terms over the past five years due to their violation of those conditions.

Immediately upon her release, Tamimi began violating the terms of her commutation by inciting terrorism.

She has been able to avoid returning to jail to serve out the remainder of her sentence because she decamped to Jordan.

From the safety of King Abdullah’s capital city Amman, Tamimi has worked as host of a television program on Hamas’s television station. Hamas television, which exists for the explicit purpose of inciting terrorism and indoctrinating viewers to become jihadists, operates openly in Jordan, as does Hamas.

Indeed, in 2011 King Abdullah decided to embrace the jihadist terrorist group that controls Gaza and is allied with Islamic State and Iran. Hamas leaders have frequently visited Jordan in recent years and the terrorist group is able to openly operate in the kingdom.

Since her release, Tamimi has given countless interviews and as traveled through much of the Arab world, celebrating her act of mass murder. She has said repeatedly that she would commit her children’s massacre again if she could.

Three of Tamimi’s victims were American citizens.

Malki Roth was 15 when she was killed. Shoshana Yehudit (Judy) Greenbaum was 31 and five months pregnant.

Nachenberg is also a US citizen.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice unsealed a 2013 indictment of Tamimi regarding her role in the murder of US citizens. The Justice Department officially requested that the government of Jordan extradite Tamimi to the US to face trial.

The US signed an extradition treaty with Jordan in 1995. But, as Malki Roth’s father Arnold Roth wrote last week in a blog post regarding the extradition request, since 1997, Jordan has claimed that the agreement was not ratified by the Jordanian parliament.

Based on this claim, two courts in Jordan, including the supreme court of appeals, rejected the US extradition request claiming that it would be unconstitutional to respect it.

Roth scoffed at the argument, noting that in Jordan, the notion of constitutionality is entirely arbitrary.

In his words, “In a monarchy where the king changes prime ministers and governments more often than some presidents change their suits, there’s an inherent problem with paying so much respectful attention to a constitution. Jordanian law, and what is legal and illegal depends on one individual. If [King Abdullah] wanted to extradite her [Tamimi], she would be in the US today.”

And this brings us to Abdullah, and what he wants.

Last week, this column discussed the hero’s welcome that Ahmad Dagamseh received when he returned home from prison. Dagamseh, a former Jordanian soldier, was released this month from Jordanian prison after serving a 20-year term for murdering seven Israeli schoolgirls at the so-called Island of Peace in the Jordan Valley in 1997.

After the column was published, Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian Jordanian ex-patriot and regime opponent who serves as the secretary general of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition wrote to me to highlight the fact that Dagamseh’s release was widely and exuberantly covered by media organs controlled by King Abdullah.

Zahran wrote that an official envoy of Jordan’s Interior Ministry Ghaleb Zohbi greeted Dagamseh at the prison upon his release and that Dagamseh was driven from jail to his village in a Mercedes flanked by a convoy of police cruisers.

Zahran added that the standard practice is for released prisoners to be taken home in a police wagon.

In a subsequent email exchange, Zahran set out his case for replacing the Hashemite minority regime with a Palestinian majority regime.

Zahran argued that the number of refugees in Jordan has been purposely inflated, and that the massive Palestinian majority in the population has not been significantly degraded by the refugee flows from Iraq and Syria over the past decade and a half.

According to his data, which he contends is supported by US embassy in Amman cables published by Wikileaks, there are 6.1 million Palestinians in Jordan. The kingdom is host to 750,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

Zahran accused King Abdullah of deliberately fanning the flames of antisemitism and anti-Americanism among the Jordanian public in order to make himself appear indispensable to Israel and the West.

Dagamseh’s celebrated release, like the regime’s protection of Tamimi and its willingness to permit her to continue to incite jihad against Israel from Amman are examples of this practice.

Abdullah’s notion, Zahran argues, persuasively, is that by giving a microphone to jihadists, Abdullah convinces Israel and the US that they cannot afford to allow anything to happen to him or to his minority regime.

So convinced, Israel and the US say nothing as Abdullah stacks his parliament with Muslim Brotherhood members. They voice no objection as Abdullah empowers Hamas, gives safe haven to terrorist murderers of Israelis and Americans, and rejects extradition requests on fictional constitutional grounds that he himself concocted.

Zahran, who seeks to replace the Hashemites with a Palestinian majority regime, which would allow Jordan to serve as the national home of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, argues that Jordan is a state run by the military and intelligence services, which themselves are controlled by the US military’s Central Command.

In his words, Jordanian forces cannot “relocate an armored vehicle” without first getting “permission from US Central Command.”

Zahran’s vision of a post-Hashemite Jordan is interesting. He envisions the US continuing to have overall control of Jordan’s security forces. The new regime would liberalize the economy and stop jihadist incitement while actually targeting jihadists rather than coddling them.

The regime for which he advocates would be dominated by the long-discriminated-against Palestinian majority. It would work with Israel to solve its conflict with the Palestinians. Zahran’s Jordan would restore Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria and give them voting rights in Jordan.

It is hard to know whether Zahran’s vision of Jordan is a viable one. Certainly it sounds a lot better than what we experience with Abdullah. And it deserves serious consideration.

By the same token, it is time for the US and Israel to test Abdullah, the moderate man we cannot do without.

The first test should be an ultimatum. Abdullah should be told that he must either extradite Tamimi to the US for trial or send her back to Israel to serve the remainder of her sentence. If he refuses, then either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump, or both, should meet publicly with Zahran to discuss his vision for the future of Jordan.

Originally Published on the Jerusalem Post.

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Change is Coming to Jordan Whether the King Likes It or Not

Despite Israel’s desire to protect the Hashemite regime, and stay out of messy Arab internal politics, it is now public knowledge that the Israeli intelligence establishment believes that Jordan’s king’s fall is imminent, and Israeli officials have been whispering that in private for a while, desperately discussing ways to save king and keep him in power. Nonetheless, a well-calculated, carefully-ushered and engineered change in Jordan could pose a huge opportunity for US, Israel, our Jordanian people, and all of those who want peace.

No, we’re not seeking a total regime change in Jordan, in which the state itself is turned into nothingness, leaving a gap for Islamists to jump in and take over. That was Obama’s style at best, because Obama did not know better, or at worst, because he wanted the Islamists to take over.

The change we desire for Jordan will be simple: Seeing the already irrelevant king leave by a small and peaceful revolution that is protected by the army. The US does not and need not interfere, this will be an internal Jordanian affair. All the US should do is offer the king a safe exit while Jordan’s army and strong intelligence keep the country intact and the Islamists at bay. This was the case when Egyptians took to the streets against the Muslim Brotherhood, deposed Morsi and the army protected the people, and the outcome: Serendipity, and more secular and peaceful Egypt, under a strong and wonderful man, President Sisi. Worth-noting here, that Jordan’s king does not control the army or Jordan’s intelligence; therefore, he will leave in peace, the US, on the other hand, finances, trains and influences our army and intelligence and could help both secular and patriotic organizations to usher in a moderate interim government for Jordan.

The US and the region could obtain breakthrough advantages from change in Jordan. The first is destroying Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood. (MB). Jordan’s MB gets its power from the regime – so if the regime falls, the MB falls. Jordan’s own government believes this. This is important because Jordan’s MB is not just another terror group. The global MB HQ is based in Amman and controls Hamas and the global MB as well, especially Qatar’s. The US intelligence agencies are aware of this fact. If Jordan’s army -under US help and guidance- ushers in a secular anti-MB leader (like Egypt’s Sisi), that would be a major blow to the MB and the Western globalists forces who support them such as Soros.

The second advantage is ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; if a Palestinian-Jordanian leader becomes the head of Jordan’s interim government, and then Jordan’s president; this means that Jordanians from all backgrounds will have a home, and that 2.1 million Palestinians in Israel, all holding Jordanian passports, could find a place to call their state.

Next, once the king is out and his theft of public money stops, Jordan will become economically prosperous and attractive for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank itself. Meanwhile, Israel and the US should continue to apply pressure on the corrupt and terroristic Palestinian Authority, gradually putting them out of the business of killing our people, Israelis, and even other PLO figures. Defusing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be major blow to the globalists who have blackmailed the world for decades with it, and who remain united against President Trump and his advisor, Jared Kushner’s, effort to usher in real peace.

Another advantage is that a successful regime change in Jordan will put the region’s radical regimes on notice, Qatar for example. Those will need to end their hostility to Israel and to stop promoting radical Islamism, otherwise face the same music King Abdullah has. This also shall empower moderate regimes, and champions of change, such as the very pragmatic Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Ben Salman, and UAE’s Crown Prince, Mohammad Ben Zayed.

America’s deep and positive influence of Jordan’s army and security agencies means the country will remain safe during the transition, and so will its borders with Israel. In fact, it is this influence that keeps Jordan’s borders with Israel safe, and not the absentee landlord king who spends most of his time in Europe, with documented travel of 30 percent of the year, not counting his year-long private vacations. Basically, he is irrelevant to everything and anything in Jordan.

One a new interim leadership is in power, the first thing it should do is banning all Islamist groups, just like Sisi of Egypt did, and this will mean they won’t even have a chance of running for any public office, let alone for president.

Today, such positive change in Jordan will be embraced by several Arab governments who no-longer see Israel as an enemy and in fact would love to see an end to the expensive and obstructive conflict.

This sought change is the very reason my political party and I are proudly taking part in the Jordan Option Conference in Jerusalem in October.

The sweet music of change is playing loud, and we all better be listening.

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Losing and Winning the Temple Mount

Israel ceded the Temple Mount to terrorists last week. But with a clear goal, we can get it back in short order and keep it perpetually for the good of all humanity.

Last week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet caved in to the demands of the PLO and its partners in Hamas, the Islamic Movement, Jordan, Iran and Turkey by agreeing to remove metal detectors and other security screening equipment from the Temple Mount. The equipment was installed last month in response to Palestinian incitement and acts of jihadist violence against Israelis, including the murder of two policemen, at Judaism’s holiest site.

After polls showed 77% of Israelis felt he and his cabinet members capitulated to terrorism, Netanyahu issued a statement thanking US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump’s senior negotiator Jason Greenblatt for their help in resolving the crisis.

The underlying message of Netanyahu’s statement was that he and his ministers folded like a cheap suit to our enemies’ demands, effectively ceding Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount to our enemies because Kushner and Greenblatt pressured them to do so.

But then this week, a congressional intern did us the favor of surreptitiously recording and leaking remarks Kushner made on the issue in off-record remarks to interns at the White House. Kushner’s remarks, which came in response to a question about his role in mediating the Palestinian conflict with Israel, were fairly detailed.

Regarding the Temple Mount crisis, Kushner justified Israel’s decision to place metal detectors at the entrance of the Temple Mount. In his words, following the murder of the policemen by terrorists armed with guns smuggled onto the Mount, “putting up metal detectors on the Temple Mount… is not an irrational thing to do.”

Kushner also emphasized several times the central role that Palestinian incitement played in fomenting the violence on the Temple Mount. He drew the logical conclusion that the same incitement which fomented the violence on the Temple Mount led to the massacre of the Saloman family in their home in Halamish two weeks ago.

Unlike all previous US mediators, Kushner didn’t blame “both sides” for causing the violence. He placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians who incited and committed murder.

In speaking this way, Kushner made clear that he isn’t the type of person who will apply bone-breaking pressure on Israel to capitulate to the demands of terrorist murderers. Certainly Netanyahu and his ministers are strong enough to withstand whatever pressure Kushner and Greenblatt may have brought to bear on them last week.

Indeed, as one administration official put it, “The idea that the same Netanyahu who withstood eight years of unrelenting pressure from the Obama administration crumpled under pressure from Kushner and Greenblatt is simply ridiculous.”

So if it wasn’t American pressure that convinced Netanyahu, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and their colleagues in the security cabinet to crumple, why did they do it?

All of their instincts were pointing them down the opposite path.

From a security standpoint, you don’t need to be a genius to understand that you don’t respond to an enemy on offense by surrendering your defenses.

More generally, Netanyahu and his ministers all know that just as releasing terrorists from prison guarantees more dead Israelis, so capitulating to the demands of terrorists ensures more dead Israelis.

But if the decision was wrong from a security standpoint, it was downright crazy from a political perspective. Among the 77% of Israelis who said the decision amounted to capitulation were doubtlessly 100% of Likud and Yisrael Beytenu voters and 85% of Kulanu voters. (Bayit Yehudi voters at least knew their cabinet representatives, Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, voted against the measure.)

According to the media, the cabinet was intimidated into surrendering by a doomsday scenario presented by the IDF and Shin Bet representatives at the cabinet meeting. Channel 2 reported that the IDF and Shin Bet warned the politicians that failure to capitulate would result in a security nightmare, whose details they laid out in a frightening PowerPoint slide.

The Palestinians would start a new terrorist war, they said.

Fatah’s Tanzim terrorists, who have been inactive in recent years, would renew their attacks, they warned.

The Palestinians would undermine Israel’s capacity to fight Hezbollah effectively in Lebanon, they insisted.

And finally, if Israel failed to capitulate, a “rare unity” of forces in the Islamic world stretching from Turkey to Iran would emerge, they hectored.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of these doomsday admonitions are debatable.

Take the issue of the “rare unity” from Iran to Turkey.

Since the Turks tried to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza seven years ago, unity has been the rule not the exception in Turkish-Iranian relations. Both supported the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called Arab Spring. Both supported Hamas in its 2014 war against Israel from Gaza. And today, both support Qatar against the Saudi- and Egyptian-led bloc of Sunni Arab states.

As for the Sunni Arabs, last week, the Saudis took the stunning step of siding with Israel on the metal detectors. The Saudis noted supportively that they installed metal detectors in Mecca and Medina.

As to the rest of the scenarios the security chiefs raised, they may or may not be true. But what is certainly true is that it isn’t the job of the security community to tell Israel’s leaders they have no choice but to surrender to aggression. It is their duty to formulate plans for defeating the aggressors, period.

And incidentally, ahead of Tisha Be’av, which fell this year on Monday night/Tuesday, unlike the IDF and the Shin Bet, the police did just that. Whereas the Shin Bet wanted to prohibit Jews from visiting the Temple Mount on the day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the police recognized it was its job to enable Jews to visit.

Rather than join the Shin Bet in recommending that Jews be barred from visiting the Temple Mount, the police provided the requisite protection and enabled more than 1,200 Jews to visit the site without incident.

The fact that Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich provided security when Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman said it couldn’t be done makes it hard to avoid the impression that the warnings the IDF and Shin Bet chiefs issued the security cabinet last week stemmed less from professional considerations than from ideological or political agendas.

This impression is strengthened when last week’s horror scenarios are seen in the context of the security establishment’s long history of blocking the implementation of government policies it was its duty to facilitate.

For instance, in 2010 and 2012, the commanders of the IDF and the Mossad reportedly refused to carry out Netanyahu’s order to prepare their forces to strike Iran’s nuclear installations.

And then-Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon’s move to blame Netanyahu when the Palestinians unleashed a terrorist offensive in 1996 after Netanyahu’s first government opened a second entrance to the tunnels below the Western Wall is etched in collective memory.

But for all their institutional and personal drawbacks, there is a limit to the amount of blame you can place on Israel’s security leadership for the cabinet’s decision to surrender to terrorists last week. After all, while it is true the IDF and Shin Bet commanders crossed the line, Netanyahu and his ministers let them cross it.

If Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman wanted to, they could easily have blunted the security brass’s push for capitulation. They certainly could have publicly criticized them for their defeatism rather than insinuate that the Americans made them capitulate.

So why haven’t Netanyahu and Liberman called them to order? Why doesn’t Netanyahu – at a minimum – publicly criticize his generals for their insubordination and contrast their spinelessness with Alsheich’s professional competence and determination? 

The answer is discouraging. Netanyahu allows himself and his cabinet members to be bullied by his generals because he doesn’t have a policy for securing Israeli sovereignty and advancing Israel’s national interests at the Temple Mount. Without a positive goal, he is reduced to treading water with the hope of keeping a lid on Muslim jihadists. And so his “policy” of bowing to his politically subversive generals bears a disquieting resemblance to George Orwell’s quip, “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

Perhaps the depressing aspect of all of this is that it isn’t hard to figure out what a reasonable, constructive policy would be for the Temple Mount.

As a liberal democracy, Israel has an interest, indeed a duty, to ensure that the holy site is open to all religions and that everyone has the right to freely worship on the Temple Mount. Given the fact that the Temple Mount is the holiest place in the world for Jews, Israel has a vital interest in securing its sovereign control over the area.

To secure its sovereignty and advance its clear interest in facilitating religious freedom for all, Israel’s policy goal is straightforward. The government should enable all faiths to worship freely at the site.

To secure this end, the government should announce its goal and make a good-faith effort to involve all relevant groups and governments, including the Palestinian Authority, Christian authorities, Jewish authorities, the Jordanian regime and others in achieving it. The government should also state outright that if the Palestinians opt instead to incite and commit acts of violence and terrorism from the Temple Mount, Israel will secure its goal and enable Jews and Christians to worship at the holy site unilaterally.

To date, the Temple Mount has been the Palestinians’ ace in the hole. They recycle the blood libel that Jews are endangering al-Aksa every time they feel they are losing ground in their never-ending war against Israel. And Israel inevitably capitulates.

But if Israel announces its policy is to secure religious freedom for all on the Temple Mount and makes a good-faith effort to advance it in conjunction with the Palestinians and all other relevant groups, it will set the conditions for taking that ace away.

If after it begins good-faith efforts to collectively advance the liberal, democratic goal of ensuring religious freedom for all at the holy site, the Palestinians again turn to violence, then the Islamic world, or parts of it, will be in a position to blame them when Israel unilaterally enables Jews and Christians to pray on the Temple Mount parallel to Muslim worshipers.

If Netanyahu and his ministers make this their goal then the IDF and the Shin Bet won’t be able to intimidate them into capitulation next time around. Instead, the leaders of the IDF, the Shin Bet and the Foreign Ministry will all know their jobs and know that if they fail to perform they will be replaced.

Israel ceded the Temple Mount to terrorists last week. But with a clear goal, we can get it back in short order and keep it perpetually for the good of all humanity.

Originally Published in the Jersualem Post.

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Is Oren Hazan Set to be the Next Israeli Prime Minister?

MK Oren Hazan, known for his bellicose nationalist views as well as a number of Knesset investigations was called back from a duel with his Jordanian counterpart Yahya Al-Saud  on the Allenby Bridge today. Prime Minister Netanyahu put cold water on the high stakes rumble that was set to disrupt and reignite the already heated situation between Israel and Jordan.

The Prime Minister’s Office said that Netanyahu’s chief of staff Yoav Horovitz had called Hazan and implored him not to go to the meeting. Hazan complied with the request.

“I came today ready for a meeting of peace but when the prime minister asks, I respect his request,” he told Israel Radio from the border.

From the beginning Al-Saud had called upon Hazan to meet him for the duel.

“The shoe of any Palestinian child is more honorable than this villain and his entity [country],” Saud said of Hazan, according to Jordanian reports, “and the shoe of any Arab and Muslim is better than him and his rogue entity, which has no origin and no religion.”

Despite the fizzled end to the high stakes fight, there is current underneath the whole incident. Hazan will most likely never be Prime Minister, but he has his pulse on the great majority of Israel. It is this silent majority that swept Bibi and Likud back into power when no one thought they had a chance and it is this silent majority that is tired of the back tracking on security and national pride that seems to have guided Netanyahu’s decision on removing the security measures on the Temple Mount.

The street in Israel is highly unpredictable. Yet, there are some aspects to it that a guy like Oren Hazan gets. Israelis like the “gever,” the real man.  Hazan may be unfitting to be Prime Minister, but he revealed something basic that Bibi Netanyahu is increasingly showing to have lost and that is a connection to real people on the street. Great rhetoric only goes so far in Israel. In times of confusion Israelis want action and that is what Hazan promises.

Bibi Netanyahu has succeeded in holding onto the reigns of power for a long time in Israel, but great speeches, political brinkmanship, and a great economy only work if you show that you get the common person.  The nation senses security is fragile.  They sense Israel’s national pride is being picked apart by half-nations.  In those moments economy does not matter, because one’s basic assumptions about life are called into question. Netanyahu is losing his base and that means his inevitability is no longer guaranteed.

As stated Hazan won’t become Prime Minister, but someone else who gets the street and can be appealing to a majority of Israelis will and when they do they should thank Oren Hazan for piercing a hole in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s armor.

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Is the Temple Mount the Fulcrum of Israel’s Break Up with Jordan?

It was never a happy marriage, but gone are the days between those euphoric moments in 1994 when Israel and Jordan first signed their peace treaty. Jordan, a made up country ruled by the minority Hashemite royal family from Saudi Arabia over which close to 80 percent of its citizens are second class Palestinians has steadily become unabashed about its in built anti-Semitism and anti-Israel modus operandi.

The trigger for the latest spate of anti-Israel vitriol is the fact that nearly 1,300 Jews ascended the Temple Mount on Tisha B’Av, Israel’s day of mourning for the destruction of the two Temples that rested there.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi was outraged that so many Jews took the time to walk quietly on the Temple Mount.

“The number of extremists who stormed Al-Aqsa today stands at a record number that has not been recorded since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967.” 

“The crisis is over but further and more dangerous crises will break out as a result of Israel’s continued provocation, if Israel will not uproot the source of the tension, if the occupation will not end and if East Jerusalem will not become the capital of an independent Palestine.”

Jordan has for years funded extremists while feigning to be moderate.  Their entire country is geared towards repressing the rights of their Palestinian majority while ensuring the Hashemite family and its bedouin backers remain in power. For Jordan, the Temple Mount is all it has. It has no historical claim to the area nor does it truly have the backing of its citizens.

Mordechai Kedar wrote the following in Midah:

In 1994, Israel signed a peace agreement with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In this agreement, Israel granted “special status” (Article 9) to the Jordanian government on the Temple Mount (‘Muslim Holy Shrines in Jerusalem’). This concession to the Jordanians was totally unnecessary since King Hussein needed peace with Israel more than Israel needed it with Jordan, and a peace agreement was achievable without it. Even ignoring this, what normal country grants another country ‘special status’ in its capital city and in the place most holy to its nation. This special status that recognizes a degree of Jordanian sovereignty on the Temple Mount has been disastrous for Israel and the devastating effects of this blunder have played themselves out once again in the wake of the latest terrorist attack on the Temple Mount, where two Israeli border policeman were killed.

The biggest mistake Israel has made with regard to Jordan is the ‘insurance policy’ it has given to the Hashemite Kingdom for the past 23 years under the baseless assumption that Jordan can deliver on its part.  This insurance policy is that Israel would protect the Hashemite Kingdom if in danger of being overthrown, and in turn, Jordan would serve as a buffer zone protecting Israel from the potential dangers threatening it from the east: Iraq falling apart, Iran and the Ayatollahs, ISIS and Al-Qaeda. As a result, the Hashemite Kingdom, whose origins are in Saudi Arabia, continues to rely on the minority Bedouin population to rule the majority Palestinian population, which thus prevents the natural process of Jordan becoming a country which is ruled by the Palestinian majority, or Jordan being split into a Palestinian and Bedouin state.

This policy of propping up a regime that clings to a false narrative has begun to unravel.  Jordan cannot exist as a country that has no real history and yet to cling to power by whipping up religious radicalism when necessary. The Temple Mount has become the focal point in the debate on who this Land actually belongs to. For Jordan, their presence on the Temple Mount is not only alien, but provocative and destructive.

With statements like Safadi’s the time is ticking until another deadly attack or a creeping play for more Jordanian control in the Old City.

 

What is the Israel’s Government Afraid Of?

Netanyahu has always pushed the far right of his coalition forward in order to hold onto the base of his party, while cutting deals to temper the very situation the right flank is pushed to set up.

In the case of the Temple Mount, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle. After years of tacit support for religious rights activists in encouraging Jews to ascend the Temple Mount, Bibi cannot simply pull them all back.  In fact, a majority of the country while not even religious support the rights of Jews to pray at their holiest site.

The murder of the two Druze policemen on the Temple Mount triggered a deep sense of collective duty to ensure the gates of Jewish prayer would be kept open and firmly established on the Temple Mount. This is a moment of reckoning concerning a policy that is not only discriminatory against Jews, but absurd in that it empowers a regime that is only at peace with Israel on paper.

The latest tension with Jordan over the Temple Mount is not only the initial stages of the end of the peace agreement signed in 1994, but one that has the potential to bring a fall to a regime in Jordan that is not only destructive to its own people, but one that is thwarting true reconciliation and peace in the region.