Tag: King Abdullah

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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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A TEST FOR KING ABDULLAH

Time to extradite a remorseless killer of American citizens.

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 by the Jerusalem Post. 

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Jordan at the Precipice

An otherwise promising future is hindered by the unsolved Palestinian problem

“We’re in dire straits.” So spoke Jordan’s King Abdullah a half-year ago. A just-completed week of intensive travels and discussions throughout Jordan finds no one disagreeing with that assessment. Jordan may no longer be hyper-vulnerable and under siege, as it was in decades past; but it does face possibly unprecedented problems.

Created out of thin air by Winston Churchill in 1921 to accommodate British imperial interests, the Emirate of Transjordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for almost a century has led a precarious existence. Particularly dangerous moments came in the 1967, when Pan-Arabist pressures led King Hussein (r. 1952-99) to make war on Israel and lose the West Bank; in 1970, when a Palestinian revolt nearly toppled him; and 1990-91, when pro-Saddam Hussein sentiments pushed him to join a hopeless and evil cause.

Today’s dangers are manifold. ISIS lurks in Syria and Iraq, just beyond the border, attractive to a small but real minority of Jordanians. The once-robust trade with those two countries has nearly collapsed – and with it, Jordan’s lucrative transit role. In a region bountiful in oil and gas, Jordan is one of the very few countries to have almost no petroleum resources. City-dwellers receive water just one day a week and country-dwellers often even less. Tourism has declined thanks to the Middle East’s notorious volatility. The king’s recent assertion of authority grates on those demanding more democracy.

The core issue of identity remains unresolved. As a country of massive and repeated immigration for over a hundred years (even exceeding the numbers going to Israel), it has received waves of Palestinians (in 1948-49, 1967, and 1990-91), Iraqis (2003), and Syrians (since 2011). The Palestinians, most estimates find, constitute a substantial majority of the country’s population, present the deepest division. It’s common to speak of “Jordanians” and “Palestinians” even though the latter are citizens and the grandchildren of citizens. As this suggests, the sense of being separate from and superior to the mostly tribal peoples of the East Bank has not diminished over time, and especially not when Palestinians have achieved economic success.

The country’s strengths are also formidable. Surrounded by crises, the population is realist and very wary of trouble. The king enjoys an undisputed position of authority. Intermarriages are eroding the historic division of the country between Palestinians and tribals – something the influx of Iraqis and Syrians further erodes. The population enjoys a high level of education. Jordan enjoys a good reputation around the world.

Then there’s Israel. “Where are the fruits of peace?” is a common refrain about Jordan’s 1994 treaty with Israel. Politicians and press may not say so, but the answer is blindingly obvious: whether it’s using Haifa as an alternative to the Syrian land route, the purchase of inexpensive water, or the provision of plentiful gas (which is already being delivered), Jordan benefits directly and substantially from its ties with Israel. Despite this, a perverse social pressure against “normalization” with Israel has grown over time, intimidating absolutely everyone and preventing relations with the Jewish state from reaching their potential.

One Jordanian asked me why Israelis accept being treated like a mistress. The answer is clear: because Jordan’s welfare ranks as a paramount Israeli priority, so successive governments accept, even if through gritted teeth, the calumnies and lies told about it in the press and on the streets. Though they are too polite to say so, they clearly wish the king would take hold of this issue and point to the benefits of peace.

On a personal note: since 2005, I have been advocating for “Jordan to the West Bank, Egypt to Gaza: The Three-State Solution” as a way to solve the Palestinian problem. Accordingly, I asked nearly all of my 15 interlocutors (who represented a wide range of viewpoints) about a return of Jordanian sovereignty to the West Bank. I regret to report that every one of them thunderingly rejected this idea. “Why,” they all seemed to say, “would we want that headache?” Accepting their negative verdict means Israel has no practical solution to its West Bank conundrum, so its reluctant and unwanted sovereignty over Palestinians will likely continue into the distant future.

Summing up the visit: Jordan has muddled through many crises, it may do so again, but the concatenation of current dangers pose an extraordinary challenge to Jordan and its many well-wishers. Will King Abdullah cope with those “dire straits”?

Originally Published in Washington Times.