Jordan has a predominantly Palestinian population and the longest border with Israel of any country, but is rarely thought of as a threat to the Jewish state.
Despite some terrorism involving Jordan—including the murder of three people at the Allenby border crossing with Israel on Sept. 8—the Jordanian kingdom’s last military adventure against Israel ended in 1967, and in 1994 the two countries signed a peace accord.
Yet the unprecedented gains of a Muslim Brotherhood party in last week’s elections in Jordan demonstrated the potential for change in a dictatorship rife with anti-Israel hatred amid religious radicalization and ancient interethnic animosities.
In the Sept. 11 election, Jordan’s main opposition party, the Islamic Action Front, or IAF, received 22% of the vote—the largest share of any party and triple its previous performance, securing 31 out of 138 seats in parliament. Prime Minister Bisher al-Khasawneh has resigned and is to be replaced by Jaafar Hassan, now head of King Abdullah’s office and a former planning minister, Reuters reported Sunday.
The IAF’s success is widely attributed to its ideological proximity to Hamas, with which many voters feel solidarity amid Israel’s 11-month war against the terrorist group. Some analysts warn that this points to creeping religious radicalization amid a tribal rift in Jordan, which is ruled by the Hashemite royal family and its Bedouin allies but whose population mostly comprises a marginalized Palestinian majority.
At stake is a scenario where a destabilized Jordan allows Iran, which already controls Iraq, to add bordering Jordan to its list of satellite states, thereby gaining access to Israel. “If you think Gaza’s a problem, Jordan can be a far worse one, with rockets being launched from Amman,” Middle East analyst Pinchas Inbari, a researcher for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS.
Inbari warned that the result of the election represents not only the rise of a potentially destabilizing force but a weakening of the internal tribal alliance that allows the Hashemites to rule. Much of IAF’s power base is from the Howeitat Bedouin tribe in southern Jordan, to which the killer from the Sept. 8 attack belonged, Inbari noted. The Howeitat have effectively transferred their allegiance from the Hashemite-run establishment to the IAF opposition, he said.
“So we’re not only talking about the ruling coalition facing an external threat, such as the Palestinians or fundamentalism. We’re seeing cracks with the coalition that allow fundamentalism and pro-Palestinian sentiment, and that’s a far more worrisome development because it could portend a breakup, and a dangerous power vacuum,” said Inbari.
Daniel Pipes, a prominent Middle East analyst and the president of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum think tank, has a more sanguine approach to the election’s results.
He views the IAF’s gains as attributable to an “anti-Zionist” sentiment, as he termed it, following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on Oct. 7, when Hamas murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251. Thousands of people in Gaza have died in the war, and images of the human suffering in Gaza have outraged much of the Muslim world and beyond.
In March, fiery protests broke out against Israel in Amman, including an attempt to storm the Israeli embassy there.
Against this background, “the IAF was the vehicle to express anti-Zionism. So it’s not so much an Islamist vote as an anti-Israel vote,” said Pipes.
King Abdullah of Jordan, Pipes said, is a cautious leader who, long before the elections, was adept at coexisting with the Muslim Brotherhood in a modus vivendi in which his regime tolerated the movement as long as it avoided violence or power grabs. Even after the election, “that basic premise has remained.”
Should the IAF attempt to leverage its electoral gains to force the king to take a more hostile line on Israel, Pipes added, this prospect is limited by Jordan’s dependence on Israel for water, gas and other benefits.
Israel, which enjoys a massive water surplus thanks to its unrivaled desalination project, now produces most of its own drinking water and provides Jordan with 100 million cubic meters annually. That covers about 25% of Jordan’s chronic water shortfall.
Pipes recalled speaking about this with locals in Amman during his last visit there in 2017. “In the city, there’s a weekly water supply to tanks of individual buildings or homes. You better have your water tank, you better fill it up, or you won’t have any water,” he said.
If Israel didn’t supply that water, “then you’d find riots on the streets. The Israeli connection is vital economically and politically or in security intelligence terms,” he added.
This dependence and others are a strong deterrence to any governing power, and the Hashemite royal family especially, against rash moves against Israel, said Pipes.
The elections may mean more anti-Israel rhetoric from Jordanian officials, he added, though they were not mincing words before it, either.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi charged Israel with “genocide” in December over its actions in Gaza. King Abdullah accused Israel of committing a “war crime” there, later claiming, while ignoring Hamas’s atrocities, that the “root of the crisis” was Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Murad Adailah, the head of IAF, dedicated his party’s showing to the killer of three Israelis at Allenby, calling him a martyr. “He is a tremendous hero,” Adailah said of Maher al-Jazi, who was killed in the attack. “On election night, he made all Jordanians walk taller, he is the real winner,” said Adailah.
Inbari, the Israeli Middle East analyst, said Israel has an important role to play in bolstering the king’s position vis-a-vis the IAF if it desists from what Inbari called “silly actions” on the Temple Mount. A holy site to Jews and to Muslims, the Temple Mont is run by the Jordanian Waqf with permission from Israel to enforce policies that prohibit Jewish worship.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and other officials have visited the Temple Mount in recent months, triggering outrage throughout the Muslim world and in Jordan especially. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently forbade any such visits without his approval.
Inbari said that “nothing erodes the prestige of King Abdullah more effectively than the appearance of Israeli encroachments on the Temple Mount.”
On this issue, too, Pipes sounded less alarmed. When it comes to the anti-Israeli priorities of Jordanians, Pipes said he supposes that “Gaza is the overwhelmingly largest story and that Temple Mount is a rather small sideshow compared to it.”
The ban on Jewish worship on the Temple Mount “has become the status quo, but it’s a very strange situation, one that should not be,” he said. As for Jordan’s role there, he argued for opening up the position to the several other Muslim powers interested in controlling the site, in exchange for concessions there or beyond.
The Temple Mount offers “Israel a great benefit that it can bestow on the Islamic authority of its choosing—maybe Saudi Arabia, in exchange for diplomatic relations, maybe another party,” he added. But the case for allowing King Abdullah to run the site, Pipes said, “is rather weak at this point.”
