By EHUD YA’ARIExtract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
The King of Jordan is tired of waiting! Almost ten years after booting the Hamas leadership far from Amman, King Abdullah is now opening up his doors to them. As usual, in Israel this dramatic development fell into the dark depths, behind the reportage on crimes and primaries. Over here, sensational events always receive more prominence than the truly important ones.
During the past few days, some in the Arab press have gone
so far as to raise unsubstantiated speculations regarding a "strategic alliance" between Jordan and Hamas. That, too, is a wild exaggeration, while what is really happening is obviously self-evident: Without the fanfare of official communiques or formal press releases, Jordan has essentially admitted that it has completely despaired of crushing the Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip or continuing to restrain it in the West Bank in the long run.
Let's not forget: The Jordanians are experts in dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood movement. In this respect, they have no competitors. Over the decades, Abdullah's father Hussein had turned the Jordanian branch of the Brotherhood into an amenable ally of the Hashemite crown, a sort of court religious opposition. It was Jordan that opened its arms to some of the leadership of the Brotherhood, when they fled from Nasser's nooses; one of them even became a minister in the Amman government. And, in the West Bank, Hamas - from its inception until today - a branch of the Jordanian organization, served as a shelter for the pro-Jordanian opposition to the PLO.
If the palace in Amman has reached the conclusion that over the past decade it has been waging a hopeless, losing battle to break the threatening, military format that Hamas has taken upon itself - then we should be paying serious attention to these assessments. Instead of continuing the boycott of Hamas, which began in 1999, instead of political disengagement and arrests of activists in the East Bank - the King has cautiously decided to adopt patterns of dialogue and the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Why? The answer provided by our Jordanian interlocutors is quite simple: The cease-fire in Gaza has convinced them that Israel is insecure, seeking to avoid a large military confrontation and choosing to strive for stability, but not decisiveness. On the other hand, Amman perceives Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and his men to be a group of weak bureaucrats who will talk forever about reinvigorating their Fatah movement ad nauseam, but will never make good on their promises. Moreover, the Jordanians, who are now training the new battalions of the Palestinian "Presidential Guard" (funded by the Americans and supervised by U.S. General Keith Dayton) know very well that salvation will not come from this direction.
And so the King was therefore left with no choice other than to take a preemptive step. He sent the powerful head of his general security services, General Muhammad Dhahabi, to negotiate directly with the representatives of Hamas (Muhammad Nazzal and Muhammad Nasr) about the terms of reconciliation. In the final stage, the head of the royal court, the efficient and energetic Bassem Awadallah joined the secret negotiations. Now it is only a matter of time until Khaled Mashaal will grace the Jordanians with a quasi-official visit.
Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
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