Jordan’s Islamists have been boosted by the war in Gaza

Editor’s note: Jordanian officials have unequivocally denied that King Abdullah’s daughter took part in the downing of drones attacking Israel. “Any reports or social media posts published on this issue are fabricated. Jordan has been the target of a systematic disinformation campaign. This is clearly part of that campaign.”

The mini-markets in Amman, Jordan’s capital, have banished Coca-Cola, a brand long associated with America, Israel’s closest ally. Local franchises of other American firms have printed leaflets stressing their support for the Palestinian cause, especially in Gaza. But such virtue-signalling hardly helps King Abdullah, who is awkwardly caught between growing popular support for Hamas and the peace treaty with Israel signed by his father, King Hussein, back in 1994.

Islamists have long been entrenched in Jordan under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch. Opinion polls conducted a month after Hamas’s attack on October 7th (and Israel’s retaliation) suggested that 66% of Jordanians approved of the group’s actions.

King Hussein had a stick-and-carrot approach to the Brotherhood, sometimes co-opting it as an ally against communism; in the 1990s he asked it to join a national-unity government. King Abdullah has been less keen to co-operate with it, though he has never outlawed it: in parliament it sits as the Islamic Action Front. However, he long ago kicked Hamas’s leadership out of Jordan for interfering in domestic affairs.

Since the wave of revolutions across the Arab world that began in 2011, he has weakened Jordan’s Islamists, partly by playing them off against each other. This reflects the age-old faultline between Jordanians of Palestinian heritage, who are at least half of the population, and the indigenous Bedouin, who are the bedrock of the Hashemite monarchy. Palestinian Jordanians tend to be more hardline.

But the war in Gaza has reunified the movement. The streets near the Israeli embassy have become a battleground between demonstrators and the security forces. Almost every night crowds chant the names of Yayha Sinwar and Muhammad Deif, the Hamas leaders in Gaza.

The king’s government has tried to outflank the Islamists. Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister, has repeatedly denounced Israel’s campaign as genocide. Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian origin, has castigated it on television. Jordan has taken a lead in trying to send aid to Gaza.

For many Jordanians this is not enough. “There is a genuine feeling that the country is selling out the Palestinians,” says a Western ambassador. Islamists prominent in the demonstrations have been stoking anger against Jordan’s intelligence services and even against the monarchy. Some Islamists in Jordan have called for Hamas’s external headquarters to be relocated to Jordan if it is kicked out of Qatar. The king’s men were particularly irked when Khaled Meshal, a Hamas figure based in Qatar, told the demonstrators by video that Jordan should unite behind Hamas in Gaza. Since March the regime has got tougher against the demonstrators, beating many of them up, arresting dozens and accusing them of getting foreign help, including from Iran, to topple the monarchy.

Israel has not helped by airing reports that Jordan helped defend it in April from a barrage of missiles and drones launched by Iran. Social-media reports that King Abdullah’s daughter, a fighter pilot, took part in downing some of the drones were rife. In the eyes of Jordan’s Islamists, that was another royal betrayal. ■

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