In the forthcoming months King Abdullah II will face his toughest test, certainly his most difficult since he succeeded his father nearly thirteen years ago. Within the Kingdom and across three of its borders, unfolding developments carry far reaching implications for the region in general and Jordan’s stability in particular. Inside Jordan, the opposition – both that of the Muslim Brotherhood and that coming from the supposedly loyal southern tribes and towns – is sizzling.
According to some observers, the phoenix of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation seems to have risen from the ashes. Discussion of this issue has revived following the crisis in the Palestinian Authority which peaked with the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas. That crisis has deepened the Israeli-Palestinianimpasse because it manifested the Palestinians’ inability to advance toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and aroused some nostalgia for the days before the Palestinian national movement moved to...
Hamas victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council has set off a flurry of speculation about the possible implications for regional politics beyond the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Considering the longstanding historical ties between the populations of the two Banks of the Jordan River, the large Palestinian population in Jordan itself (more or less half of the total), and the fact that Jordan ruled the West Bank for nearly twenty years prior to the 1967 War, the election results might appear to have particularly negative...
The rise of the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a social and political force is the most important development in the modern Arab world. Beginning in the late 1970s, radical Islam directly affected Egypt and Jordan, neighbors and co-signatories of peace treaties with Israel. The radical Islamic movement in both these countries assumed two forms – non-violent, represented mainly by the Muslim Brotherhood, and violent, represented by various terrorist groups. Both groups shared the objective of replacing the existing regimes with...
