Uneasy lies the head

In the early 1960s, when Jordan's King Hussein was embattled by Nasser's regime in Egypt that was bent on the export of its revolutionary fervor, the young king published an autobiography entitled "Uneasy Lies the Head". Taking his cue from Shakespeare's King Henry IV ("Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown"), Hussein's characterization of his predicament could equally apply today to his son and heir, King Abdullah II. Egypt is once again the source of inspiration for revolutionary fervor. Now, however, the revolutionary spirit is being generated by the masses who seek to overthrow the regime built by Gamal Abdel Nasser and his successors, while Abdullah braces himself to face the fallout from Cairo in the streets of Amman.

Emboldened by the protest movements sweeping the Arab street from Tunisia to Cairo and as far afield as Yemen, demonstrators led by the Muslim Brotherhood have taken to Jordan's streets in recent days, demanding political reform and focusing on reduction of the power of the monarchy. The force and intensity of the protests in Jordan do not compare with the whirlwind of events that have shaken Egypt to the core, but they are surely cause for concern for Abdullah and his new government. This is especially true because of the unsavory combination of potentially destabilizing trends that have simultaneously come to fruition in Jordan in recent years.

Like other Arab states, Jordan faces structural economic difficulties that have resulted in high levels of unemployment and poverty, recently exacerbated by rising food and fuel prices. What makes matters worse from the regime's point of view is that in recent years the original Jordanians of the East Bank, the longstanding bedrock of the regime, have had reason to express serious misgivings about Jordan's domestic politics.

As of the 1970s, a functional cleavage came into being in Jordan whereby the original Jordanians governed and were the unchallenged masters of all spheres of political influence, while the Palestinians in the kingdom, about half (maybe more) of the entire population, dominated the economy and the private sector. When Jordan's economic troubles forced the government to reduce its spending, it was the original Jordanians who generally suffered the consequences more severely than their Palestinian compatriots, who were far less dependent on government largesse, jobs and jobbery.

Over the years, a militant and influential ultra-nationalist Jordanian trend has emerged in the kingdom devoted to the eradication of Palestinian influence and of real and perceived economic advantage. In the long run, it sought the return of as many Palestinians as possible from Jordan to a future state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and to Israel proper as well. Efforts by the king to introduce political reforms were often stymied by the conservative East Banker elite who feared that a more liberal regime would allow for the greater integration of Palestinians into the kingdom's politics, at their expense.

At the same time, Jordan's expectations from the peace with Israel have remained largely unfulfilled. That peace could not have been and was not a panacea for Jordan's structural economic difficulties. But, even more disturbing for the Jordanians, Israel and the Palestinians failed in their endeavor to transform the Oslo accords into a final agreement.

In the last 25 years or so, the Jordanians have steadily developed an obsessive fear of the "alternative homeland conspiracy" and a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. In their analysis, if no Palestinian state comes into being in the West Bank and Gaza, a confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians would culminate in the massive migration or expulsion of Palestinians eastwards across the river to Jordan. In this nightmare scenario, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, but the Jordanians, would end up as the great historical losers.

After the failure of the Camp David talks and the second Palestinian intifada, Jordanian trepidation of this nightmare scenario resurfaced as if the peace treaty with Israel had never been signed. In 2003, the US invasion of Iraq and the consequent perennial threat of Iraqi disintegration, coupled with growing Iranian influence in Iraq and in the region as a whole, severely compounded the Jordanians' sense of strategic suffocation. The Jordanians now found themselves sandwiched between two poles of regional instability, with the chaos of Iraq to the east and the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum to the west. This was the kind of regional predicament that they had certainly not bargained for after the peace with Israel, made infinitely worse today by the tremors shaking much of the Arab world.

One of the keys to the failure of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations was the inability of the parties to agree on the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees. Israel's position was stridently condemned by the Jordanians, who again saw the looming specter of final refugee resettlement in Jordan as the forerunner to the "alternative homeland" scenario. Not only was the Israeli position an obstacle to an agreement with Palestinians, they believed, but it threatened to permanently saddle Jordan with a huge Palestinian population. Thus, the positions of Jordan and Israel are diametrically opposed on an issue that both sides regard as truly existential, touching on the raw nerves of their collective being. It was the Jordanians and the Lebanese who were responsible for adding to the Arab Peace Initiative, in 2002 and again in 2007, the absolute "rejection of all forms of [refugee] resettlement" ("tawtin"), which made the initiative virtually impossible for Israel to accept.

In the past, Jordan and Israel's common fear of being overwhelmed by Palestinian demography led the two countries into covert strategic understandings. Today this shared fear is actually driving Jordan and Israel apart. Surveying an increasingly unstable Arab world from Amman and the implications any regional upheaval might have for Jordan's domestic politics, one may conclude that times for the Hashemite crown are presently "uneasy," to say the least.