AMMAN, Jordan — Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, made a rare and pointedly low-key visit to Jordan on Sunday, days after Hamas officials signaled that he had effectively abandoned the group’s base in Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Mr. Meshal and a delegation from Hamas’s political bureau, including his deputy, Mousa Abu Marzook, arrived in Amman with the crown prince of Qatar, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and met with the king of Jordan, Abdullah II.
It was the first official visit to Jordan by Hamas’s leader since the group’s former headquarters in Amman were shut down by the Jordanian government in 1999, forcing the group to relocate to Damascus. Moves toward reconciliation are a delicate issue for both sides.
Jordan wants to restore relations with Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza, because the group is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Islamist allies are forming new governments around the Arab world, and because Jordan wants to remain an influential go-between in the region, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Jordan does not want to damage its relationship with Hamas’s chief rival, President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, nor to anger Jordan’s allies, Israel and the United States, which consider Hamas a terrorist group.
Hamas, likewise, is eager to distance itself from the increasingly bloodstained government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but does not want to provoke Syria or its powerful political and financial patron, Iran.
After the Hamas delegation led by Mr. Meshal met with King Abdullah on Sunday, the royal palace issued a statement repeating Jordan’s nuanced positions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supporting a negotiated solution based on two states and citing “the importance of unity among the Palestinians groups.”
In turn, Mr. Meshal issued a statement welcoming the visit as a “good start” and saying that Hamas was mindful of Jordan’s “security and stability, as well as its interests.”
A wholesale return to Amman by Hamas does not appear to be on the table. Some analysts believe the group will disperse its leadership around the region: Mr. Meshal perhaps to Qatar, where he has a residence; Mr. Marzook to Egypt, where he can be closer to his family in Gaza; and other leaders to Amman or Beirut, or in Damascus — where they would remain individually.
Khaled Hroub of Cambridge University, who studies Islamist movements, said leaving Syria fit with a “paradigm shift” in Hamas — led by Mr. Meshal, over some resistance from hardliners in Gaza — away from an armed campaign and toward less violent popular resistance to Israel.
“They have decided for the time being that nonviolence is the strategy,” Dr. Hroub said of the Hamas leaders. “The whole nonviolent strategy has shown its effectiveness: the Arab Spring has proved this with the fall of strong governments in Egypt and Tunisia.
“With newly emerging governments in the post-Arab-Spring era, many of them Islamist, Hamas wants to be hosted and embraced and have offices in these countries, so they want to establish a distance from the old Hamas. This will make it easier for countries like Egypt and Tunisia to deal with them, without having problems with the Americans and the West.”
Dr. Hroub and others are not persuaded by reports that Mr. Meshal plans to step down from leadership of the political bureau, perhaps to move to a post at the Muslim Brotherhood or even in the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is now headed by Fatah, the more secular of the two main Palestinian factions.
Instead, they suggested that Mr. Meshal might be trying to prompt grass-roots appeals to stay on, which would renew his legitimacy after 16 years in the leadership role.
“I know the man very well,” said Labib Kamhawi, a Jordanian political analyst. “The fact that Khaled says, ‘I might not be running for office, blah blah,’ means he is running for office. He wants to see demonstrations in the streets — people asking for Khaled.”
Mr. Kamhawi noted that Mr. Meshal would have to stay on as head of Hamas if he wants to become the head of the Palestinian Authority.
In Jordan, which has two million registered Palestinian refugees, there is widespread admiration for Mr. Meshal, who survived an assassination attempt here in 1997. Palestinians interviewed in Amman said they were happy he was coming.
“Of course he will have more influence here, because there are more Palestinians here than in Syria,” said Mahdi Mahmoud, 26, a refugee from Jerusalem. Nadia Jamil, 52, said she saw him not as a party chief, but as a Palestinian leader. “Everybody loves him, he’s very dear to us,” she said. “He’s a distinguished figure, he has stature.”
In Israel, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, a former adviser to the defense ministry on Palestinian affairs, said it had become impossible for Hamas to remain based in Damascus while the Assad government, dominated by Syria’s Alawite Muslim minority, was killing fellow Sunni Arabs.
He said it made sense for Hamas to lower its profile at a time when its Islamist allies want to be seen in a better light in the West. He said the clearest sign of Hamas’s sensitivity to changing regional winds was that it had bowed to pressure last year from the new Egyptian government to release Gilad Shalit, a captive Israeli soldier it held for more than five years.
“The decision is to smother themselves in low profile,” General Harari said of Hamas, though he warned that the group would resume “the armed struggle, guns and bombs, when the time is right — and the time could be right within months.”
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