[..]
The crisis that forced the government to toughen its economic plan isn’t disconnected form Jordan’s foreign policy. Jordan had to ask for a $723 million loan from the International Monetary Fund after Saudi Arabia announced that it wouldn’t renew its age package.
In 2015, Jordan received Saudi aid to the tune of $473 million. This was reduced in 2017 to $165 million. This year Jordan was to receive $250 million, but it never arrived.
The reason is the two countries’ strong disagreement over relations with Qatar. The Saudis demanded that Jordan join the boycott of Qatar imposed last year by several Gulf states. Jordan initially agreed to reduce ties with Qatar, though not all of them. Ultimately it restored full relations.
Saudi pressure doesn’t go over well in Jordan, especially after Saudi Arabia announced that it wanted to revoke Jordan’s custodianship over the holy sites in Jerusalem, in contrast to the agreement reached in the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty.
The Saudis said their position hadn’t changed and they considered East Jerusalem to be Palestine’s capital, but they didn’t mention Jordan’s custodianship at the city’s holy sites. In the past, the Saudis asked Jordan to attack the Assad regime as part of the Arab coalition, and to join Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen. But Jordan rejected the request to attack in Syria.
This week, many days after the protests erupted in Jordan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman phoned King Abdullah to express his support. It’s unclear whether he committed any financial aid, and if so, under what conditions. Jordan angers the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, another important Jordanian donor, by not joining the struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Brotherhood is a legitimate political party in Jordan, one that takes part in elections. Outlawing it as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia could spark a political insurrection that would be hard to suppress.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been silent during the current Jordanian demonstrations; the labor unions warned it against dragging the protest into the ideological and religious realms. Israel isn’t mentioned in the Jordanian and wider Arab media as a factor fomenting the demonstrations, but the peace agreement was brought to parliament three months ago, possibly becoming a contentious issue before October.
That month, Jordan has to declare whether it will renew clauses in the peace agreement on Israel’s leasing of Jordanian land in the Arava region. The lease expires in 2019, a quarter-century after the signing of the peace treaty, and Jordanian legislators are increasingly calling for letting the lease expire and returning those lands to Jordan.
Will King Abdullah manage to overcome the current crisis as well, after extricating his kingdom from the danger of an Arab Spring-style revolution? As long as the protest revolves around specific issues like the tax law and dismissing the government, the king has done what’s needed. He has changed the government and asked the new prime minister to “re-examine” the tax law. Wage rises are also a well-known method that could calm things down.
Also, it will definitely help if the Saudis release several hundred million dollars and the Americans agree to give more grants. Unclear is whether the demonstrations will go further than demands for political reforms that include a transition to a constitutional monarchy that would reduce the king’s power.
These countries are pledging to give Jordan money because they can not afford to have it fail and become terror infested. What ever differences they may have with the King, in the middle east unless is viewed as the enemy, leaders tend to stick with the devil they know which in this case is the King.
No one wants to take the chance that the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS takeover Jordan.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/176869-180611-saudi-arabia-uae-kuwait-offer-2-5-bn-in-aid-for-jordan
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I didn’t say this was “tribal”. I recalled that the two countries had a very disruptive past, and that Arabs hold grudges for centuries, as have these two once adajcent families. .
This is obviously political, and I don’t know why you needed to point out the glaringly obvious.
This is obviously not tribal. Even if they weren’t both Hashemite regimes. They are on opposite sides of the new cold war. Iran plays the role that the Soviet Union played at one time and everybody is being forced to line up on one side or the other now that Trump is in charge in America and the Crown prince in Saudi Arabia. Right now Trump is trying to pry N. Korea away from Iran, if only a little. He went after Quatar too, at one point, but had to back off because of the U.S. base, which is being relocated. If Trump were only to use American control of the Jordanian army to install Zahran, that would truly be a game changer.
I think it is logical to recall that Arab families and tribes can and do hold feuds and grudges against one another for centuries, even though sometimes obscured by temporary alliances.
So here we have meetings between Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The Sauds have been the overlords of their territory in the Arabian Peninsula for centuries, -except for Mecca, and the Hejaz, along the coast. Mecca was reputedly ruled since Islam emerged, by direct descendants of Muhammed, At the time of WW1, it was in the person of Sherif Hussein bin Ali. For centuries irregular wars had been going on between the two families. In the mid 1920s, the Sauds finally defeated and chased out the Sherif-Emir, with 5,000 men against 500 reluctant warriors. Hussein in the meantime had become The KIng of Hejaz, by proclamation of British/French political meddling in the area.
The surviving line of the Hejaz royal family re-emerged as British subsidised rulers in what became known as the Emirate of Trans-Jordan, later, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. And this is the situation today. What tomorrow or next week or month holds, no one can tell.
Arab leaders to hold meeting with King Abdullah over Jordan crisis
By: Reuters
Sat, Jun. 9, 2018
CAIRO – 9 June 2018: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman will hold a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber al-Sabahand and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates on Sunday in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, a Saudi Royal Statement said early on Saturday.
The joint meeting will discuss “ways to support Jordan to emerge from the economic crisis it is going through”, the statement added.
— https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/51787/Arab-leaders-to-hold-meeting-with-King-Abdullah-over-Jordan
This looks like crunch time for King Abdullah. He would like to reach out his hand to the Turks (I picture this as something like holding out your hand to an unpredicatble bulldog); but Erdogan has –zippo– to offer Jordan economically.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, seems to have jumped into its pro-Trump political and economic gambit, feet first. The US economy is reviving, and there is upward pressure on the price of oil. This is good for the Saudis, whose riyal is pegged to the US strong dollar — a sharp contrast with floundering Jordan and its Turkish would-be partner.
Economically, it seems sensible that Jordan should join with the US, Israel, Egypt and the Saudi coalition; but politically, it is being pressured to join an incipient Turkish-PLO-Hizbullah-Qatari-Syrian-Iranian axis. If it opts for the latter choice, economic collapse and regional war may well be the result.
Meanwhile, all eyes are on Singapore. If Trump and Kim reach and accord, ANY accord, it will smack the Iranians right between the eyes.
I wonder about the Russians. Their dependence on oil and gas exports puts them economically in the same basket as Saudi Arabia. At the same time, President Trump has dangled a carrot in front of them, in the form of an invite to rejoin the G-8. Should they join, they would become part of a Western, NON-CHINESE bloc. That, in addition to warming US-N. Korean ties, would start making life very interesting for China’s President Xi.
It looks like a huge wave on the move, with Donald Trump riding the crest on a surfboard.
I wonder when Ted Belman, will weigh in on this article, as it pertains to a subject he is very interested in.
For my part, I notice that the situation in Jordan has a lot of parallels with Egypt in 2011. The civil commotion there, which led to the Obama government abandoning Hosni Mubarak to the Moslem Brotherhood mob, erupted because of a hike in bread prices. The eventual victor in Egypt then gained power by massive infusions of money from Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. Egypt and Jordan alike have longstanding peace treaties with Israel; but in both cases, policies toward Israel played no part in the revolution.
I hope and expect that President Trump will not follow Obama’s Egyptian example, and abandon the Jordanian leader. There is no guarantee that things will ultimately right themselves in Jordan, the way they did in Egypt; and there is a real danger of the Moslem Brotherhood coming to power. This would be an open invitation for TURKEY to intervene on behalf of the MB (Turkey’s ruling party is a Moslem Brotherhood affiliate). Wouldn’t that be a fine kettle of fish?
@ david melech:
Hi, David.
If the land in question is that mentioned in the following article,
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/31/world/israel-yields-land-to-jordan-in-keeping-with-peace-pact.html and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzofar
it amounts to about a square mile of farmland near Zofar in the Negev. That is FAR from the Temple Mount. The land is already de jure part of Jordan, so Jordan gains nothing by not extending the lease. In fact, they would lose out on the Israeli rent payments.
who’s the idiots who’s write and sign these agreements? A lease on historical JEWISH land (arava) the Temple Mount. What’s ours is ours and stays ours. You have enough of ours in eastern ISRAEL.