Prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and US president Bill Clinton congratulate Jordan’s King Hussein after his speech at the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty signing ceremony on October 26, 1994. Photo: Gary Hershorn/file photo.
By Tara Alami – Apr 13, 2025
In the early 1920s, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi entered into a verbal agreement to take custodianship of Al-Aqsa with the Palestinian Supreme Muslim Council. Custodianship of Al-Aqsa, and later all of occupied Jerusalem’s holy sites, became a legacy of the Hashemites, Jordan’s ruling family. As the designated keepers of these sacred sites, the Hashemite family becomes linked to certain mythos that guide local propaganda. King Abdullah I reportedly extinguished a fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1949.
That story may very well be true, but it begs the question of the devastating fires of war, betrayal, displacement and more – fires that Jordan’s ruling family have refused to extinguish over the past 76 years – and why.
King Abdullah I was assassinated two years later in Al-Aqsa compound by 21-year-old Mustafa Shukri Asho, a Palestinian tailor and previous member of Jaysh al-Jihad Al-Muqaddas, a Palestinian-Arab resistance faction formed during the 1936-1936 Revolution and active during the beginning of the Nakba.
King Abdullah I was the first ruler of post-independence Jordan. He was close to the British and reticently sent his troops – notably led by British generals – to fight Zionist militias during the beginning of the Nakba. Despite Jordan not yet being a member of the United Nations (UN), he was the only Arab leader to accept the 1947 UN plan for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an “Arab state,” reportedly attending covert meetings held by the Jewish Agency before the proposal of the plan and only allowing his troops to protect areas “designated” to Arabs per the plan in 1948. An expansionist statesman, the King immediately annexed the eastern part of Palestine, which falls west of Jordan, hence the term “West Bank.”
After his assassination, his son Talal ruled for only a year before being abdicated by a unanimous vote and sent to an asylum in Turkey. During his short time on the throne, King Talal developed a “liberalised” version of Jordan’s constitution, perhaps attempting to advance Jordan’s mode of production from a colonial mode of production to a truly “postcolonial” one. Occupied by neoliberal aid packages and foreign development projects, Jordan’s capitalist economy remains dependent on US-led imperialism; in fact, it can only survive as a structural byproduct of US-led imperialism.
King Hussein ruled Jordan from 1952 until 1999. His reign was long and dramatic. He strengthened relations with the US, receiving billions in development packages since the early ’50s for Jordanian healthcare, education, intelligence and surveillance, and defence. His relationship with Gamal Abdelnasser was strained, with an alleged coup attempt in 1957 by Nasserist and Arab nationalist Free Officers. 1967 also marked a historic setback, leading to a total military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, eastern Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Syrian Golan Heights. A year later, Jordanian troops joined Palestinian guerrillas in the Battle of Karameh, defeating Israeli forces on Jordanian soil and reviving dreams of Arab unity against a singular enemy. By 1970, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had amassed popular support across Jordan’s Palestinian population and the Jordanian opposition, taking over entire towns and cities and running extensive guerrilla training camps.
In June, Zionist forces attacked Irbid following a PLO operation. Pressured by the US, King Hussein recalled the troops he had deployed after the attack and signed a ceasefire agreement. The PLO viewed this as a betrayal, a sign of increasing cooperation with Zionists despite popular support for resistance. Indeed, this was the impending end of joint Palestinian-Jordanian fedai victories against Zionist forces. With the threat of escalation and civil unrest looming over his state and confrontations mounting between Jordan and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the King besieged and bombarded Palestinian refugee camps during Black September, killing at least 3500. Despite dissent and opposition from within the government and Jordanian masses, King Hussein installed Martial Law and deployed the Jordanian Armed Forces to finally expel thousands of Palestinians to Lebanon by 1971.
A strategic peacemaker, King Hussein allowed Palestinian political parties to maintain their offices in Jordan, though with severely limited, neutralised, and surveilled activities. He simultaneously built close relationships with Shimon Peres and Mossad director Danny Yatom, leading to Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with the Zionist state. Part of the treaty included “leasing” the Jordan Valley to Israelis for 25 years. The “lease,” or annexation agreement, stipulated that settler farmers could access and work the land without visas, in addition to buying private property.
In response to Mossad’s assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal in 1997, King Hussein leveraged the peace treaty to demand the release of Palestinian and Jordanian prisoners from Israeli dungeons. Among those released and repatriated to Gaza was Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas. A week before the assassination attempt and the King’s response, though, King Hussein had hosted Yatom and his family in Aqaba.
Following King Hussein’s death, King Abdullah II inherited the throne. He further strengthened relations with the US and its Zionist proxy, continuing his father’s legacy of cracking down on revolutionary struggle within Jordan, signing multibillion-dollar deals with the Zionist state to provide his citizens with resources stolen from Palestinians, and allowing the sale of “Israeli” merchandise in Jordanian stores.
Among those deals is the infamous 2014 15-year-long, 10-billion-dollar gas deal signed by Jordan’s state-owned National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) and Noble Energy. Two other Jordanian private companies, Arab Potash and Jordan Bromine Company, also signed deals with Noble Energy in 2014. Noble Energy, which has since merged with Chevron to become Chevron Mediterranean Ltd., has been selling and exporting stolen gas from Zionist-occupied Leviathan and Egyptian Zohr gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite popular opposition to the gas deal and national campaigns calling for an end to the deal, Jordan has not only repeatedly defended its position but also signed another water-for-energy agreement in 2021 and renewed it in 2024. Far from hyperbole, Jordanians are consuming water and energy stolen from Palestinians and sold by their coloniser, funding American corporations like Chevron and Total that mediate imperialist resource theft from the region. Now more than ever before, Jordan’s structural dependency on the Zionist state and the US – and the nefarious deals signed by the political elite at the expense of stifling popular sentiment – is crystal clear.
After the Jordan Valley lease agreement ended in 2019, King Abdullah told the parliament that Jordan plans to impose its “full sovereignty [on] every inch of those lands.” Settlers, however, still privately own land in Baqura. The Valley is effectively still occupied by Israeli settlers.
Since October 2023, Jordanian troops have been deployed to violently disperse protests and escalations at the Jordanian-Palestinian border. Journalists like Heba Abu-Taha were imprisoned for publishing investigative reports on the Jordanian elite’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza and Jordan’s land corridor with the occupation. In November 2023, Jordanian English teacher Sameer Nemrawi was also arrested for calling for mobilisations in support of Palestine and critiquing the state. He was charged with “spreading false news, targetting national security and community peace,” and “insulting a symbol of the state.” In April 2024 and October 2024, while Jordanian masses cheered on Iran’s retaliation, Jordan intercepted and shot down Iranian missiles and drones directed at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The question of Jordan’s custodianship of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem’s holy sites, and American approval of this arrangement, rests within this long and arduous history. Materially, this custodianship does little to prevent or protect from Zionist incursion and violence, nor does it defend Palestinians being harassed, assaulted, and detained when visiting these sites. It is, in its most generous iteration, a symbolic arrangement: a practical agreement to repair broken glass and replace burned carpets after the countless IOF incursions subside, but not a commitment to defending our most sacred sites from those incursions in the first place.
Trump Pledges to ‘Take, Not Buy’ Gaza in Meeting With Jordanian King
In my Amman high school, our British-imported history book had a chapter on the “Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Within this chapter, the caption under a picture of revolutionary Palestinian guerrillas called them “Palestinian terrorists.” We did not speak about this picture – or the chapter as a whole – rather, despite some minor unrest within the student body, we skipped it entirely, pretending it did not exist. We learned instead about American history.
Over a decade later, I wonder if that incident is a microcosm of the extent to which Palestinian-Jordanians and sympathetic Jordanians are willing to engage with glaring contradictions. Contemporary Jordanian national identity has arguably been formed through the othering of Palestinian refugees in Jordan and the forced assimilation of naturalised Palestinian Jordanians in exchange for a sense of political, social, and economic legitimacy in quotidian life. It is exclusionary by definition, a dialectical process of nation-making; to exist within Jordanian national identity – indeed to belong to this nation-state – requires a coerced political tranquillisation.
But now is the time to interrogate the Jordanian regime’s role in maintaining imperialist and Zionist hegemony in the region, to engage in this sobering reality in which we are active participants, not casual observers – and what it means to accept a precarious promise of national security and safety from an inherently expansionist imperialist proxy and its US sponsor.
It is Jordan’s most destitute, Palestinian refugees in the permanent limbo of statelessness and NGOisation, and assimilated Palestinians alienated from their struggle who pay the ultimate price of this trade-off. How long can an unsustainable, odious compromise of political freedom last? Who does Jordan’s interception of Iranian drones and missiles protect, if not the Zionist state and US hegemony?
At a time when an estimated 300,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by the state’s closest Western allies, as Jordanian lawyers, teachers, unionists, journalists, and youth are imprisoned, fined, and punished for protest and dissent beyond the confines of permissible speech, as the third and fourth generations of stateless Palestinian refugees are born into a stagnant existence in Jordan’s refugee camps, and as the cost of living crisis plagues Jordan’s most impoverished – is this fraught promise of national security worth the price?
Tara Alami is a Palestinian writer & researcher from occupied Jerusalem and occupied Yafa.
