Jordan’s King Abdullah is the newest member of the Iranian axis. On June 27, Abdullah met in Baghdad with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi. The three leaders signed a deal to transport Iraqi oil to Europe through Jordan and Egypt. As Arab affairs scholar Dr. Edy Cohen put it in the Jerusalem Post, “This agreement is King Abdullah’s ‘coming out of the closet’ with Iran. It’s now official: Jordan is allied with Iran because Iraq is actually under Iran’s control.”
Just as Iran controls Lebanon through its Shiite proxy army Hezbollah, so Iran controls Iraq through the Iraqi Shiite militias that operate as its proxies.
In parallel to the oil deal, Abdullah has ended the prohibition on Iranian tourism to Jordan. The prohibition was put in place shortly after the 1979 Khomeinist revolution. To drive home the seriousness of his intentions, Abdullah visited a Shiite shrine in southern Jordan. The shrine, located south of Amman, belongs to Islamic Prophet Muhammad’s cousin Jaffar Ibn Abu Taleb. It is considered a pilgrimage site for Shiite worshippers.
Jordanian officials estimate that a million Iranian tourists will soon begin pouring into Jordan, to the benefit of its flailing economy. Opening his kingdom to Shiite tourism isn’t the only Iranian outreach activity Abdullah is undertaking. He has also ended a longstanding ban on Shiite proselytization, opening Jordanian society to Iranian cultural and political subversion. Throughout the Sunni Arab world and indeed, throughout the world, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has focused massive resources on conversion to Shiism. Terror cells from Germany to Morocco to Nicaragua have been formed by individuals converted and radicalized by Iranian regime-sponsored Shiite preachers.
Abdullah’s embrace of Iran is no surprise. Over a decade ago, Abdullah faced a choice. On the one hand, the Obama administration had joined the Europeans and was seeking a rapprochement with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood as a means to realign the US alliance structure in the Middle East away from traditional US allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab states. Responding to Obama’s betrayal, Israel and the Sunnis, led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE discovered that they had a key common interest in containing Iran and surviving the 44th president’s administration. They began developing ties that were formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords.
Facing the pro-Iran axis of Democrats and Europeans on the one hand, and the anti-Iran axis of its neighbors on the other, Abdullah chose the former. And he stuck with the pro-Iranian axis during the Trump presidency. He had two reasons for behaving as he did. First, Trump’s policies were based on reality. And in reality, Jordan is not a significant regional player. It is a Western protectorate. It owes its military survival to the US and it owes its economic survival to Israel, which subsidizes the regime through below-cost electricity and water. Before Israel and the Gulf states discovered one another, Jordan was the bridge between them. Once they began working together directly, Jordan lost its position.
The second reason Jordan opposed the Israeli-Sunni Arab peace is that its allies – the Democrats, the Europeans, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli Left – viewed the Abraham Accords, (which effectively end the Arab conflict with Israel), as a massive threat to their political and strategic positions. The accords disprove the diplomatic doctrine shared by Israeli leftists, the PLO, the EU and the Democrats that peace between Israel and the Arabs goes through the Palestinians. In disproving the claim of Palestinian primacy, the accords took away their political leverage against Israel (or in the case of the Israeli Left and the Palestinians, their leverage against the Israeli Right).
Then there was Iran. Open economic and strategic ties between Israel and the Sunnis endanger the appeasement policies that the Biden administration is advancing with the Europeans towards Iran. The Israeli-Sunni alliance gives Israel an independent position as a regional power and diminishes the dependence of the Saudis and other Gulf states on US protection.
Abdullah’s current willingness to open Jordan to Iran and to link Jordan’s economy to Iran and its satrapies demonstrates that he remains loyal to his allies. His ties to Iran – which threatens to swallow Jordan just as it swallowed Syria and Lebanon – can be expected to grow deeper and more dangerous for Israel and the Gulf States as time goes on.
This brings us to Abdullah’s “secret” meeting with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett last Tuesday. The meeting was held in secret. When news of it was leaked on Thursday, Israel’s leftist media began collectively praising Bennett’s diplomatic skills. His predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu had cold relations with Abdullah due to the king’s decision to side with the pro-Iranian axis. The two leaders didn’t meet for years. Bennett, the media gushed, was succeeding where Netanyahu failed and shoring up Israel’s relations with its key partner in the Arab world.
Three aspects of Bennett’s meeting expose the ridiculousness of the praise and the danger his embrace of Abdullah poses to Israel’s core strategic interests. The problem is the fact that it was held in secret. Jordan’s economy is dependent on Israeli largesse. Were Israel to stop giving Jordan electricity and water below cost, chances would rise that the royal house would be overthrown. Abdullah owes his power to Israel.
The media claimed that the leak of the meeting embarrassed Abdullah. But actually, it embarrassed Israel. Rather than demand the respect due to his country. Bennett allowed an effective client to treat him – and through him Israel – like a mistress.
Even worse, Bennett paid up front for the national humiliation. Until last Tuesday’s diplomatic tryst, for years Israel rightly refused Abdullah’s demand that it increase the amount of water it supplies Jordan above the ridiculously generous quantities it agreed to provide the kingdom under the 1994 peace deal. Rather than maintain that policy, or at a minimum, demand something concrete in return, Bennett capitulated. In 2019, to show his anti-Israel bona fides, Abdullah, “the moderate,” breached the spirit of his kingdom’s peace treaty with Israel by refusing to renew Israel’s long-term lease of the disputed border areas at Tzofar and Naharayim. Bennett could have demanded their restoration in exchange for extra fresh water. But he didn’t. He asked for nothing.
The most alarming aspect of Bennett’s secret meeting with Abdullah is the regional context in which it took place. The meeting was held a week after Bennett’s senior coalition partner Foreign Minister Yair Lapid took a machete to Israel’s relations with the UAE during his visit to Abu Dhabi. As Globes newspaper reported last week, Lapid managed to anger the Emiratis in two ways. First, he blew off a meeting with the UAE’s most important businessmen. And second, and more alarmingly, he refused to disavow Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg’s intention to cancel Israel’s bilateral agreement with the UAE to transport oil from the Emirates to the states of the Eastern Mediterranean. The UAE rightly views the government’s position as a major breach in relations.
Oman’s announcement Sunday that it will not join the Abraham Accords is testament to the diplomatic and strategic damage the Bennett-Lapid government is causing Israel regionally and internationally. Netanyahu publicly visited Oman’s late Sultan Qaboos in Muscat in 2018 and the strategically situated sultanate was widely expected to be the next Arab state to normalize its relations with Israel.
Israel has two foreign policies it can follow. It can strengthen its relations with its partners in the Abraham Accords and so preserve and fortify its regional and global posture. Or it can work with Iran’s supporters – the Democrats, the Europeans, the PLO and Jordan.
It cannot do both.