Caught between Israel and Iran, Jordan clings desperately to stability

After Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel on April 13, Jordan finds itself caught between the two enemies. Friday morning's suspected Israeli strikes in central Iran have intensified fear that the country could be dragged into an escalation against its will. Having been historically neutral in the two countries’ decades-old struggle, the Hashemite kingdom is now seeing its delicate balancing act threatened.

“Jordan is the main corridor to attack Israel from Iran, which has violated Jordan’s sovereignty and airspace,” said Jalal al Husseini, a researcher associated with the French Institute of the Near East in Jordan’s capital Amman. “Without even thinking of Israel, Jordan was keen to ensure that its airspace and sovereignty were respected.”

“The Iranians have their eyes on Jordan, they look at it as the weakest link in the region,” Ghaith al-Omari, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Times of Israel. “And the Jordanian military considers Iran to be the most prominent threat in the area, due to the presence of Iran-sponsored militias on the Syrian border and the eastern border . They are very concerned about the Iranian influence extending into the West Bank through Hamas.

Jordan was the second Arab country – after Egypt in 1978 – to recognise Israel, signing the Wadi Araba Treaty on October 26, 1994. The decision served as a means to secure its borders, with the kingdom having lost half of its territory – the West Bank – in the Six-Day War won by Israel in 1967. Jordan is also considered to be the guardian of East Jerusalem’s holy sites, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The mosque, the third-most sacred site in Islam, is built on the summit of what Jews call the Temple Mount, the holiest place in their religion. Jordan therefore works closely with Israel’s security and intelligence services, even if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has strained an already delicate relationship.

King Abdullah II, for his part, has been doing his best for more than six months to limit the risks of the conflict spreading across the region. The king has rejected all forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and maintains that the total siege of the enclave and Israel’s bloody bombing constitute a “war crime”. The monarch has also told US President Joe Biden that his country will not become "the theatre of a regional war".

پاکستان تازہ ترین خبریں, پاکستان عنوانات

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