• Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that it would take Iran about a year to actually develop a nuclear weapon—if it decided to. That decision, he added, is the United States’ red line. [Haaretz]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, having effectively abandoned Damascus, visited King Abdullah II in Amman, in a sign of reconciliation between estranged allies who both have reasons to be friends (but not too good friends) again. [NYT]

• The chatter in Israel is of early elections. The thinking is that Prime Minister Netanyahu will call them while his popularity is high and before the U.S. elections. [LAT]

• Russia is, like, absurdly good to the Assad regime. [NYT]

• An Israeli documentary about the legal system in the West Bank won the prize for best documentary at Sundance. [Haaretz]

It seems like Meshaal is backing away from the Hamas leadership less out of exhaustion than out of ambition. Nathan Thrall, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor who is a Jerusalem-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, answered my questions by email earlier this week.

How credible are these reports?
Highly credible, as the announcements have come from Hamas itself. One doesn’t really “run” for election as politburo head; there are no campaigns. The leader of the politburo is elected by Hamas’ senior decision-making body, the Shura Council, which is itself comprised of elected Hamas leaders. Although there remains a significant possibility that he will be chosen by the Shura Council despite announcing his intention to step down, the announcement doesn’t seem to be a ploy by Meshaal to be begged to lead for another four years.

How voluntary is his retirement?
Hamas’ internal elections are quite secret, so the deeper we get into the mechanics of them the less reliable the information we’re discussing. That said, it appears that Meshaal’s decision was not entirely voluntary.

His ambitions seem larger than to be the leader of Hamas. He speaks more and more as a leader of all Palestinians. Some suspected that he was pushing much harder than his colleagues for reconciliation with Fatah because the end-game for him was Hamas joining the Palestine Liberation Organization and his eventually becoming that organization’s chairman, which is to say, leader of the Palestinian people. These suspicions caused his behavior to come under extra scrutiny, as happened when the May 2011 signing ceremony for the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement was nearly derailed by a dispute over whether Meshaal would be given a seat at the podium beside Abbas. Some in Gaza saw the highly conciliatory speech he delivered in Cairo that day as pushing the boundaries of Hamas’ internal consensus. After meetings with Abbas in Cairo in November and December 2011, Meshaal stressed that Fatah and Hamas had agreed to a joint program of popular resistance, which many—especially Fatah spokesmen and leaders—interpreted to mean that Hamas was committing to a program of nonviolence. Though Hamas leaders on the outside, including Meshaal himself, were quick to clarify that they had not abandoned their right to armed resistance, they didn’t do so as loudly, clearly, or forcefully as they could have, and some in Gaza were unhappy with the resultant misperception that Hamas had radically changed its positions.

At the end of the day, Hamas is a popular movement, based in the West Bank and Gaza, with roots in local schools, mosques, welfare organizations, charities, and, since municipal and legislative elections in 2005 and 2006, government institutions. It is the inside leadership that must be more attentive to the base of Hamas supporters. The outside leadership gets a lot of publicity, but it is the inside leadership that has borne the heaviest burdens of the movement, from arrest to torture at the hands of the Palestinian Authority to the death of family members through assassination attempts by Israel. As one member of the inside leadership told me, “Hamas is not an office in Damascus.”

In discussing Meshaal’s decision, I would caution against using the word “retirement.” He is highly respected, experienced in diplomacy, charismatic, well-connected, and powerful within the movement. It seems likely he will continue to play a prominent role, whatever his official title.

It seems Meshaal’s decision would be connected to Hamas’ abandoning of Damascus in the midst of the Syrian civil war. Is Hamas’ next leader going to be more or less committed to staying in Damascus? If they leave, do they go to Cairo? Doha? Amman?
With the exception of a small group among the outside leadership, Hamas has all but left Damascus already. If Hamas’ outside leadership had been offered an alternative home in a state bordering the West Bank or Gaza—an alternative home in which they were permitted to conduct the business of the movement unobstructed—it’s quite likely they would have relocated by now. That said, unlike Hezbollah, Hamas has managed to avoid supporting the Syrian regime while continuing to express its gratitude for the years of support Assad had offered. Having avoided the mistakes of Hezbollah and other groups, Hamas may be able to stay in Damascus should Assad be replaced.

There is talk that Hamas, much like its cousins the Muslim Brotherhood, is genuinely reforming. Do you buy it? How does the Meshaal news affect your calculation? Does this make reconciliation with Fatah more or less likely?
There’s no doubt that Hamas has undergone significant changes in the last several years. In 2006, they participated in elections for a body many of its members deemed illegitimate because it was the product of the Oslo Accords. In 2007, they agreed with Fatah to form a national unity government that would respect the past agreements signed by the PLO, which include, of course, the recognition of Israel. The platform of that unity government affirmed the PLO chairman’s right to negotiate a final agreement with Israel and to bring such an agreement back to a referendum whose outcome Hamas has said it would respect. In Gaza, Hamas is arresting and prosecuting rocket launchers, albeit less completely than Israel would like. In Cairo in May 2011, Meshaal said that Abbas could take a year to continue pursuing negotiations with Israel. Today Hamas sits in a committee affiliated with the PLO while that organization negotiates with Israel. Hamas speaks loudly, albeit not exclusively, of a state on 1967 borders, though it should be noted that the difference here is one of emphasis, as Hamas has repeated this position many times since it was first uttered in the 1990s by Sheikh Yassin. And in fall 2011, Meshaal stressed his commitment to engage with Fatah on a joint strategy of so-called popular resistance.

These developments notwithstanding, Hamas leaders also say that though they are willing to engage for a defined period in popular resistance with Fatah, and though they are willing to embrace the creation of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, and though they were willing to form a government whose platform respected the past agreements of the PLO, including its recognition of Israel, they still retain, as members of a people under military occupation, a right to armed resistance; they still hold a long-term goal of liberating not just the territory Israel occupied in 1967 but also the remaining 78 percent of historic Palestine; and they still refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. It should be noted that Fatah too insists on its right to armed resistance.

By all accounts, Hamas makes its decisions collectively, so even if Meshaal had been pushing harder for reconciliation, he cannot make decisions of enormous consequence to the movement without the consent of the Shura council. His successor will be similarly constrained. If the successor is Musa Abu Marzouk, I don’t expect to see changes with respect to reconciliation; Abu Marzouk had been the primary negotiator for Hamas for quite some time. If the successor is from the Gaza leadership, I imagine reconciliation could become more difficult.

Who is his likely successor?
The two names most frequently discussed are Ismail Haniyeh, the Gaza-based Palestinian prime minister, and Marzouk, the deputy head of the politburo, who was an early follower of Hamas’ founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, created the politburo, and headed it from its inception until his arrest in the United States in 1995. The former is a skilled orator and fair mediator, is popular among female voters, and would be Hamas’ most viable candidate in a presidential election. The latter hails from Rafah [in Gaza], is respected by the Gaza leadership, and has a reputation for being one of Hamas’ leading strategists.

(Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Hamas Says That Its Political Leader Does Not Plan To Seek Re-election [NYT]
‘Mashaal Planning to Visit Gaza With Abbas’ [JPost]
Hamas Leader To Make Historic Visit to Jordan [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: Hamas Smartly Departing From Damascus

For the United States, this is about bolstering Jordan, one of only two countries that has a peace treaty with Israel (and Egypt’s future stance is unpredictable given that country’s impending Islamist parliament), a close Arab ally sitting on a crucial piece of territory and possessing ace intelligence services. for Jordan, this is about bolstering the Palestinian Authority, which it hopes can contain Hamas (who have brethren among anti-regime Islamists in Jordan) and bring a Palestinian state to fruition before talk grows about Palestinian-majority Jordan absorbing the West Bank. One thing Jordan is doing to help P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas consolidate his power is persecute his archrival within the Fatah Party, Muhammad Dahlan: upon the P.A.’s request, it stripped Dahlan of his assets, said to include companies together worth millions of dollars. The P.A. has accused Dahlan of corruption, which he denies.

Abdullah is starting to get antsy. On his fourth prime minister since a year ago, there are reports that he has begun to crack down violently on some dissent. Jordan provides more reason for the U.S. to pressure Israel to make concessions for the sake of the peace process—pressure that almost certainly won’t be forthcoming until at least November.

Remarks by President Obama and His Majesty King Abdullah of Jordan [White House]
Jordan’s Abdullah Sees Glimmer of Hope in Mideast Talks [WP]
Jordan Seizes Assets of Muhammad Dahlan [The National]
Earlier: Israeli-Palestinian ‘Meeting’ Today in Jordan

For this, as the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner explains, is really all about Jordan. King Abdullah II is on his fourth prime minister since the Arab Spring began, because he faces the dual threats of a native Islamist movement (kin to Hamas and Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood) and the majority of his subjects who are Palestinian (he is Hashemite). (Nicolas Pelham published an excellent primer on Abdullah II’s situation last month.) The king wants to be seen as central and important now that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who usually hosted such talks, is out of the picture; wants to empower the more moderate P.A. as compared to Hamas, whose success threatens him both insofar as it emboldens his homegrown Islamist movement and as it increases the chance of a Hamas-run West Bank sharing 60 miles of Jordan’s border; and wishes to advance a Palestinian state in the territories lest the notion that majority-Palestinian Jordan absorb all the Palestinians become more enticing.

So that’s Jordan. You could argue that Israel faces incentives to make this meeting lead to talks, on the theory that a re-elected President Obama will push it as never before, but more likely Prime Minister Netanyahu will wait to see if Obama is re-elected before considering new initiatives. For the same reason, the U.S. is likely to make small statements and take few new risks. The P.A. typically looks for big concessions—the thinking is that these would persuade the Palestinian people that its moderate path is more effective than Hamas’. But right now, the P.A. is also pursuing a more confrontational path, both by trying to establish a unity government with Hamas and, reportedly, going to the U.N. Security Council with complaints about Israeli settlements (it did this last year, too, and a resolution was vetoed by the U.S., as one certainly would be again) and referring Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza to the International Criminal Court. In fact, the P.A. had better not come away with anything big, as its rival and potential partner, Hamas, has called for a boycott of the talks. And Hamas has its own patrons: not only a prospective future democratically elected Egyptian government, which would have a heavy Muslim Brotherhood element, but also Prime Minister Erdogan’s Turkey, which over the weekend hosted the head of Hamas’ government in Gaza, who was able to tour the Mavi Marmara.

So, to sum up: all of the relevant players are hemmed in by their own domestic constituencies in ways that all but guarantee no real results and a continuation of the status quo. It must be the new year!

Palestinians and Israelis Will Talk This Week [NYT]
Erekat: Peace Talks Require Settlement Halt [Haaretz/Forward]
Palestinians Plan Diplomatic Steps to Put Israel Under ‘International Siege’ [Haaretz]
Erdogan to Haniyeh: Talks Must Include Hamas [Ynet]
Related: Jordan Starts to Shake [NY Books]
Earlier: Reconciliation 2.0

“Israel and Egypt have an interest to preserve peace and stability,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in response. He added that “nothing would be better for prosperity, for security, for peace,” than for Egypt to be democratic. Which is of course dubious! A democratic Egypt is very likely an Egypt run by the Brotherhood—indeed, the unrest of recent days has if anything strengthened the hand of the country’s oldest and most organized political party. Already, the Brotherhood has been able to throw its newfound weight around: through Egypt and Jordan (whose monarch is scared of his own revolt), it has blocked the demolition of a bridge in the Old City of Jerusalem. The point isn’t whether you agree that the bridge should not be removed (some allege the project is intended to ease settlers’ access to the Temple Mount). It’s that already popular Islamist movements in the Arab world have been able to affect Israeli policy.

Regionally, this has wider implications. The New York Times’ indefatigable Anthony Shadid published an essay yesterday taking stock of the region and noting that the Islamist complication, among others, means that the Arab Spring, which at various times over the past year has seemed so neatly tied up, is going to go through several more messy stages yet. Elections held Friday in Morocco saw the Islamist Justice and Development (yes, that is also the name of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s party) win the plurality of parliamentary seats. In Egypt, there are a number of ways this could all play out. The military council offered to immediately form a new government with one ex-prime minister; protesters rejected this and instead proposed a National Salvation Government to be helmed by Mohammed ElBaradei, the once and perhaps future presidential candidate.

Notably, the National Salvation suggestion was put forth by a coalition of Islamist and secular protesters, a sign that Egypt could at the least be moving toward a Turkey-style model of official but comparatively moderate and tolerant Islamism. (Still not great for Israel, if Turkey is any indication, but given that the alternative is something closer to the government of Gaza … .) Another promising notion is the truism that the surest way for an ideological movement to lose support is for it to gain power and be summarily introduced to the compromises that power necessitates. So far, Egypt’s Brotherhood has maintained a deliberate ambiguity about what exactly their vision of politically realized Islamism is—they know the second they are forced to articulate it, many of their supporters will disagree. Which is a good reminder of why democracy is indeed the worst form of government except for all the others.

Egypt’s Turmoil Shadows First Post-Mubarak Vote [NYT]
Analysis: Islamists Strong Ahead of Egypt Poll [Reuters/JPost]
Egypt’s Activists Unite Against Military [WSJ]
Post-Uprising, a New Battle [NYT]
Netanyahu Delays Demolition of Jerusalem Bridge Over Egypt, Jordan Warning [Haaretz]
Political Islam at a Crossroads [LAT]

• The United States, Canada, and Britain imposed further sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy industries yesterday, though they stopped short of completely isolating its crucial central bank. [NYT]

• Israel is still freezing the transfer of Palestinian Authority tax revenue in protest of the UNESCO membership. [Haaretz]

• In visiting the West Bank, Jordan’s King Abdullah meant to demonstrate that President Abbas is still the top Palestinian and that the Palestinians’ homeland is not Jordan. [NYT]

• Upholding a promise, Vice President Biden met with a handful of Jewish leaders, who lobbied him—almost certainly unsuccessfully—to lobby the president to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Much of the West Bank and Gaza is without cell phone and Internet access following what is said to have been an organized hack. [WP Blog Post]

After this punt return last night, many wondered if the New England Patriots’ Julian Edelman is Jewish. He is not. Great play, though.

• The explosion at the weapons depot/secret missile base outside Tehran has drawn the curtain back on Iran’s missile program. [NYT]

• King Abdullah’s hold over Jordan is shaky and getting shakier. [NYRB]

• Bernie Fine has denied the charges. [ESPN]

• Toward the end, Libyans accused Muammar Qaddafi of being a Jew, because it’s Libya. [Forward]

• A disabled Jewish Venezuelan marathoner drew the ire of anti-Semites, because it’s Venezuela. [Time Global Spin]

• New Bravo reality show Shahs of of Sunset is exactly what you think it is. [Hollywood Reporter]

• It would certainly be funny if intelligence was withheld from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. [AP/FP]

• The Chicago Bears placed rookie right tackle Gabe Carimi on injured reserved, ending his season. You’ll get ‘em next year! [ESPN]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Shalom Auslander has a new Showtime comedy coming out you should watch. [Deadline]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Etgar Keret has this contest you should do. [Something Out of Something]

• Macaro/oo/nis: a user’s guide. [Slate]

• The Quandt family, which owns BMW, has pledged $7 million to memorialize forced laborers who worked at the Quandt patriarch’s Nazi factory. [JTA]

Happy pre-Thanksgiving weekend!

• We know Gilad Shalit is slated to come home tomorrow, but it looks like Israeli-American Ilan Grapel, held by Egypt since June, will follow him soon. [Haaretz]

• Israel officially submitted plans to begin a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem; it was condemned by the Palestinian Authority and cautioned by the United States. [NYT]

• The Arab League is considering the fairly extraordinary, if largely inconsequential, step of expelling Syria over the months-long, brutal crackdown of the Assad regime. [WSJ]

• King Abdullah, of Jordan, fired much of his cabinet, giving himself (by my count) his third prime minister since the Arab Spring began. And it is one of the most stable countries in the region! [JPost]

• Much how Al Capone was brought down by tax evasion, for all the controversy over the planned Islamic center near Ground Zero, it may end up being felled by a dispute over $1.7 million in rent it allegedly owes Con Ed, the electrical utility. [NYT]

Palm fronds are like Douglas firs: crops that have value only when marketed to a particular group of people at a particular time of year. Known as lulavs, palm fronds are as important to observant Jews during Sukkot, which begins tonight at sunset, as Christmas trees are to Christians in December. The tightly furled spears of immature fronds are one of the four species traditionally shaken during the holiday, a mimic of ancient rituals performed by priests in the Temple.

Egypt, as it happens, is the largest supplier of lulavs in the world, shipping as many as 700,000 fronds to Israel and about as many to the United States and Europe every fall. So, the threat of a potentially holiday-wrecking shortfall sent distributors—and politicians—into a frenzy. “Let my lulavs go!” exclaimed a press release sent out by Rep. Howard Berman, a Los Angeles Democrat, who is facing a tight re-election battle in a newly drawn—and heavily Jewish—district.

This isn’t the first time Sukkot observers have had to cope with lulav drama. The last big scare was in 2005, when Egyptian authorities curtailed palm-frond exports over concerns for the country’s date crop. The result was a run on lulavs in New York’s Orthodox precincts, where prices for the lowest-end fronds shot up from $2 to $10. (And that was after Egypt agreed to release about 450,000 fronds to Israel and another 100,000 to the United States, once aggressive lobbying from Jewish officials prompted the State Department to get involved.) But earlier panics featured villains closer to home: In 1999, Israeli authorities filed a complaint against an Arab-Jewish cartel suspected of cornering the market on Egyptian output, driving the price up. In 1986, American Jews were stymied by U.S. regulators who impounded a crucial 90,000-frond shipment from Tunisia, leaving them to rot in a warehouse for want of a proper certificate of origin.

This year’s episode has struck many as evidence of a structural problem in the lulav market that can’t be ignored any longer. “Why would anyone rely on a single source of anything?” asked David Wiseman, a Dallas-based distributor of Sukkot sets known as arba minim, which include an etrog, or citron, and myrtle and willow branches alongside palm fronds. “It’s crazy.”

The trouble for buyers like Wiseman is figuring out where else to go. Egypt is the world’s leading producer of dates, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan—all unlikely suppliers of lulavs for anyone looking to diversify. Israel ranks No. 17, producing a mere 22,000 metric tons to Egypt’s 1.3 million. Jordan, which helps boost Israel’s supply, doesn’t even rate in the top 20, according to the most recent U.N. statistics. Kosher lulavs, which must be straight and have unsplit green leaves, can only be obtained from particular varieties of palms that, today, are under relatively limited cultivation. And American demand, by all accounts, is steadily rising, from an estimated 270,000 fronds in the mid-1980s to at least 500,000 today. “The market has exploded,” said Yitzchok Summers, the rabbi at Anshe Emes, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. “When I was growing up here, there were a couple of places you went to get your lulav and etrog, but last year when you went down Pico Boulevard there were kids sitting outside the Judaica stores who would do drive-up service.”

Israeli officials announced last week that they expected to satisfy domestic demand for about 650,000 lulavs, in part thanks to new preservatives that allow for a longer harvest window in Israeli date groves. Jordan provided a buffer shipment of about 110,000 palm fronds—including, traders told Ha’aretz, some contraband Egyptian lulavs. Special import licenses were also granted to Spanish growers, though Hamas nixed efforts to open up imports of 50,000 fronds from Gaza.

But everyone seems to agree that Israel’s patchwork solution has strained global supply—leaving American Jews to figure out their own plan for replacing the high-quality, low-price lulavs from the Sinai. The obvious solution, according to Summers and Wiseman, is to buy domestic— specifically, from California and Arizona, the top two date-producing states. Late last week, Wiseman said he was still waiting on a cut of the Egyptian supply, but he’s posted a notice on his website announcing that he is only selling California lulavs this year and for the foreseeable future. “As far as we know,” the announcement read, “we are the first major dealer to make this decision, and we have received the overwhelming support of our customers.”

The majority of dates produced in the United States are deglet noor or medjool, whose fronds tend to be too weak to meet halakhic standards. But Wiseman estimates there are enough trees of sturdier varieties in California—including the dayri palm, whose tight fronds command premium prices—to produce as many as 40,000 lulavs each year. “I got California ones last year because I wanted to wean people off Egyptian lulavs,” Wiseman told me. “But there is no infrastructure. The trees can produce, but you need a system of cutting them, packing them, sorting them, and distributing them.”

Calls to growers in the Coachella Valley, in the desert east of Los Angeles, suggested the first hurdle is actually explaining to growers what a lulav is. (“Are you sure? Palm fronds are really big,” said a woman who answered the phone at Brown Date Garden, when she heard about the ritual lulav-shaking.) Even among those who know about Sukkot, there is hesitation about getting into the lulav business. “We’ve been approached in the past and have never engaged,” said Albert Keck, the president of Hadley Farms, one of the best-known growers in Southern California. “I cringe at cutting off the central terminal of a young palm.”

That hasn’t stopped smaller growers from getting into the market. Arthur Futterman, a small grower in Indio, Calif., who was raised in a Reform Jewish household but is now an evangelical Christian, has worked for the past six years with dealers from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, which does not buy Israeli products. “At first I was helping them locate farmers around the desert who had dayris and helping them do their packing and shipping,” Futterman explained this week. It was slow work: Each grower who agreed to participate had fewer than a dozen of the high-end dayri palms. Futterman said most growers limit cuttings to four fronds per tree. “It’s like cutting your fingernail to the quick,” he said. “You can do it a little, but not too much.”

Now Futterman has leased several acres to brothers Shulem and Schmiel Ekstein, Satmar dealers who have planted several dozen dayri palms exclusively for Sukkot. Those trees, however, won’t mature for several years. In the meantime, Futterman said, there is an opportunity for people with less exacting interpretations of halakha. “The minutiae the Eksteins want are not present in most varieties—they will look at the last little leaf to make sure it’s sealed closed,” Futterman said. “But in my mind, you can take any center frond that’s not opened up, like a rosebud.” And, he went on, “if that’s your understanding of closed, then there are thousands here.”

Which is how Rabbi Summers of Anshe Emes has managed to satisfy his congregation’s needs this year. “I work through someone who said there was a big problem because of Egypt, but he was able to secure lulavim from Palm Springs,” Summers said last week. Still, Summers had a Plan B: “I have two date palms in front of my house, and you can see the lulav in the middle. It’s kind of high up, but I was thinking, this year, if I’m really stuck, I can always just get a ladder.”

• Among Palestinians, the statehood movement has generated much enthusiasm, despite knowledge of the risks. [NYT]

• Jewish vote Israel N.Y.-09 Republicans Obama. More at 10. [NYT]

• Israel cleared out its embassy in Amman, Jordan—its only other one in an Arab country—in advance of expected anti-Israel protests there. [AP/WP]

• Though they had originally threatened to, Arab states now promise not to bring up Israel’s “alleged” nuclear weapons program at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting next week. [AP/WP]

• U.S. ambassador Robert Ford attended the funeral of a Syrian human rights activist who had been detained and then killed. [AP/NYT]

Yet most signs point to its going forward. Israel is readying for General Assembly approval—they know there’s no way for them stop it—anticipating potential challenges both legal and physical. Indeed, in addition to West Bank reinforcements, the IDF is actually training settler security teams. That said, it should be noted that the P.A. strategy is to refrain from violence. Here’s hoping.

One gets the sickening sense that, for two years or so, Palestinian statehood at the U.N. was a bluff: not a bad one, but one that has been called; and now it is in no one’s interests more than the bluffer’s to fold.

Jordan Urges Abbas to Rethink U.N. Bid [YNet]
Are Palestinians Walking Into a Trap at the U.N.? [+972]
The Day After Palestine [Ynet]
Israel Braces for Palestinian Statehood at the U.N. [WP]
Israel Intensifies Training of Settler Security Teams [NYT]
Earlier: Is the P.A. Statehood Drive Good for the P.A.?

As Uzi Landau, Israel’s interior minister, noted, the most important repercussions of the disruption are not strictly economic—Israel can get its electricity elsewhere in the short term, and in the longer term may, with the development of offshore natural gas fields, become a net energy exporter. Rather, the most important consequence of the continued disruptions in supply—as well as questioning over East Mediterranean Gas’s long-term deal with Israel, which allegedly set the price of gas at a below-market rate—is that energy deals between Egypt and Israel provide key reinforcement the two countries’ chilly but very real peace, and with longtime president Hosni Mubarak gone and elections to be held as soon as September, that peace needs all the buttressing it can get. “This was an anchor, perhaps the most important element of our peace agreement with Egypt from an economic perspective and it is slowly, slowly eroding,” Landau said.

And that’s just Israel. What of Jordan—the seemingly last pillar of (relative) stability in the Arab world, and the only other Arab country to have a peace treaty with Israel? It needs energy, too, and if it cannot get energy from Egypt, it may need to get it from the east—and is reportedly considering striking a deal with Iran. Which would be bad for pretty much everyone except Iran and its proxies, which apparently now include forces in Egypt powerful enough to disrupt the country’s lucrative energy exporting business.

‘Egyptian Economic Ties Eroding After Pipeline Blast’ [JPost]
Officials Say Gunmen Blew Up Terminal of Egyptian Gas Pipeline to Israel, Jordan [AP/WP]
Egypt Gas Disruptions Lead Jordan to Consider Iranian Alternative [Ahram]
Earlier: Sabotage Foreshadows Israel’s Energy Future
Israel-Lebanon Sea Border Dispute Heats Up

Now Jack O’Connell, the CIA’s Amman station chief from 1963 to 1971, writes in his wide-ranging and loosely argued new memoir, King’s Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, that the reverse is actually true: It was Hussein who alerted Nasser to the impending attacks, in two separate cables, the night before the Israeli Air Force struck. And how did Hussein get this intelligence? O’Connell knows: “I told him.”

It’s an astonishing claim. At the time, the United States was trying desperately not to get involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, mainly to avoid opening a new front against the Soviets at a time when U.S. forces were already fully engaged in Vietnam. The Israelis had sent a string of envoys to Washington in hopes of securing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s backing, and they’d all come away with nothing more than a tacit understanding that Johnson wouldn’t stop them from launching a war. Yet on June 4, after the U.S. embassy in Amman got word from the U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv that the Israelis planned to start demolishing Egypt’s airfields at 8 a.m. the following day, the CIA man decided, on his own, to relay the information to a foreign head of state. “I was not authorized to tell him any of this,” O’Connell admits. “I didn’t report this to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

O’Connell wound up retiring from the CIA to go into private practice as Jordan’s lawyer in Washington, and his book is a courtier’s account—written, he says, to fill the gaps in the historical record left by King Hussein’s failure to complete a memoir before his death in 1999. It’s doubtful that, if Hussein had lived to write his own version, he would have included the hottest anecdote in O’Connell’s book: During a weekend retreat at the beachfront Jordanian resort of Aqaba in the summer 1967, shortly after the war, Tyrone Power’s ex-wife laced Hussein’s drink with LSD in a desperate attempt to get the married 31-year-old king in bed with her teenage daughter. “The way his aides described it,” writes O’Connell, who wasn’t present, “the king was seated in a chair but was no longer capable of discerning where his body ended and the chair began.” Help arrived in the form of a CIA medical team from Athens, dispatched with Langley’s approval.

But it’s also hard to imagine that Hussein would have authored such an angry book. Most of the stories involve what O’Connell reads as the repeated betrayal not just of Hussein’s efforts but of any commitment by either the Israelis or American Jews to achieve long-term peace. He tells a story about Arthur Goldberg, the labor lawyer appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the Supreme Court, who then stepped down to become Johnson’s ambassador to the United Nations. O’Connell writes that Goldberg took a threatening tone at a meeting in November 1967, and bragged about his “blank check” from the American Jewish community. “They will buy whatever I decide upon,” O’Connell quotes Goldberg saying. In O’Connell’s view, Goldberg—an official of the American government—had no business serving only the interests of the Jewish community. He writes that Goldberg not only reneged on the backroom agreement he made guaranteeing Hussein “minor reciprocal border rectifications” from the prewar lines in exchange for peace—but also somehow engineered the disappearance of the only written document that could have proved the reversal in the U.S. position.

Later, Henry Kissinger appears as a villain for his role in the run-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. O’Connell goes through a complicated deductive exercise based on photographs and Kissinger’s memoirs to argue that, during a meeting in early 1973 outside Paris, Kissinger must have told the Egyptians they would have to “create a crisis” by going to war again with Israel in order to provide pretext for the Nixon Administration to re-engage with the Middle East. “We can never have a complete account of what was said at the meeting,” O’Connell writes. “But whatever words were spoken, I am convinced the Egyptians came away with the understanding that they had to go to war for the Americans to become involved in making peace.” (Kissinger did not respond to requests for comment.)

The work O’Connell has to put into making his case against Kissinger highlights the difference between history written by a historian and history written by a spy—someone who is party to events that are not generally recorded in publicly available documents, if at all. Many of the people mentioned are dead, a fact that O’Connell takes pains to point out in the text. Of those still living, one, the former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution (and Tablet Magazine contributor), flatly denied telling O’Connell what he is quoted as saying—that during the first George W. Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, asked the Israeli embassy to vet the names of her potential Middle East aides. (Rice’s office did not respond to a phone call left seeking comment.)

But the other hallmark of spy memoirs is the desire for attention after careers spent on the shadowy sidelines of world events. So, it’s hardly a surprise when, toward the end of the book, O’Connell shifts from lionizing King Hussein to seeking credit for his own unrecognized contribution to the peace effort: the idea for a pan-Arab agreement that eventually became the Saudi-led Arab peace initiative. He writes that he first raised it with officials in the Clinton Administration in 1998, before the Wye River Accords were signed, and later gave a version to Hussein’s son after the king’s death in 1999. The Jordanian diplomat Marwan Muasher, the kingdom’s first ambassador to Israel, said that O’Connell’s account on that score is true. “I have the original proposal,” Muasher told me in a phone call. But on other issues—including the account of what Nasser knew in 1967—Muasher said he only knew the stories he had heard from O’Connell over the years. “I have,” he said with a slight chuckle, “no independent documentation one way or the other.”

• How Jordan, while not without some unrest, has managed to avoid the upheaval characteristic of much of the rest of the Arab world. [AP/WP]

• Thirty-five years to the week after the raid at Entebbe, the one Israeli soldier slain, Yonatan Netanyahu (the prime minister’s brother), is remembered by people he knew at Harvard. [Harvard Crimson/JPost]

• For the first time, China has awarded a foreign ambassador honorary citizenship. The ambassador in question is Amos Nadai, of Israel. [The Schmooze]

• A new poll found that President Obama would win only 56 percent of the Jewish vote against a generic Republican candidate today. The problem is that the poll is a load of partisan crap. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Andrew Silow-Carroll has some other ideas for leads in the vein of “The following may cheer those who complain that Jews exercise too much influence in the American political system.” [JustASC]

Fact I learned today: Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” is based on David Geffen.

Oh, and Holland’s government won’t recognize statehood, either, President Abbas was told by the Dutch foreign minister, whose name (I’m not making this up) is Uri Rosenthal.

Report: Jordan To Oppose P.A. Statehood [Ynet]
Dutch Government Rejects Palestinian Initiative Seeking U.N. Recognition of Palestinian State [AP/WP]

• “I would resign,” President Obama said of what would happen if he were found to have sent crotch-shots to people he had met over the Internet. [City Room]

• Street clashes yesterday evinced simmering discontent with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. [WP]

• Somebody had to take Seymour Hersh’s dubious article about the lack of an Iranian nuclear weapons program overly credulously, which is why we have Roger Cohen. [IHT]

• And somebody else had to be a transcriber for the Saudi government vis-à-vis Israel, which is why we have … Richard Cohen? [WP]

• Whoa. In Israel, a mother and a grandfather—who are also more than that—were convicted of killing their four-year-old daughter/granddaughter. [Reuters/NYT]

But what are the rest of us to make of this bit of text, we whose eyes glazed over in math class and require a calculator to work out a 20 percent tip on a $100 check? The answer lies in the spirit rather than the letter of the text, and in spirit this week’s parasha delivers a simple but profound message: We all count. Even a small nation, or in particular a small nation, must keep track of each and every soul. Seen through this prism, numbers are not abstractions; each one corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Which, of course, is why we should be very careful to handle numbers with accuracy and care—fudge a number, and you’ve sinned against the very core of the tangible and the real.

Ours, alas, is the era of unreal numbers, from the falsified spreadsheets of Bernie Madoff to the felonious schemes of the equally criminal yet tragically unpunished swindlers behind the subprime mortgage bubble. Bluffing discreetly on balance sheets is bad enough; do it in the open, on the largest imaginable stage, and we’re headed down a dangerous road.

Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the Congress earlier this week was a master class of numeric (and other) inaccuracies. Because these things matter—they matter very much—let us, in the spirit of this week’s parasha, do the Jewish thing and set the record straight.

Netanyahu said: The vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.

Actually, there are 304,569 Israelis living in the West Bank, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Add to that East Jerusalem—which, according to most credible sources, is home to about 200,000 Israelis—and you hit the 500,000 mark. Even if one chooses to be generous and give the prime minister these East Jerusalemites in his count, one has to wonder, as Jonathan Lis recently did in Haaretz, why Netanyahu, who later on in his speech roared that “Jerusalem must never again be divided,” would possibly choose to include the residents of the undividable capital in the overall tally of the contested populace.

Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel.

This bit of bluster may come as somewhat of a slight to Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, where the robust parliamentary elections of 2009 drew a record-high voter turnout. Also in line for surprise are the Iraqis, who, despite still struggling to find democracy’s balance, came out in droves to vote in the recent 2010 elections for the Council of Representatives: 62.4 percent of Iraqis cast a ballot that year, only a slightly less impressive showing than the 65.2 percent of Israelis who exercised their civic duty in the nation’s most recent elections in 2009. Oh, and Jordan? Its 120-member House of Representatives holds a substantial number of seats for women and religious and ethnic minorities. You know, as they’re wont to do in fiercely oppressive, thoroughly non-democratic countries.

As the cherry on top of Netanyahu’s rhetorical ruses comes the fact that two days before the prime minister thundered in Congress, the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee passed, in a preliminary vote, a new bill that would give preference to  applicants for government jobs who are veterans of the IDF, thereby openly discriminating against Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the army. Add to that the so-called Nakba Law, which prohibits Israeli Arabs from teaching or commemorating their interpretation of the historical events that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, as well as other laws currently under consideration in the Knesset—like the one that would require all citizens of Israel to pledge allegiance to their nation as a uniquely Jewish state—and this whole “truly free” business begins to crumble.

In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath.

David, actually, swung his fateful sling in the valley of Elah, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, which is squarely within the boundaries of Israel proper. And if Netanyahu truly believes Israel is nothing like the Brits or the Belgians, he is welcome, of course, to do with the West Bank as had once been done with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and annex them. Until then, however, the prime minister has to choose: If he wishes to follow the Bible as his unsurpassable guide to realpolitik, let him declare so openly and allow his constituents to support or reject his theological aspirations. But if he wishes to guide the ship of state according to the acceptable, rational norms of Western democracies, all that blessed biblical stuff is, alas, rather irrelevant. Seen from that perspective, asserting martial law on a territory and its citizens, setting up an intricate bureaucracy of governance, oppressing any aspirations for self-governance, and insisting time and again that the natives are too corrupt and incompetent to govern themselves sounds like it’s one punch bowl away from feeling right at home at the Bengal Club.

The fun never ends. One could, for example, juxtapose Netanyahu’s encomiums for the riotous youth of the Arab spring with his efforts to drum up support for the despotic Hosni Mubarak as the Egyptian president was losing his grip on power earlier this year, or contrast Netanyahu’s claim that “the Palestinian economy is booming” with the World Bank’s report, released this April, which finds that the very same economy would soon be rendered “unsustainable” unless Israel relaxes the considerable restrictions it still places on the Palestinian private sector.

But instead of hurling oneself against the firm wall of slurs and untruths Netanyahu erected in his Washington speech, let us read the parasha instead, and recall the spirit, sacred and fierce and urgent, that urges us to keep our accounting strict and strictly honest.

Everyone else has recommended it, but still, you should read this take by Andrew Exum, an active-duty counterinsurgency expert turned national security blogger. Israel’s response to the marching was not, he says, in line with past overreactions (such as—this is my example, not his—the response to the Gaza flotilla), but rather entirely understandable: “What were they supposed to do in the face of a breach of the border?” he asks. “And what did the protesters think would happen?” He adds, “You can’t really fault a military for protecting the territorial integrity of its state by force.”

Exum concludes, “Israel has been kidding itself if it had imagined itself immune from the non-violent, peaceful protests that have been sweeping the Arabic-speaking world,” and there are actually two separate ways, albeit stemming from the same place, in which yesterday represented the first day that the Arab Spring truly came to Israel. Place one is Syria: Much as the two-month-long (and counting) uprising against the Assad regime made Hamas feel threatened and spurred it to ostensibly reconcile with its bitter rival Fatah, the Assad regime, itself feeling threatened, needed a scapegoat, and there is surely no better scapegoat in the region than Israel; thus, the Assad regime, almost certainly, cynically harnessed the genuine feelings of its Palestinians by allowing them, for the first time, to actually storm the border, precisely in an effort to draw a response from Israel that could be used to distract its citizens from their uprising against the regime itself and to threaten the international community that support for deposing the regime could lead to more days like yesterday. It is certainly fair to point out that on the same day that four Syrian Palestinians were killed by the IDF for trying to cross in Israel, eight Syrians were killed by Syrian security services for trying to cross into Lebanon. In the context of the past two months, only the former event was extraordinary.

(By the way, contributing editor Jeff Goldberg rightly calls out Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner for his overly earnest treatment of just whether, in fact, the Assad regime let this happen on purpose, when past history indicates that angry protesters reach that border only when the regime wants them to. Likewise, Anthony Shadid’s more fair-minded Times news analysis was headlined, as of last night, “A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card?” when in fact the piece itself makes very clear that it’s the latter. [Also, “random”? It was Nakba Day!] I’m usually not one of those people when it comes to the Times, but come on.)

It would be convenient if the entire thing could be blamed on the awful Assad regime, but it of course can’t. The Arab Spring, and the examples especially of Tunisia and Egypt, in which longtime despots were replaced through popular protests, have made Arabs feel newly empowered about their ability to influence how they are governed. It has also unleashed ugly forces that these despots had kept contained (violence against Egyptian Christians continued this weekend.)

The Arab Spring has made Palestinians feel as though they can shape their destiny vis-à-vis Israel as never before, and if reconciliation—in which a group that calls for Israel’s destruction, Hamas, was welcomed into the main governing body—is any indication; if ostensibly moderate President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statements that Palestinians will never give up the right of return and that yesterday’s dead were martyrs are any indications; and if one of the most restive Nakba Days in recent years is any indication; then as of right now, the mainstream Palestinian vision of the Palestinian future is incompatible with the mainstream Israeli vision of the Israeli future. That doesn’t justify Israel’s ignoring these latest events. Rather, it demands two things: tactically, a combination of restraint and insistence on red lines; and strategically, inventive diplomacy and compassion. Israel demonstrated the former yesterday; here’s hoping the latter is on the way.

Israeli Troops Fire as Marchers Breach Borders [NYT]
Just Another Sunday in the Levant [Abu Muqawama]
A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card? [NYT]
How to Understand the Golan Heights Demonstrations? [Goldblog]
Scores Wounded in Latest Religious Clashes in Egypt [WP]
Earlier: Has Assad Reached Our Breaking Point?
On Reconciliation, ‘The Devil Is In the Details’

• George Mitchell resigned as U.S. special envoy for the Mideast, ostensibly for having served his two years but actually because the peace process is on life support. [Politico]

• “I don’t see Hamas as a terror organization,” said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Hamas is a political party.” [JPost]

• Nakba Day is Sunday, but the clashes have already begun in East Jerusalem. [Al-Jazeera]

• A fascinating look at the Alawite sect—it’s like a non-mainstream, neo-Platonic version of Shiism—and how its adherents came to power in Syria despite comprising only 12 percent of the population. The Alawites of French Syria are eerily reminiscent of the Jews of British Palestine. [NYRB]

• Jordan has agreed to buy natural gas from Egypt at a higher price than it did under the Mubarak regime, making it likely that Israel will eventually do so as well. [JPost]

• Reflections from a Times reporter on Jeff Hall, the neo-Nazi whose son allegedly shot and killed him on May 1. [NYT]

• Jeffrey Herf argues that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt is bad not only for Israel but for Egypt itself as well. [TNR]

• Some ultra-Orthodox newspapers airbrush women out of more than just photos. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• The head of an Orthodox day school in Buenos Aires was assaulted to shouts of “Jew, Jew!” [ADL]

Wishing you a sunny afternoon.

This came in the midst of the Egyptian prosecutor’s questioning of former president Hosni Mubarak over energy exports to Israel. (Mubarak was moved to a hospital for heart problems earlier this week.) Reports have it that Mubarak’s two sons each received a 2.5 percent cut of Israel’s 15-year, $2.5 billion deal with Egypt’s East Mediterranean Gas, inked in 2005, which allegedly set cut-market rates; two former Egyptian ministers have been accused of costing Egypt nearly three-quarters of $1 billion in selling energy to Israel on the cheap. (Until recently, Egypt supplied as much as 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas.)

All the way back in early February, when Hosni Mubarak was still president (how time flies!), Egypt expert Samer Shehata told me, “Many Egyptians would be willing to sell gas to Israel if they believed they were selling gas at international prices, as opposed to in an opaque, murky economic transaction that people seem to be left in the dark about—where no one really knows what the arrangements really are and the assumption, for good reason, is that the sale of gas is at below-market prices.” For their part, according to the New York Times, Israeli officials are okay with the new light being shed on the 2005 deal as long as the focus remains on the price of energy exports rather than the exporting of the energy itself, which at times has been controversial (including when Egypt kept the gas flowing during Operation Cast Lead). Reported the Times, “A senior Israeli official said, however, that if the investigation becomes a pretext for halting the deal for domestic political reasons, Israel would have reason for genuine concern.” Translation: That Leviathan field is sure going to come in handy!

Pipeline Blast in Sinai, Said to Be Sabotage, Cuts Gas Supply in Israel and Jordan [NYT]
Related: Mubarak Faces More Questioning on Gas Deal With Israel [NYT]
Earlier: For Israel, Gas to Come Less Naturally
How Egyptian Unrest Affects Israel’s Energy

But what if it doesn’t come to an end? Last Friday more than a hundred people were killed in 18 cities and villages around Syria. Another 100 disappeared with no record of their arrest. On Saturday, snipers shot mourners trying to bury their dead. On Monday, tanks and infantry units surrounded the city of Deraa, where the uprising first broke out six weeks ago. So far, at least 400 are dead, a higher total than in Egypt, which has roughly four times the population of Syria.

So, what should Washington do next? Previously, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the United States intervened on behalf of the armed Libyan rebels because the regime’s forces were firing on their own people from airplanes. Presumably, then, so long as Assad continues using only tanks, snipers, and battalions of army troops against peaceful demonstrators, he is safe. There are rumors of sanctions that may target Assad’s brother, who has led some of the shock troops against protesters, but probably not the president himself. As one administration official explained, Assad “sees himself as a Westernized leader … and we think he’ll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators.”

There is some legitimate concern about what happens if Assad falls. Who will rule Syria next? Perhaps, as Assad warns, there is a powerful Islamist current that will come to power in this Sunni majority (70 percent) country now controlled by a ruling clique drawn from the minority Alawite sect. But Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, decimated the Muslim Brotherhood during the ’70s and ’80s, culminating in the 1982 destruction of Hama, where tens of thousands of Syrians were slaughtered by the country’s security forces. Most of Syria’s Salafist groups have been penetrated by the regime and used against its adversaries in Lebanon and Iraq. So, the Islamist current in Syria is hardly as powerful or cohesive as Assad’s apologists make it out to be.

The Obama Administration’s cautious Syria policy is not pragmatic and realist; it is, rather, an ideological fantasy. The White House is worried not about what happens to U.S. interests after Assad, but about how to salvage a campaign promise that has been thwarted by reality. The Obama White House is sheltering Assad for the same reason it was slow to support Iran’s green movement when it took to the streets in June 2009. Just as Obama held out hope for talking to the Islamic Republic, he still wants to engage Syria. The Obama Administration’s entire Middle East policy is premised on getting Damascus back to the negotiating table with Israel. Accomplishing that goal, the administration believes, will not only win the United States the favor of the Arab and Muslim masses, but it will also drive a wedge between Syria and its ally Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been pessimistic that Washington could separate Damascus and Tehran. Nonetheless, official Israel isn’t saying much these days, because no one has any idea of what follows the Assads, or if it would be better or worse for Israel. The Assads have kept the border on the Golan quiet since 1973, even as they’ve waged war against the Jewish State through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, built secret nuclear facilities, maintained thousands of missiles armed with chemical warheads pointed at Israeli cities, and aligned their interests with Iran. In spite of this, there are almost as many Israeli officials as there are U.S. policymakers who believe Syria wants a peace deal—Defense Minister Ehud Barak most prominent among them.

And yet over the last 30 years it is Syria more than any actor that has brought war to Israel, on its borders and within, through terrorist assets and allies. If Damascus has not itself waged direct state-to-state war on the Jewish State, it is not because it doesn’t want to but because it cannot. Nor can it make peace with Israel. Forget for a moment the strategic reasons why Syria can’t sign a deal—that if Israel returns the Golan Heights as part of a full peace agreement the Damascus regime loses a legitimacy based on its war footing, or that without war against Israel, Syria no longer gets to burnish its prestige by bargaining with Washington. Consider instead the nature of the regime: A ruling clique whose snipers shoot its own children is not going to make peace with its own people, let alone with Israel.

The other problem with the fantasy of a Syrian peace track is that the peace process no longer exists. Obama unwittingly threw it under the bus when he abandoned Egypt President Hosni Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for more than 30 years at some personal risk to his own life. By trashing Mubarak, the White House showed that the so-called peace process isn’t really all that important to Washington. In Egypt, winning the love of the masses meant siding with the young social media activists-cum-populists and the Muslim Brotherhood when they wanted to pull down a U.S. ally who supported the most consequential peace treaty between the Arabs and Israel.

Nonetheless, the Obama White House has no other tricks up its sleeve in the Middle East. The Palestinian track has become reduced to Washington, the one-time regional power-broker, now petitioning Abbas to refrain from unilaterally announcing statehood. The hopelessness of the Israeli-Palestinian track is one reason why the administration keeps insisting Assad live up to his billing in Washington as a “reformer.” In reality, Assad put away any thought of reform a little less than a year after he took power following his father Hafez’s death in 2000. The so-called Damascus Spring was short-lived because Assad, only 35 at the time, knew then what the 82-year-old Mubarak would only understand when it was too late—opening the door to reform gives your opponents enough leverage to push it wide open and toss you out.

In the aftermath of Mubarak’s downfall, no Arab regime has failed to observe the lesson. Hence, instead of reforming a vicious political system that permits Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family to treat the country’s Shia majority as second-class citizens, the government of Bahrain called in a 4,000-strong Gulf Cooperation Council force to terrorize Shia. Instead of reforming their medieval system, the Saudi royal family merely bought off their subjects with a $93 billion bribe.

When Obama officials call Assad a reformer, they are not making excuses for Assad but for themselves. Were they to admit to themselves and others that the Syrian president is a serial murderer of his own people as well as of Americans and their allies around the region, including Iraqis, Lebanese, Israelis, and Palestinians, Washington might have to design a new Syria policy. But in place of a rational intellect and a moral center, all the White House has is an imaginary peace process, a pipe dream that requires the “reform-minded” Bashar al-Assad to come to his senses and engage with Washington.

America’s special treatment of Syria long precedes the Obama Administration, as I’ve noted. U.S. diplomats have been coloring the Assads (the son and before him the father) in favorable hues ever since the family came to power. “Hafez always keeps his word” was the favored slogan of U.S. envoys for years, even as the Syrian president’s terrorist assets killed U.S. citizens and allies. American policymakers just back from Damascus liked to describe Hafez as a tough bargainer who can talk for hours straight without permitting his interlocutors to go to the bathroom. That is to say, U.S. officials turned the degradation that Hafez served them into a gourmet meal.

In the end, concern over who follows Assad is just another way of covering for the inadequacies of Washington’s Syria policy. It doesn’t matter who rules Syria—whether it’s ruled by the country’s well-educated merchant class, the Islamists, or, while unlikely, a broad multi-sectarian coalition of liberal democrats. Maybe, as one Lebanese journalist told me recently in Beirut, no one will rule Syria for some time. One likely scenario for Syria is that it will return to its pre-Assad character, scored by coups and counter-coups, a country that is a problem only for itself and incapable of exporting its problems to its neighbors as Damascus has done for the past 40 years—with Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, as well as Israel.

Sure, things can always get worse, especially in the Middle East. But not in Syria. It can’t get any worse than the Assads’ regime, or, rather, what could be worse? A regime that actually fires those chemical warheads at Israel, or activates its secret nuclear program and builds a bomb? The only limits the regime in Damascus knows are those that have been imposed from without, and not often enough by Washington. The end of this cancer might go a long way toward healing an American policymaking community whose Syria policies have been riddled with moral sickness for almost half a century.

• What the Assad regime is up against. [Slate]

• There were also somewhat-violent clashes in Amman. [AP/WP]

• The U.S. labor secretary was in New York City today to mark the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire. [Forward]

• For the first time, Israel deployed its “Iron Dome” missile-defense apparatus to combat the rocket threat from Gaza. [AP/WP]

• This Anthony Weiner/Rachel from Glee “Separated at Birth” is pretty great. [Buzzfeed]

• Austin Ratner, subject of a Tablet Magazine joint profile (by me), won the $100,000 Rohr Prize from the Jewish Book Council. [WSJ]

• AIPAC apologized for trying to raise money off of the Jerusalem bomb. [JTA]

• Who says Israel can’t compete on the international stage? A women’s club basketball team defeated a French one to win a European trophy. [Haaretz]

• The New York Times alters its house style to reflect that Nazi concentration camps in Poland were not, y’know, Polish camps. [The Kosciuszko Foundation]

• Meet the newest members of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Special D.C. shout-out to the late, great Abe Pollin. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• A beloved, Palestinian-owned bookstore in Jerusalem is imperiled. Great story. [Book Bench]

• For the first time, the U.N. Human Rights Council appointed an Israeli (a British-Israeli, technically) to one of its working groups. [JPost]

• New book forthcoming from Maurice Sendak! [WSJ]

• We definitely needed yet another article about Miral. [NYT]

There’s a galley of John Lennon and the Jews on my desk.

• Syria killed at least six in a southern city that has been the site of the greatest anti-regime riots. [Reuters/WP]

• The Knesset passed two laws criticized as anti-Arab: One (in reaction to Palestinian protest of teaching the Holocaust) withholds funding to groups that teach the Nakba narrative of Israel’s founding; the other allows small communities to deny admission to members of outsider groups. [WP]

• Jordanian King Abdullah II blamed his new prime minister for failing to implement reforms with sufficient speed. [AP/WP]

• The Mount of Olives cemetery is becoming a particular point of contention for hawkish Israelis and American Jews. [AP/WP]

• Columnist Harold Meyerson links modern labor struggles to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (anniversary Friday). [WP]

You should read all of Erlanger’s piece—which touches on the Muslim Brotherhood’s prospects for power (it likely neither wants nor will get significant control of Egypt) and the resonance of the Turkish model of a democratically elected, moderately Islamist government (which is very strong; we should probably get use to the prospect of there being several Turkey equivalents). Meantime, two issues bear a closer look: The Israeli and Palestinian peoples’ common interests in the regional events, and the question of Jordan.

Libya’s situation—where longtime dictator Muammar Gadhafi has really dug himself in, killing protesters, losing control of parts of the country, and provoking calls (including from Elie Wiesel) for outside intervention—brought Israel and the Palestinian Authority together yesterday. Three hundred Palestinians trapped in Libya provided the opportunity for a rare moment of successful bonding between President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu: After a “personal request” from the Palestinian leader, Israel will allow their entry into the West Bank. And a draft resolution passed the Human Rights Council—on which, notoriously, Libya actually sits—that was sponsored by Arab members such as Qatar and Jordan; signed by Iraq, Tunisia, and Turkey; and also backed by—wait for it—Palestine and Israel. (The United States, of course, also supported it.) Yes, folks, that’s right: The U.N. Human Rights Council just brought Israel and the Palestinians together. Gadhafi, as the above photo shows, is a real unifier in that way.

Then there’s Jordan. When I spoke to expert Bruce Ridel more than three weeks ago—when Hosni Mubarak was still nominally in power—he was already telling me, “From an American standpoint, Jordan is the one that is both at risk and critically important”: Equipped with a superb intelligence service, ferocious at fighting terrorism, situated on a critical piece of land, and lacking the oil money of the Gulf states to buy its citizens off.

The one thing Jordan has going for it, stability-wise, is the prestige of the nearly century-old Hashemite monarchy. But even here, as David Ignatius paints it, King Abdullah II must perpetually balance between the so-called East Bankers—the traditional Bedouins who historically make up the monarchy’s “base,” if you will—and the Palestinians—who are Westernized (like his own wife, Queen Rania) and who keep Jordan’s economy functioning. “People speak of ‘Meds’ and ‘Beds,’” Ignatius notes, “referring to the worldly Mediterranean outlook of the Palestinians and the traditional values of the Bedouin tribes of the East Bank.” The king, he adds, “depends on the entrepreneurial Palestinian business elite for Jordan’s economic growth; but he needs the army, dominated by the Bedouin tribes of the East Bank, for security.”

Abdullah II most definitely has President Obama’s backing, but what of his own people? A few weeks ago, in response to popular protests—albeit peaceable ones that, in large part, did not seek to unseat the monarchy—the king dissolved his cabinet and appointed new ministers designed to appease the protesters. And what have these new ministers done? The new justice minister called Israel “a terrorist state that will be destroyed,” and the new prime minister directed attention to Israel’s failure in the peace process. Apparently, this is what is selling.

Oh, plus, this is all good for Iran. Right, that.

As Arab Leaders Teeter, Israel Frets [NYT]
Israel Clears Palestinians to Flee Libya for West Bank [The Lede]
A U.N. First! [U.N. Dispatch]
A Tough Balancing Act for Jordan [WP]
Obama Reassures Jordan King of U.S. Support [LAT]
Jordan Justice Minister: Israel Is a Terrorist State [Haaretz]
Jordan PM: Israel’s Obstinancy to Peace May Further Destabilize Mideast [DPA/Haaretz]
PM: We Need to be Prepared for All Outcomes in Region [JPost]
Earlier: Why Egypt Can Handle Democracy

• Big news in the West Bank: Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat resigned; Prime Minister Salam Fayyad disbanded the cabinet and planned to form a new one; and new presidential and parliamentary elections will be held in September, in a response to calls in the wider Arab world for more democracy. [NYT]

• A new report, conducted and released by Symantec, found that the computer virus Stuxnet, widely believed to be Israel’s handiwork, infected Iranian nuclear facilities at just five initial points. [NYT]

• President Obama reiterated his support for the U.N.’s probe into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination as the sixth anniversary of the event approaches. [Ynet]

• The top U.S. general and a top U.S. diplomat were in Jordan this weekend to reassure (and be reassured by) King Abdullah II, whose reign has been unprecedentedly challenged in recent weeks. [WP]

• One of the most significant consequences of the events in Egypt for the U.S. and Israel could be the subsequent decline in counterterrorism cooperation. [WP]

• Very good analysis: Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979. [NYT]

Jordan is absolutely vital to fighting terrorism. They have the best intelligence service in the Middle East … They sit on a vital piece of territory, and they face many of the same problems Tunisia and Egypt face, of a large youth bulge with high unemployment and underemployment, and without the oil money to buy off political enemies. … I think Jordan is something to keep a very close eye on here, because the stakes are very high for the United States and Israel. The Hashemite monarchy has been a very loyal and important friend for over half a century. And just as Israel-Egypt is an important peace treaty, Israel-Jordan is as well.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II had already dissolved his entire cabinet in response to unrest, and the active and prominent Islamist opposition seemed to be indicating that it was not satisfied with his new prime minister, either. The popular perception of his wife, Rania, as a glamorous jet-setter wasn’t really helping matters, either.

However, news comes today that the Hashemite monarch has bought himself at least some time: The kingdom’s Muslim Brotherhood, which refused to join the new government, nonetheless pledged to give it and the new prime minister, an ex-general, up to a year to enact reforms, including a new election law. No doubt Israeli officials are breathing a not-insignificant sigh of relief at the news that they have one fewer crisis to worry about—for now.

Jordan’s Islamists Say They’ll Wait For Reforms [WSJ]
Crisis in Cairo [Tablet Magazine]

Increased uncertainty for Israel’s energy situation is one of the less heralded but still important consequences of the Egyptian unrest. In response, Israel is speeding up exploration of its massive new offshore natural gas fields (which Lebanon has bellicosely contested); considering increasing quantities from its fields in the south; and even exploring the production of fossil fuel from shale. Perhaps most remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu, couching his proposal in the language of Palestinian economic improvement, suggested commencing talks with Palestinian negotiators about developing an offshore field off Gaza’s coast. Of course, given that Gaza is ruled by folks whom Netanyahu doesn’t (publicly) talk to, this proposition may prove tricky.

So already you can begin to grasp the potential consequences of what’s going on in Egypt—increased Israeli desperation? further Lebanese tensions over the offshore fields? rapprochement, or the reverse, with Hamas driven by mutual economic and energy interests? a shaky situation in Jordan turned shakier by energy shortages (Jordan also relies on Egyptian natural gas)? And all this merely in the less obvious dimension of energy. This is what people mean when they describe the remarkable past weeks as “an earthquake.”

Gas Pipeline Explosion Was Terror Related, Probe Finds [JTA]
Natural Gas Supply to Israel Cut Off After Blast at Egyptian Terminal [WP]
Israel: A Controversial Shale Project and Energy Security [Babylon & Beyond]
Israeli Leaders Suggests Palestinian Gas Talks [WSJ]
Earlier: Lebanon Passes Oil Law

• A secret 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable, released by WikiLeaks, reported that President Hosni Mubarak was resistant to U.S. calls for him to reform in order “to avoid conflict.” Oops. [WP]

• Another WikiLeaks-leaked U.S. cable reported that Vice President Omar Suleiman is Israel’s preferred successor to Mubarak. Well, duh. [Haaretz]

• Suleiman announced two new reform committees, even as Tahrir Square continued to be packed by tens of thousands. [WP]

• Jordanian tribesmen—usually stalwarts of the monarchy—signed a statement calling for new political rights lest their country go the way of Tunisia and Egypt. [NYT]

• The Palestinian Authority announced local council elections in Gaza and the West Bank will be on July 9. Hamas has already said it would boycott them. [Haaretz]

• Aaron David Miller predicted in Tablet Magazine that Israel would fear the Egyptian uprisings; here, he explains why. [WP]

• Leon Wieseltier concedes Israeli fear of the new Egyptian government, but also indicts Israel’s government for not having made progress on the peace process during calmer times. [TNR]

• A Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson on CNN refused to confirm that his group, if in power in Egypt, would continue to respect the Israeli peace treaty. [JPost]

• How President Obama’s reaction to the Egyptian events has helped articulate the emerging “liberal realism.” [TNR]

• An additional primer on Egyptian Vice President (and likely next strongman) Omar Suleiman. [The Arabist]

• Israel depends on an Egyptian natural gas pipeline for one-fourth of its electricity. Uh oh. (For more, see my interview with James Hamilton.) [WSJ]

• Coptic Christians probably have the most indisputable case for wanting Mubarak to stay. [WSJ]

• Israeli-Arab leader and alleged Hezbollah spy Ameer Makhoul was sentenced to nine years in prison. [JPost]

• The University of Maryland’s endangered Yiddish studies department scraped together enough funds to last, for now, through 2013. Still can’t beat Duke, though. [JTA]

• Establishment-y people are standing up for foreign aid. [Laura Rozen]

• ‘Course, Sen. Patrick Leahy wants to cut Egyptian aid till this all gets sorted out. [Laura Rozen]

• “The main stumbling block is Israel,” says George Soros. Have fun in the comments, guys! [WP]

• We’re supposed to be scared of a Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt? We’re allied with Saudi Arabia, for Chrissake. [Slate]

• Solomon and Cohen out at the Times Magazine (Times critic Ariel Kaminer will be the new Ethicist). For some of our readers, this is the biggest news of the day. Here is Rachel Shteir taking Cohen down. [Daily Intel]

• Oh, by the way, none of this matters compares to Jordan. I’m exaggerating, of course, but Jordan actually is more important at this point. Will the Hashemite monarchy survive? [Goldblog]

Enjoy the Game.

• More violent clashes in Cairo left at least five dead and hundreds wounded. [NYT]

• Jordan’s King Abdullah II meets today with opposition Islamists for the first time in nearly ten years to hear out their grievances. [WSJ]

• It is undeniable that President Hosni Mubarak retains a broad base of support, from among the rich and poor alike. [WP]

• It seems obvious, but in calling for a transition to begin “now” and condemning violence against protesters (“shocking,” Secretary of State Clinton called it), the United States is breaking with a major ally in an extremely unusual way. [NYT]

• Perhaps even more remarkably, the U.S. is recalculating its stance toward “non-secular actors” in Egypt—the Muslim Brotherhood—out of recognition that they are likely to play a role in the democratic government the U.S. seeks there. [WP]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu is pushing Western officials to ensure that whatever government emerges in Egypt honors the Israeli peace treaty. [WSJ]

• Some neoconservatives like democracy in Egypt because they like democracy. Others don’t like democracy in Egypt because Egyptian democrats may not like Israel. [Goldblog]

• As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei was a leading critic of Egypt’s nascent nuclear program. In other words, prepare for an atomic-size flip-flop. [NYRB]

• Jordan’s Islamist opposition slammed the king’s brand-new prime minister; they want him out. [JPost]

• “Half the population is made up of Jews,” Isaac Babel wrote of Odessa, “and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths long the way. Jews get married so as not to be alone, love so as to live through the centuries, hoard money so that they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhan coats, love children because, let’s face it, it is good and important to love one’s children.” [The Book]

Oh please, what else?

• Meanwhile, the administration scrambles to answer the question of the moment: What, exactly, does opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei represent? [NYT]

• Israel is concerning itself with making sure its Egyptian border is sealed and preparing for a potential wave of Sinai Bedouin asylum-seekers. [Haaretz]

• But of course: Oil prices have been rising over the past week. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, King Abdullah II, of Jordan, fired his cabinet in response to protests and ordered a former army general to come in and form a new one. [AP]

• The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog warned Syria that it would be toughening its stance. [WSJ]

Most remarkably of all: The United States might be … siding with the protestors. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called for an end to violence and the lifting of the Internet ban. Secretary of State Clinton insisted that “leaders need to respond” to their peoples’ calls for democracy; Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, went further, explicitly calling for free and fair elections. On top of that, the Obama administration is publicly threatening to reconsider the $1.5 billion in annual U.S. military aid Egypt receives, which, as I noted earlier today, was actually the initial result of Egypt’s becoming the first Arab country to make peace with Israel.

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution came first, but the unrest in Egypt is a bigger deal because the Arab and even broader Muslim world has long taken its cues first and foremost from Egypt. In addition to Tunisia and Egypt, there is of course the unstable situation in Lebanon; protests in Yemen; and, today, much more placid yet very real marching for regime change in Jordan.

I just named three of the four countries that border Israel, and the two Arab states that recognize it. It is no wonder that the mood in Israel is cautiousness, the sense that these revolts represent “an earthquake,” and some concern over these regimes’ toppling—even if, broadly speaking, one watching this must greatly sympathize with the masses of young people who have known nothing but authoritarianism, agitating for democratic government. One wants to think that a democracy such as Israel would be sympathetic, but one cannot blame the country for worrying that arguably hovering in the background of the Egyptian protests is the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful Islamist party, which is not at the protests’ forefront—yet, and maybe not ever (similarly aligned groups are most definitely poised to benefit from unrest in Yemen and likely to benefit from Tunisia’s regime change). Bruce Riedel, who wrote about Al Qaeda yesterday in Tablet Magazine, argues today that even should the Muslim Brotherhood—whose Palestinian branch is Hamas—rise to lead the protests, it should not be a cause of overmuch concern. But Israel is not likely to agree with Riedel’s analysis.

Truthfully, anyone who says they know what is going to happen next—whether Mubarak’s regime will maintain power or not, and in what form; what character the Egyptian revolt will take on—is lying. So sit tight, keep watching the news, and—if I may editorialize for a moment—cheer on, for now, the courageous youth of Egypt.

Egypt Calls In Army as Protestors Rage [NYT]
U.S. Calls for Egypt to Respond to Its People [WSJ]
U.S. to Review Aid to Egypt, WH Spokesman Says [WP]
The Taking of Kasr Al Nil [New Yorker]
Don’t Fear Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood [Daily Beast]
Earlier: Lebanese Power Broker Supports Hezbollah

• Is Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution about to spread to Jordan? [JPost]

• BREAKING: Some people argued over what it means to be pro-Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Hussein Agha and Robert Malley argue that the status quo is going to remain, well, the status quo. [NY Books]

• Sacha Baron Cohen will be playing Saddam Hussein in a forthcoming movie. Sure, why not? [Animal NY]

• Is Urban Outfitters drawing fashion inspiration from the ultra-Orthodox? [Jewcy]

“Some of you so called boycotters are just assholes,” declared Macy Gray, announcing she and her band would indeed play an upcoming gig in Tel Aviv. Here is that one Macy Gray song I know!

As Jordan’s position on Palestinian refugees is becoming one of the more strident in the Arab world, the two countries now hold diametrically opposing views on an issue that both sides regard as truly existential, touching the raw nerves of their collective beings and promising future discord: Jordan wants large-scale repatriation; while Israel rejects the so-called right of return.

A recent Jordanian sense of urgency on the Palestinian question has even pushed the Hashemite Kingdom away from the American orbit and more in the direction of the Iranian one, Susser reports.

Falling Out

Yet Western observers who are used to seeing Israel and Jordan as bound by common interests are missing a new reality that has overtaken the cooperative relationships of the past: The common fear of being overwhelmed by Palestinian demography is now driving the two countries apart. As Jordan’s position on Palestinian refugees is becoming one of the more strident in the Arab world, the two countries now hold diametrically opposing views on an issue that both sides regard as truly existential, touching the raw nerves of their collective beings and promising future discord: Jordan wants large-scale repatriation; while Israel rejects the so-called right of return.

The roots of the current Jordanian view lie in the country’s domestic demographic and political situation. Palestinians and their descendants probably form a majority of the Jordanian population but are barred from meaningful political power—a situation that in turn has roots in Jordan’s own historically ambiguous relationship to Palestine. After occupying the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan formally annexed the territory, with Israeli acquiescence, in April 1950. Despite Israel’s entreaties to Jordan to refrain from intervening in the June War of 1967, the Jordanians, following their own domestic and pan-Arab calculations, decided to join Nasser’s anti-Israeli alliance but then lost the West Bank in the fighting that ensued.

Jordan’s loss of the West Bank was a historical watershed for the Hashemite kingdom and for Israel. Jordan’s manipulative control of what remained of Arab Palestine took a back seat to the PLO’s homegrown version of Palestinian nationalism. It was the PLO’s war against Israel, waged from Jordanian territory, that kept Palestinian hopes alive against the background of the humiliating 1967 defeat of the Arab states. In the process, the PLO gradually built a Palestinian state within a state in Jordan, challenged Jordanian sovereignty, and called the very existence of the Hashemite kingdom into question.

Matters came to a head in September 1970 when the Jordanians mobilized their military power to crush PLO forces in Jordan within what became known as “Black September.” Israel played a critical role in the September events by conducting military maneuvers designed to pressure the Syrians to withdraw the force they had sent to Jordan in support of the PLO. Beaten in the battlefield by the Jordanians, and deterred by the Israelis from escalating their involvement, the Syrians pulled back. By July 1971, all PLO forces were expelled from Jordan, never to return.

The Jordanian struggle with the Palestinians was a traumatic event for the Jordanian people and their collective identity. It accelerated the evolution of a much more conscious sense of Jordanianness, defined against the Palestinian “other.” The Palestinians threatened to deny the Jordanians their political patrimony, not in the West Bank but in Jordan itself. A process of Jordanization, or ardanna, was set in motion in Jordan in the early 1970s, culminating in the almost total exclusion of Palestinians from positions of influence in the country’s political elite and the military and domestic security establishments. A functional cleavage came into being in Jordan whereby original Jordanians governed and were the unchallenged masters of all spheres of political influence, while the Palestinians in the kingdom, about half of the population, maybe more, dominated the economy and the private sector.

Over the years a militant and influential ultra-nationalist Jordanian trend has emerged devoted to the eradication of Palestinian influence and, in the long run, to the return of as many Palestinians as possible from Jordan to a future state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and to Israel proper. Simultaneously with these developments in Jordan, though unrelated to them, Israel’s politics have shifted to the right. The first Likud government came to power in Israel in 1977, and governments of the right have been in power either on their own or together with Labor for much of Israel’s history since. In the past, prominent spokespersons of the Likud did not hide their conviction that Jordan—which was originally part of the British Mandate for Palestine and where people of Palestinian origin are such a large part of the population—ought to become the real Palestinian homeland. From the Jordanian point of view, such talk had the makings of an existential threat.

In response to internal demographics and their understanding of the Israeli political debate, Jordanians have steadily developed an obsessive fear of the “alternative homeland conspiracy,” or mu’amarat al-watan al-badil, and a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. In their analysis, if no Palestinian state comes into being in the West Bank and Gaza, an eventual confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians will culminate in the massive migration or expulsion of Palestinians eastward across the river to Jordan. Such “demographic aggression” would, by the sheer weight of numbers, transform Jordan into a Palestinian state. In this nightmare scenario, the Jordanians, not the Israelis nor the Palestinians, would end up as the great historical losers.

The peace treaty signed between Jordan and Israel under the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin in October 1994 drew a sigh of relief from Jordanians. The nightmare of the “Jordan is Palestine” or “alternative homeland” theory was gone forever, so they believed. Israel had recognized Jordan’s boundaries and was on the way to the formation of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, in accordance with the Oslo accords signed a year before. Henceforth it would be clear that Palestine was Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan was Jordan on the other side of the river. Moreover, peace with Israel would bring prosperity to Jordan and long-term stability to the region.

Jordan’s expectations, however, remained unfulfilled. The peace with Israel could not have been and was not a panacea for Jordan’s structural economic difficulties. Even more disturbing for the Jordanians, Israel and the Palestinians failed in their endeavor to transform the Oslo accords into a final agreement. Worse still, the Israeli-Palestinian track now seems to have reached a dead end.

After the failure of the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 and the outbreak of the second Intifada, Jordan’s nightmare scenario resurfaced as if the peace treaty with Israel had never been signed. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the consequent perennial threat of Iraqi disintegration, coupled with growing Iranian influence in Iraq and in the region as a whole, severely compounded the Jordanians’ sense of strategic suffocation. The Jordanians now found themselves sandwiched between two poles of regional instability, with the chaos of Iraq to the east and the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum to the west. This was the kind of regional predicament that they had certainly not bargained for after making peace with Israel.

Israel drew its own conclusions from the failure of Oslo. They were, primarily, that the Palestinians were not ready for an end-of-conflict agreement that did not encroach upon Israel proper. The issue with the Palestinians went beyond the occupied territories, particularly because of the Palestinian demand for the right of return for the 1948 refugees. The Israelis countered with a demand of their own, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people as a guarantee against substantive, as opposed to symbolic, refugee return. This demand was initially made by the government of Ariel Sharon in 2003 and has been repeated by all Israeli governments since. The Benjamin Netanyahu government has upped the ante by demanding such recognition as a precondition for Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state.

This new Israeli position has been stridently condemned by the Jordanians, who again see the looming specter of final refugee resettlement in Jordan as the forerunner to the “alternative homeland” scenario. Not only is the Israeli position an obstacle to an agreement with Palestinians, they believe, but it threatens to permanently saddle Jordan with a huge Palestinian population.

King Abdullah speaks often of the great urgency of a two-state solution, blaming Israel for the impasse. Jordanian ultra-nationalists, in their fear of Israeli intentions and of the Palestinian presence, go even further, emphasizing the need not only for two states but for refugee return, totally rejecting the notion of long-term resettlement in Jordan. It is they and the Lebanese who were responsible for adding to the Arab Peace Initiative, in 2002 and again in 2007, the absolute “rejection of all forms of [refugee] resettlement” (tawtin in Arabic), which made the initiative virtually impossible for Israel to accept.

For many years Jordan sought the succor of a U.S.-Israeli protective umbrella, but today King Abdullah speaks bitterly of the chilly and deteriorating relationship with Israel. And where Abdullah defiantly warned against the emergent “Shiite crescent” as late as 2004, the Jordanians now appear to be sheepishly going out of their way to pronounce their fealty to Iran, as exemplified most recently by the king’s acceptance of an official invitation to visit Tehran. Is this public eating of crow just a tactical feint of the kind that Jordan has made on countless occasions in the past, or does it portend a more significant shift toward the radical camp? The fact that the question arises at all is a measure of the change that has already taken place.

Asher Susser, a senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, is a visiting professor on modern Israel at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

• However, the new top U.N. nuclear inspector said he was amenable to turning a more focused eye onto Syria. [WSJ]

• Speaking on U.S. cable news, Prime Minister Netanyahu cautioned that Iran wants to control the region’s oil supply. [JPost]

• Opposition parties boycotted Jordan’s parliamentary vote; the results are likely to strenghten the monarchy’s allies while increasing popular disaffection. [NYT]

• Jewish federations, gathered in New Orleans, are concerned less about the current economy and more about their long-term futures as their biggest donors age, with younger people not replacing them. [JTA]

• Famed realist painter Jack Levine died at 95. [NYT]

“The State of Israel has reached the height of fascism,” says Haneen Zoubi, a member of the Knesset representing Balad, an Arab Israeli party. The oath’s author, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, charges that it is precisely those like Zoubi who make the oath necessary. Zoubi was aboard the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-sponsored boat that attempted to run the naval blockade of Gaza. The ship violated international law by refusing to respect a blockade and then attacked an Israeli boarding party, which would make Zoubi, were she a citizen of, say, the United States while it was at war, subject to a number of charges, including conspiracy and treason, and liable to execution by the state. And she’s not alone: Some of her fellow Knesset members from Arab Israeli political parties have become notorious in recent years for actions that no Western government would tolerate from its citizens—let alone from legislators who are privy to government decisions and counsels. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, served as a close political adviser to Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader planned to undermine the Oslo Accords and murder hundreds of Israelis in the second Intifada. Tibi’s colleague, Azmi Bishara, resigned from the Knesset and fled to Syria in 2007 to avoid facing charges of espionage and treason for giving Hezbollah detailed information about optimal rocket targets inside Israel during the Second Lebanon War.

The idea that mandating an oath of allegiance for new citizens is a sign of Israeli fascism is part of the delegitimization campaign against Israel. It fits so well with media blather about the decline of Israeli democracy—and the nightmarish scariness of Israel’s foreign minister—that critics have conveniently ignored the fact that such oaths are normal fare in every major Western democracy. The U.S. oath of allegiance for new citizens, for example, requires new Americans to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty”; promise to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; promise to “bear arms” and “perform noncombatant” service at the direction of the U.S. government; and swear that one takes the oath “freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” in the name of God Almighty himself, all of which makes swearing an oath of allegiance to the democratic Jewish State of Israel seem like pretty weak stuff.

The fact that Jews who become new citizens under the Law of Return are exempt from taking the oath is wrongly cited as proof of the inherent racism of the proposed new law. Countries that allow individuals not born in the country to establish citizenship on the basis of blood and cultural ties—a doctrine known as jus sanguinis, or “right of blood”—commonly have a different citizenship procedure for those citizens than for other immigrants. Most European countries—and many other countries—rely on jus sanguinis as the foundation for citizenship. In Bulgaria, persons of very distant Bulgarian origin can become citizens immediately upon arrival in the country without any waiting period and without giving up their current citizenship. The same is true in Croatia. China has a similar policy. And that only takes us through the Cs.

But the furor over the oath is more than just an index of the increasing tension between Israel and its Arab citizens, and of a combination of rancid anti-Israeli sentiment and sheer ignorance that makes news coverage of the Middle East so difficult to read. Because this is the Middle East, the uproar over the oath of allegiance also reveals the true dynamics that are shaping the region.

Many observers have noted that the oath coincides with Israeli demands that their Palestinian interlocutors acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. This is broadly correct: Israeli leadership expects that negotiations entered into with the Palestinian Authority will lead to a final settlement, that at the end of the process, there will be a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish one, and there will be no interminable haggling over the question of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

And the reason Jerusalem wants Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to acknowledge the Jews’ right to a homeland is not merely a feel-good exercise in Middle East tolerance and coexistence, or to salve the national insecurities of the Jews. Rather, the Israeli demand is a referendum on Palestinian sovereignty: If PA officials can’t declare that Israel is a Jewish state without the very legitimate fear of assassination from rivals like Hamas, or state actors like Iran and Syria, then they are incapable of exercising the monopoly on legitimate violence that is the fundamental requirement of nation-building. Jerusalem is highlighting the fact that without the authority to make such a statement, the Palestinian leadership cannot build a Palestinian state; therefore, any treaty the PA signs with Israel is worthless.

It is clear that this logic is lost on Washington. After all, dreamers are not susceptible to disenchantment with the dream worlds that they themselves have built. Even before President Barack Obama came to office, the Americans were pumping so much cash, arms, prestige, and hope into the Palestinian Authority that they convinced themselves that Palestinian institutions would one day lead to a state. U.S.-built Palestinian institutions, like the economy, security forces, and the prime minister, are therefore premised on a questionable assumption: that what the Palestinian people really want is a functioning state side-by-side with Israel.

Statehood represents only one form of political organization; and as the E.U.’s bureaucratic elite will attest, the nation-state is not necessarily the best or even most progressive form of mass politics. But Washington does believe in old-fashioned nation-states, and it is U.S. money and power that gets to call the shots in the Middle East—until the region itself votes otherwise. Yet post-Saddam Iraq is clearly not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Rather, the wars in Iraq have revealed the sectarian nature of the region, where the designation “Arab” is meant to disguise that there is no unified Arab nation, but rather Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Kurds, Greek Orthodox, as well as Jews. Often these sects are at war with each other in various levels of intensity within what are now state borders, like Iraq or Lebanon. The French and British are blamed for the way they drew the post-World War I borders, but these accusations ignore the fact that all borders in the Middle East have always been random and malleable, depending on factors like conquest and population transfers, some voluntary and others not. For all the Middle East rhetoric about land as a birthright, the people of the region know when it’s time to go—because the land will no longer support them or some greater power is threatening to wipe them out.

Right now it is Middle East Christians who are leaving Iraq and Lebanon, but they won’t be the last. Consider the Druze, a sect that started in Egypt in the 11th century and moved to the Levant—Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, where their population is largest. Lebanon’s Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt believes that the sect’s time there is running out; Lebanon will be left to the Sunnis and Shiites to fight over, and eventually they will draw their own borders. The same will happen in Iraq, and perhaps much sooner, as the country is partitioned, while the Kurds will go their own way as soon as they believe they can weather likely wars with the Turks and Persians. Someday Alawi rule in Syria will come to an end, and if they’re lucky this minority sect considered heretical by the Sunnis will break away in time to the Mediterranean coast, where they’ve carved out an escape hatch state for themselves. The East Bankers of Jordan know that the West Bankers, the Palestinians, will outnumber them someday and Jordan will become either part or the whole of Palestine. In other words, Israel’s foreign minister is the one man in the Middle East who is publicly discussing an issue that everyone else in the region is also confronting in the wake of the Iraqi war—internal sectarian conflict where one side threatens to topple the political order. For example, despite the rhetoric of resistance, Hezbollah’s war with Israel on behalf of Iran and Syria that threatens to destroy the Lebanese state is no less treason than Azmi Bishara’s selling information to Damascus. The Arab regimes, regardless of their public criticism of the oath and Lieberman, are watching closely, because Israel’s treatment of the issue may well shape how they deal with their own sectarian issues—or at least we can hope they learn from Jerusalem rather than Saddam, who laid waste to Iraqi Shia and Kurds.

The choice the Israelis face is maybe not so tough, after all. And even if it is tough, so what? What Frenchman thinks that it is inherently part of his national identity to be fearful of war with Germany? And yet for reasons of geography, ethnicity, and history, it has been so. It would be nice if Palestinians wanted to make peace with Israel on terms that allowed for Israel’s secure existence as a Jewish state, but the recent historical record and regional dynamics offer little assurance that such a blessed day is coming anytime soon. If Zionism must not allow for transferring Arabs or ruling over them, then is it about Jews picking up and leaving when a Jewish state in the Middle East doesn’t look exactly like local democracy in Vermont? Based on the historical evidence, the Jews of Israel will continue to try their hardest to appease U.S. policymakers—hopefully led by those, like Avigdor Lieberman, who understand what it takes to maintain their national existence in the region where they have made their home.

• The best overview of what Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas might be hoping to get out of the talks comes courtesy Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz. If you read one article on the talks, read this one. [JPost]

• President Obama is yoking some of his prestige and credibility to the mother of all impossible conflicts. Why? [LAT]

• And how is he going to keep the American pro-Israel community onboard? [Politico]

• But he is getting praise for including Egypt and Jordan, whose heads of states will also be in Washington, D.C., this week. [Politico]

• Back to Israel, where the head of the main settlers’ organization vociferously opposes an extension of the settlement freeze, which is being requested of Netanyahu. The head of the main settlers’ organization’s previous job? Chief-of-staff to Netanyahu. [LAT]

• If you’re the Palestinian Authority, here is one way to keep Hamas from accusing you of selling out the cause by talking to the Israelis: Ban their clerics from preaching. No way that’ll backfire. [JPost]

• The European Union wants in on the talks. [AP/JPost]

• Egypt also wants the EU in on the talks. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. wants Syria to stay far, far away from the talks. [JPost]

• Last and least, a group of retired IDF generals enacted an amusing but probably altogether worthless negotiation simulation (say that ten times fast). [JPost]

Yesterday morning saw the biggest and deadliest Israeli-Lebanese skirmish since the 2006 war—the death toll included two Lebanese soldiers, one Lebanese journalist, and one senior Israeli reserves officer—and 36 hours later, things are nowhere near back to normal. Notably, Hezbollah forces were not directly involved; this was between Lebanon and Israel. Also notably, Lebanon started it. (Don’t believe me? Ask Stephen Walt.) The IDF has alleged that the provocation was “planned,” presumably in an effort to distract the world from the impending results of the international probe into the 2005 Syrian-backed assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Yesterday morning, Israel notified U.N. peacekeepers (UNIFIL) of the planned pruning of a cypress tree in Israeli territory but on the other side of the border fence with the aid of a crane stretching over the fence (see picture). Again, to be clear: The U.N. has reported that the tree is on the Israeli side of the Blue Line—the actual border—but on the other side of the border fence, and “Israel has every right to be on the north side of the fence” (the IDF has since occupied the zone, generally about 20 yards wide, between the fence and the border). Lebanon asked for a delay in the pruning, to which Israel agreed. All of this is run-of-the-mill: “Once a week, the army prunes bushes and trees on the border in coordination with UNIFIL, which coordinates with the Lebanese,” said an Israeli diplomatic spokesperson.

At some point, though, the Lebanese—who say the Israelis want the tree down because it is hindering their observation abilities—asserted that the tree was on Lebanese territory (Lebanon disputes parts of the U.N.-enforced Blue Line), fired warning shots, and then shot the dead Israeli commander and another Israeli soldier, who was seriously wounded. According to the IDF, the snipers aimed not at the soldiers doing the pruning but at those who appeared to be in command. Israel responded with tank artillery; Lebanon responded to that with a rocket-propelled grenade; Israel responded to that with further shelling and helicopter strikes.

“I see the Lebanese government as directly responsible for this violent provocation against Israel,” affirmed Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is convening his security cabinet today. Defense Minister Ehud Barak chimed in. A U.S. diplomatic spokesperson urged both parties to exercise “maximum restraint,” as did Jordan’s prime minister, who has volunteered to mediate.

Maybe relatedly, maybe not, before Tuesday’s conflict Lebanon had arrested a retired army colonel for allegedly spying for Israel. More clearly relatedly, Lebanon has since accused three more citizens of espionage.

Also in the category of maybe-or-maybe-not-related were the rocket from Gaza that hit Ashkelon last week and the rocket apparently fired from Egyptian Sinai that hit Eilat earlier this week. While Egypt had denied that the latter rocket, as well as another from Sinai that hit the Jordanian city of Aqaba, had originated in Egypt, an Egyptian spokesperson has since acknowledged that Hamas fired them from Sinai. Today, Netanyahu blamed those two attacks on Hamas, and instructed the group as well as Lebanon’s government: “Don’t test our determination to protect our citizens.”

As Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith reported in June, a fresh war between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah is generally seen as a when-not-if situation.

Clash Escalates Israeli, Lebanese Tensions [WSJ]
Peace Pruned [The Economist]
U.N. Says It Tried To Prevent Israel-Lebanon Clash [WSJ]
Bibi Slams Hamas for Eilat Attack, Vows To Strike Back [JTA]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]

• Another diplomatic dispute between them: Turkey summoned Israel’s ambassador in response to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comment that Turkey’s new spy chief is a “friend of Iran.” [Haaretz]

• Though it “took too long,” Israel deserves praises for cooperating with a U.N. flotilla probe, though, the New York Times worries, the panel’s mandate may be too narrow. [NYT]

• The probe’s head, former New Zealand prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, spoke about its “challenging and demanding task.” [Haaretz]

• 400 children in Israel who are essentially illegal immigrants are set for deportation, provoking a strong debate in the country. [NYT]

• Their investigation of the rocket apparently launched from Sinai yesterday demonstrates that while Israeli-Jordanian diplomatic relations have been cold, military cooperation has continued. [JPost]

• Egypt denied that any rockets were launched from its territory. [JPost]

• President Obama personally wrote to President Abbas warning that failure to accede to direct talks would cause a serious diplomatic breach. [WP]

• Now the administration is working the Israeli side for a trilateral meeting to establish a direct negotiations framework and discuss the September expiration of the settlement freeze. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Erich Steidtmann, who was under investigation for participating in massacres of Jews around Lublin, Poland, in 1943, died at 95. [NYT]

• Israel is appointing an officer to oversee efforts to try to minimize civilian casualties in combat zones. [LAT]

• British Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza “a prison camp” and advocated an end to the blockade while addressing a group of Turkish businessmen. [Haaretz]

• Six Israeli and one Romanian solder died in a helicopter crash in central Romania, where they were participating in joint military drills. [JTA]

• Oliver Stone apologized for his remarks yesterday about Jewish control of the media and clarified that the Holocaust was—indeed—“an atrocity.” [NYT]

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of Nextbook Press’ Betraying Spinoza) has a great essay on the brothers Singer (yup, there was another!). [The Book]

• Ian Buruma accuses Israel’s critics of holding it to a double standard. [Project Syndicate]

Nice song for a summer day:

• A profile of the American Council for Judaism, which urges the separation of church and state—church being the synagogue and the state being Israel. [NYT]

• Onetime Labor Party minister Yossi Beilin argues that Jordan should be allowed to enrich its own uranium. [NYT]

• Barry Rubin argues that the Obama administration, wittingly or not, is propping up Hamas’s rule in Gaza. [JPost]

• Marc Schneier, the impeccably first-named rabbi to the stars, is splitting from his fourth wife; he has been seen around town with a woman a couple decades his junior. [Page Six]

• Walter Shorenstein, a presidential adviser, top Democratic donor, and prominent San Francisco real estate maven, died at 95. [NYT]

A teaser trailer for The Social Network, the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), has dropped. If it feels a bit like Aaron Sorkin wrote the thing, well, um, he did!

But this is actually far more complicated than a simple expansionist statement directed against the Jewish state. In fact, Senator Taher al-Masri probably does not have Israel in mind at all.

Something you will hear from time to time on the Israeli and American right is that Jordan is the Palestinian state. Without getting into the historic or ethnic validity of that statement (to say nothing of its moral angle), for a time, Jordan maintained this line as well, until it strategically disowned it after 1987’s First Intifada. So Al-Masri’s statement is quite loaded: He may be implying that Jordan is the rightful home of the Palestinian people, and that the resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could involve Jordan’s annexation of Palestinian-inhabited land in the West Bank. Which, depending on where the line is drawn, could make many on the Israeli right—though probably not the religious right—quite happy.

In fact, it could—again, depending on where the lines are drawn—mesh with a recent statement from Al-Masri’s Israeli analog, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin. A Likudnik, Rivlin said that he would prefer a one-state solution with all Palestinian Israelis gaining full citizenship than a two-state solution. It is easy to see how Al-Masri and Rivlin are at direct odds here. It is likewise not particularly difficult to see how their visions could be reconciled.

To be very clear, and so you don’t email me angrily: I am not endorsing Jordanian annexation of the West Bank; personally, I believe there are massive practical and moral problems with it, not least that the West Bank Palestinians would likely find themselves hugely and permanently screwed over by it. However, the fact that a prominent Jordanian politician seemed to float the idea strikes me as strategically and especially politically significant. You may hear more about it, is all.

Jordanian Official Speaks of ‘State of Two Banks’ [Ynet]
Israeli Official: Accepting Palestinian States into Israel Better Than Two States [Haaretz]

I have come to meet with Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Jordan’s ambassador to Washington. The U.S.- and British-educated Prince Zeid, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Cambridge, is cut from similar cloth as his distant cousin, King Abdullah II. The model moderate Arab leader of a moderate Arab state, Abdullah is a regular star at international conferences like Davos, where the world’s ruling elite rubs elbows. Abdullah’s Hashemite ancestors have ruled Jordan since 1921, and while the country is one of the smallest Arab states and without the natural resources of its oil-rich Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, it nonetheless has a habit of shaping history, often to U.S. advantage.

The late King Hussein brokered many key deals and contacts between the United States and other Arab countries—and also with Israel, with whom he signed a peace treaty in 1994. He was succeeded in 1999 by his now 48-year-old son, who follows in his father’s footsteps in influencing U.S. understanding of the Middle East. It was after his July 2008 meeting with King Abdullah II that the soon-to-be president Barack Obama articulated his belief that the peace process is the chief issue in the Middle East. Obama spoke with great respect about the Jordanian monarch, calling him “as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as there is.” Obama continued: “One of the points that he made, and I think a lot of people made, is that we’ve got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The 46-year-old Prince Zeid, who attended that meeting between Obama and the king, is Jordan’s former representative to the United Nations and its current (non-resident) ambassador to Mexico, in addition to his post as U.S. envoy, which he has filled the last three and a half years, and so his range is considerably broader than for most within the Beltway. His demeanor, and the papers and books stacked on his desk, more suggest the habits of a prestigious academic than of a political operative. His credentials—his dissertation was on the diplomatic history of Jordan from 1956 to 1958—leave him well-connected not only in Washington social and diplomatic circles but also in intellectual ones. Friends from his graduate students days include Rob Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and former Bush National Security Council staffer Michael Doran.

“Jordan tends to send the best of the best from its Foreign Ministry to Washington,” says Ghaith al-Omari, advocacy director at the Washington-based American Task Force in Palestine. “They are very much invested in the U.S. relationship, and there is a very close connection between the embassy and Amman. It’s a very well-oiled and effective machine, and they expend energy in this town. They’re out there on the Hill, and dealing with Jewish groups, in a way that is unparalleled by most of the other Arab embassies.”

“In the Middle East we are so focused on our own issues,” says Prince Zeid. “Can you think of any signature initiative, either from the Arab government side or the Israeli government, that deals with some major global issue not directly connected to the Middle East? We’re not really full participants in these global discussions, so consumed are we by all of our issues in the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli crisis.”

“They are probably the Arab state most affected by developments on the ground in Palestine,” says Omari. “When things go badly there it affects Jordan very directly, with the possibility of it spilling over into Jordan.”

The Hashemites have found themselves in the middle of virtually every regional issue since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of the modern Arab state system. Run out of the Hejaz region by Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, the Hashemites were rewarded for their loyalty to the British crown and participation in the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. The Sharif Hussein’s son Feisal was made king of Syria, until he was deposed. He then moved on to Iraq where his descendants ruled until 1958. His brother Abdullah was made king of what was then known as Transjordan. Prince Zeid is the grandson of Sharif Hussein’s youngest son, Zeid, and his father is the head of the royal houses of Iraq and Syria. If Iraq were still a monarchy, Prince Zeid would be next in line to throne.

Iraq is a tricky subject for Jordan today. Amman proved a very helpful U.S. ally during the lead-up to the invasion and the war itself, and it paid the price for its loyalty in November 2005, when three Amman hotels were bombed by members of Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization. As Iraq has turned from a Sunni-ruled dictatorship into a Shia-majority democracy, the prospect of a bordering state that may well fall under Iranian influence is of grave concern to Jordan. It was King Abdullah who first warned in December 2004 of a Shia crescent spreading from Iran that might well change the regional balance toward a political culture of resistance and threaten moderates like the Hashemites.

“When we speak of Iran’s nuclear file,” Prince Zeid tells me, “we want to see a diplomatic solution. We are not in favor of a military solution, the region can’t take the stress.” However, Obama’s failed attempts to engage with Iran are making Jordan’s position less comfortable by the day. “Look at the Middle East,” says the ambassador. “If you take Europe in the 1920s, a perceptive observer would have known it was in trouble, and it’s the same if you look at our region now.” The White House’s very public determination to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq has given the neighbors of this Arab state leeway to meddle in Baghdad’s divided politics. “Iraq has to be given room to breathe when it comes to forming a government,” Prince Zeid says diplomatically when I ask him about Iranian and Syrian interference in Iraq. “It needs oxygen and space. As for the future, much will depend on where the Iraqi government is, regarding its strengths, when U.S. troops leave. We hope Iraq will come out united and strong.”

But because Iraq is not at the top of the Obama Administration’s Middle East agenda, Jordan has accordingly re-fitted its own priorities. “With the war on terror, the Bush Administration gave Jordan prominence,” says Hassan Barari, a Jordan specialist who has spent the last year in Amman researching a book. “So, Jordan got something like $1.2 to $1.3 billion a year,” a figure dramatically reduced in the last two years. The world’s economic downturn, then, is taking a toll on Jordan, as is the fact that the resistance bloc—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas—is seen to be winning while the moderate Arab camp is losing. “In Jordan, the opposition, like the Islamic Action Front, says that we should align ourselves with the resistance camp,” says Barari. When Jordan’s economy is not prospering, King Abdullah II has a harder time making his case for the strategic relationship with the United States. “What can change the dynamic and give the moderate camp a boost,” says Barari, “is proper engagement on the peace process.”

Talk of the Shia crescent has been replaced with concern for progress on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. “It’s an element of timing,” says the ambassador. “Unless the proximity talks succeed and we graduate into direct peace negotiations soon, the chance will slip, and there will be little or no possibility for peace.”

In fact, this is a refrain that’s been coming out of the Hashemite court for more than half a century. While the Obama Administration may have been convinced by the Hashemite king that the current status quo—meaning the lack of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace—is not sustainable, there was nothing new about Abdullah’s remarks to Obama. In other words, peace is neither closer nor further than it was 50 years ago when the Jordanian monarchs first sounded the alarm.

Nonetheless, it is easy to see that the Palestinian issue is truly central to the survival of the Hashemite regime in Jordan, a country that was carved out of the Palestine Mandate in 1920 by the British. When Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1948, it added hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the country’s original population. While there are no reliable figures, it is believed that a majority of Jordan’s residents are the descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, even as the political power is in the hands of what Jordanians call the “East Bankers.” The Jordanian tribes, who staff the higher echelons of the security services and the military, are loyal to the Hashemites, which is largely what has allowed them to stay in power despite rounds of violence between the two communities. In 1951, King Abdullah was murdered by a Palestinian militant. His grandson (and Abdullah II’s father), the revered King Hussein, is believed to have escaped several assassination attempts, as well as the eruption of the 1970-1971 Jordanian-Palestinian civil war known as Black September, in which Yasser Arafat tried to topple the Hashemites and transform Jordan into a Palestinian state.

Given this violent history, it is hard to square Prince Zeid’s contention that the region is more dangerous today because of Islamic extremism. Indeed, as the ambassador remarked to me, it was the act of a Christian extremist, Michael Dennis Rohan, whose arson of the Al-Aqsa mosque in 1969 nearly set fire to the region. “Can you imagine if something like that happened today?” Prince Zeid asks. He walks me over to a picture on his wall of the old city of Jerusalem and shows how easy it would be for someone to create mayhem here that would spread throughout the region. “The center of gravity,” he says, “is Jerusalem.”

The city held dear by the three major monotheistic religions is a special concern for the Jordanians, who held the eastern part of Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967 and administered the holy places until the city was reunified under Israeli control in the aftermath of the June Six Day War. Nonetheless, it appears that Amman is content to have retaken control of the Muslim Waqf on the Temple Mount along with religious administration of the Haram al-Sharif mosque from the Palestinian Authority in 2004. The city of Jerusalem is Israel’s problem now, one that, from Amman’s perspective, they’re not handling very well. “Continued Israel settlement activity around East Jerusalem, unless checked, will take Jerusalem off the table of negotiations,” says Prince Zeid. “If Jerusalem is not on the table, then there is no peace, period.”

While the ambassador understands that successive Israeli governments have been building in Jerusalem even during the Oslo years, he is worried about religious extremists who seem to be driving the political debate in Israel. “It’s extraordinary to be here in Washington,” he explains, “where there are seminars on Hezbollah and Hamas on a weekly basis, but not once have I seen a seminar devoted to the activities of the settler movement. On the Arab side, we deal with our extremist issues and discuss it. But in Washington you do not seem able to discuss the activities of the Israeli settler movement. Why?”

The Israeli government doesn’t consider building in Jerusalem the same as construction in West Bank settlements, and neither did the U.S. government, until the Obama administration decided to make it an issue—one that neither the United States nor Jordan, nor even the Palestinian Authority, has expressed previously—that construction in Jerusalem is a barrier to negotiations.

“If the Israelis just want to take all of Jerusalem,” Prince Zeid answers, “such action will produce an acute crisis. No two-state solution will result. Israel then has to figure out how to deal with its demographic realities.” He adds, “specifically, if there’s no peace on the horizon. Israel will have to come to terms with its own demographic reality of ruling over some 5 million Arabs, whose numbers will only increase. Will it give all of them rights equal to those enjoyed by its Israeli citizens or not?”

What if there is a deal over Jerusalem? What if there’s peace? What happens if the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority’s U.S.-trained security forces are incapable or unwilling to put down Hamas? Isn’t that a problem for Jordan? “No,” says the ambassador. “First of all, we place our faith in the Palestinian Authority, but whatever happens in the future, so long as East Jerusalem is occupied by Israel, it is Israel, and not Jordan, that will always be the prime target for Hamas or any other resistance movement.”

This is true, of course, at least as long as the Arab moderates can hold off the resistance bloc. However, an Iranian nuclear bomb may well change the equation, and in the worst-case scenario, in which Washington forfeits its regional position, the Hashemites will be caught between aligning themselves with the resistance camp or losing the throne. Regardless, in the meantime, Jordan no less than Israel has its own demographic issues with the Palestinians. Therefore, the Jordanians have as much invested in the project of a Palestinian state as Israel does.

The question then is, what does this mean for Amman? The Jordanians may find the prospect of taking authority over the West Bank unfeasible, but it is no more distasteful than Hamas on their border. A Palestinian state on the West Bank patrolled by security forces trained by the United States, and underwritten by Amman, would work fine for everyone—except for the sticky issue of Jerusalem. As Prince Zeid notes, Jerusalem is the center of gravity—which is why focusing on the city is a recipe for disaster. Worse yet for the Jordanians and the security of their regime is a Palestine born out of an American departure from the region and Israeli weakness.

• Before departing New York, President Ahmadinejad pledged that new sanctions wouldn’t halt Iran’s nuclear development—though they will, he added, kill any chance at reconciliation with the United States. [WSJ]

• Both Egypt and Jordan argued that a nuclear-free Mideast, which a 1995 U.N. resolution calls for, would make dealing with Iran easier. The only (unofficially) nuclear state in the Mideast is, of course, Israel. [JPost]

• President Obama had lunch at the White House with Elie Wiesel yesterday, in what is being seens as the most blatant symbol yet of the administration’s “charm offensive” toward American Jews and Israelis. [NYT]

• More charm: An Obama national security official assured the Anti-Defamation League that the administration does not overly “link” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to others in the region. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Israel reportedly tried and failed to convince Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to make aliyah and serve as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. [JTA/Forward]

• The Israeli leadership is taking steps to resolve its tensions with America. [NYT]

• Jordanian King Abdullah II accused Israel of trying to cleanse Jerusalem of Arabs. [Haaretz]

• Mazel tov to Avner Netanyahu, the 15-year-old son of Israel’s prime minister: After winning the Jerusalem competition last month, he won the Israel-wide Bible Quiz. He will compete in the world championships, in Jerusalem, in several weeks. [Arutz Sheva]

• The New York Times’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnists, Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd, both wrote about Israel today (and generally took the administration’s side). [NYT/NYT]

• Do you actually want to live in one of those planned East Jerusalem homes? Here’s how. [Slate]

Jam band Phish, two of whose four members are Jewish, announced its summer tour yesterday. They’ll be hitting many cities; here they are covering Talking Heads’s “Cities”.

• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 am post will have much more. [LAT]

• While the main victors in France’s regional elections were leftist parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right National Front won a higher-than-expected 12 percent. Among other provocations, Le Pen has minimized the Holocaust. [JPost]

• The IDF chief-of-staff is in Turkey on a fence-mending visit. [Haaretz]

• Even as U.S. officials assert no tolerance for Iranian nuclear weapons, America has already, quietly, initiated containment policies. [NYT]

• The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket was announced. Maccabi USA Head Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers drew a six seed and will play San Diego State Thursday evening. [ESPN]

The most interesting tidbit today in the continuing story of the assassination, likely by Mossad, of Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was that one Hamas official told an Arabic-language paper that his group believes an Arab government was behind the killing. (This is less surprising than it may sound: Hamas’s initial investigation concluded the same thing.) Specifically, the Hamas official told the paper that al-Mabhouh had been tracked by Jordanian and Egyptian agents. Let’s also not forget about the two ex-members of Fatah who were arrested: two men who now work for a construction company owned by Muhammad Dahlan, a powerful Palestinian Authority official who in the past has been linked to efforts to take down Hamas’s Gaza leadership. And let’s also not forget that the wide consensus remains that the Mossad was, at least, the prime mover behind the killing.

Other than that, the big news is Dubai’s first sanction: Israeli dual nationals, even those who carry non-Israeli passports, are now barred from entering. According to the Dubai police chief, Israelis not carrying Israeli passports will be detected by “physical features and the way they speak.” By “the way they speak,” I assume he means those talking in Hebrew. As for “physical features”? Up yours too, buddy.

Finally, the intrigue of the case has officially hit the Internet. Google searches of “Mossad” have increased fourfold in the past month. And, if you like, you can join the Facebook group I Was Also Part of the Dubai Assassination Squad. Though don’t be surprised if the Dubai police chief proceeds to bar you from his city, too.

Hamas: Jordan or Egypt Likely Behind Dubai Hit [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]
Dubai Restricts Israeli Entry After Killing [WSJ]