Hamas and Jordan

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

This paper focuses on the relationship between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Jordanian regime, particularly after Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian legislative elections and its formation of a Palestinian government. This relationship has taken on security and political dimensions that are tense to some degree, marked by accusations and counter-accusations and media friction, and has been shaped by regional and international factors. It has had repercussions for the Palestinian cause as a whole, and specifically for the standing of the Palestinian-Israeli agreements, the readiness to accept and implement them in line with the vision of the international Quartet, and the forces that contributed, directly and indirectly, to the signing of those agreements.

Jordan’s relationship with any official or unofficial Palestinian party takes on special importance because of the particular nature of the relationship between the Jordanian and Palestinian peoples, whom many political, academic, and social quarters regard as a single people. Official Jordanian accord with the various Palestinian parties, and especially the large factions, is reflected positively in the ordinary, everyday relations between the two peoples, and the reverse is equally true; and if signs of tension appear in the relationship, it is the people on both banks of the river who pay the price. And since Hamas is a widely spread organization with broad influence, the consequences of its relationship with the Jordanian regime show up clearly in the course of people’s daily lives.

The Dialectical Relationship

Political analysis cannot come reasonably close to the heart of the truth except by understanding and grasping the dialectical relationships among the various political parties and entities, because these relationships form the general beacon that guides the day-to-day and long-term general policy of a party, a state, or an entity. The dialectical relationship pre-determines the general direction of policies even if they appear, situationally, to be contradictory, and it gives an advance picture of the various expected positions on the various issues raised and anticipated.

It is not easy, for example, for a holder of despotic or one-man authority to accept an education system that cultivates in the citizen a love of freedom and a desire to seize it, because in doing so he would be directly contributing to the destruction of his own rule. The dialectical relationship between despotism and education is indoctrination, such that the horizon of the one being educated remains confined to a particular corner that glorifies the despot, on the premise that he is the tender father in whose absence the country would be lost and the people would go hungry.

Hamas is a movement of change because it is a resistance movement; it considers negotiating with Israel religiously forbidden, holds fast to Palestine from the river to the sea, and views the current Arab regimes not as regimes of liberation but as regimes that make peace with Israel and normalize relations with it. Hamas looks toward changing conditions in the Arab homeland, while Israel works hard to preserve the stability of the Arab regimes. The Arab regimes do not want change and resist everyone who tries to bring it about. Dialectically, Israel is in harmony, or alliance, or at least non-hostility, with the Arab regimes, while Hamas is the opposite, seeing change in the Arab arena as necessary in order to change the facts prevailing in Palestine. That is to say, Hamas stands in dialectical contradiction with most, if not all, of the Arab regimes, and especially with the Arab regimes surrounding Israel that maintain relations with it.

The meaning is that the Jordanian regime, dialectically, cannot accept Hamas, and is likely to contribute to waging war against it in order to be rid of it; and if the relationship sometimes appears out of step with this dialectic, that is due to circumstantial reasons that quickly dissipate as the circumstances themselves dissipate.

Historical Background

The present is never entirely separate from the past, and any attempt to predict the future cannot succeed if it is cut off from the historical development of social and human phenomena. The Hamas-Jordanian relationship cannot be separated from the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and Jordan, and it also remains within the bounds of what the Jordanian regime deems things ought to be at the local and regional levels. For this reason, I point here briefly to the doctrinal and quasi-doctrinal (tribal) elements upon which this mutual relationship was built:

The Jordanian Regime

The Jordanian political system is a tribal system that drew its legitimacy from the tribal origin of the Hashemite regime, and from the approval of the British colonial power, which worked together with others, particularly France, to arrange the political affairs of Greater Syria and Iraq; it is a regime now sponsored by the Western states, chiefly the United States, in terms of political and financial stability, which work to preserve its continuation. It is a regime that clings to tribal values that guarantee it, to some degree, the continuation of its rule, and it generally aligns with the general thrust of Western policy in the region, and often with its particulars as well.

The Jordanian regime tries to reconcile tribal values with the values of institutional and political modernization. It does not want to appear before the world as a purely tribal regime that does not embrace democratic foundations of governance, nor does it wish to democratize the state to the point of losing its grip on power, or perhaps the continuation of its rule. It allows elections to be held, but only within a formula that guarantees the tribal regime’s continuity, and it works to modernize institutions while taking care that their administrations are formed of those loyal to the regime. In general, the regime relies for its survival on loyalty, not on belonging.

Hamas

Hamas is a resistance movement that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, but it differs from it in that it relies on resistance to restore Palestinian rights. The Muslim Brotherhood movement, on the whole, is not a confrontational movement; it relies on reforming the individual and appeasing regimes as far as possible in order to reach an Islamic state. The movement has a strategic goal of establishing the rule of God on earth, which requires establishing an Islamic state wherever possible. Hamas departed from this by adopting resistance as a method of confronting Israel, for circumstantial rather than doctrinal or methodological reasons — that is, the existence of Israel made the emergence of Hamas inevitable, and its adoption of this method does not mean that the Muslim Brotherhood movement has changed its own methodology for achieving its goals.

Repulsion and Attraction

Just as the Muslim Brotherhood movement looks toward establishing an Islamic state, the Jordanian regime looks toward the continuation of its own rule; that is, each side negates the other at the strategic level. Just as the Hamas movement is bound up with the Muslim Brotherhood group, the Jordanian regime is bound up with those who brought it into being and provide it with protection — namely the West, foremost among them the United States, and Israel. The Islamic state represents a negation of all the Arab regimes, including the Jordanian regime, and Israel is a major guarantee for many Arab regimes, chief among them the Jordanian regime. It is therefore not difficult to conclude that many Arab regimes, including the Jordanian regime, are allied in one way or another with Israel, from which Hamas is trying to restore Palestinian rights.

Despite the strategic repulsion between the Jordanian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, and by extension Hamas, day-to-day and situational relations swing up and down depending on the issues of the moment. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood enjoyed the Jordanian regime’s permission to operate in the Jordanian arena at a time when party activity was banned in Jordan, during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Muslim Brotherhood had open offices in Jordan, and the Jordanian regime did not pursue it; matters went so far that members of the group, or those close to it, such as Dr. Ishaq al-Farhan, rose to important positions in the state. The Jordanian regime also enjoyed the Muslim Brotherhood’s support in the 1950s, when the regime came under severe pressure from the Baath Party that nearly toppled its foundations. The Muslim Brotherhood took to the Jordanian street in confrontation with the Baath Party and supported the regime.

Furthermore, the period of the 1950s and 1960s brought the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jordanian regime together in confrontation with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the pan-Arab nationalist movement in general. The Jordanian regime is a state-particularist regime hostile to pan-Arab nationalism and Arab unity, even though it constantly proclaims its concern for an undefined Arab solidarity, while the Muslim Brotherhood stood, on doctrinal grounds, against the nationalist idea. This conflict of goals did not prevent the two from standing together when circumstances called for it.

The Jordanian regime is not a religious regime, nor does it aspire to apply the foundations of the Islamic religion in governance, but it is not hostile to religion so long as religion remains confined to the sphere of the clerical and the devotional. The regime is quite willing to bring clerics close to the court, to contribute to building magnificent mosques, and to have its own pillars perform certain public prayers and arrange Ramadan iftar banquets, but it has no willingness whatsoever to make peace with religious figures who try to politicize the Islamic idea so that it becomes a way of life for the state. For this reason the regime has moved to pursue those who step outside the clerical sphere (that is, outside the performance of rituals, carrying prayer beads, and the constant murmuring of supplications), even if they belong to the Muslim Brotherhood itself, such as Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who was dismissed from his post as a professor at the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Jordan.

The Muslim Brotherhood clashed with the Jordanian regime after the regime decided to hold general legislative elections. The Brotherhood decided to contest the elections with an Islamic program, and won a fair number of parliamentary seats. The regime was not oblivious to this, and its security services worked to harass members of parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood, and a number of them were subjected to pursuit, such as Dr. Abd al-Mun’im Abu Zant. More importantly, the regime amended the electoral system in a way that limited the membership of Palestinians and Islamists in parliament, while bolstering the presence of Jordanian clan or tribal representation. The regime went beyond the proper bounds of the electoral principles in this system, and found understanding from the Western states, chiefly the United States.

The official Jordanian move produced a political effect that expanded the presence of tribal figures in parliament at the expense of the popular weight and presence enjoyed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had by then taken the name of the Islamic Action Front. The Front further intensified the regime’s discomfort with it when it expressed its support for Hamas’s military activity against the Israeli occupation. Of course, the regime cannot openly declare this issue, but it is fully aware that such a position works in favor of the resistance of those who stand against it. Hamas carried out numerous martyrdom operations, and, together with other Palestinian forces, managed to obstruct the Oslo Accords and to significantly affect Palestinian cooperation with Israelis.

The Position Toward Israel

The Jordanian regime has maintained good relations with the Zionist movement, and subsequently with Israel, from the establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan up to the present day. A number of Zionist movement leaders visited Emir Abdullah before 1948, and described the Emir as hospitable. King Hussein remained faithful to this relationship, and admitted at a late stage that he used to visit Israel from time to time. I recall that one of my colleagues at the University of Jordan was once imprisoned for publishing an article in the Jordanian newspaper al-Ra’i, reprinted from a Palestinian newspaper, in which he explained the King’s visits to Israel. They punished a university professor who specialized in economics for publishing an article they claimed was full of lies and cast doubt upon the King. But the King admitted in the 1990s to what he had been doing, and I do not know whether the regime ever apologized to my colleague the doctor or paid him any compensation.

…-and Syria were going to wage a war on Israel, though he said he had not been informed of the exact date of the war. Of course, he did not know that date. Nor was the matter free of secret Israeli visits to Jordan to meet with Jordanian officials and other Arabs.

The Jordanian regime began its process of normalization with Israel very early on, through relations in various fields, foremost among them the political field. Some of the large landowners in Jordan took the initiative early on to import agricultural materials and equipment, such as greenhouses, from Israel, and Israeli goods have long entered the Jordanian market under Palestinian labels. After the Oslo Accords, the regime moved quickly to sign a peace treaty with Israel, even though it bore practical and moral responsibility for the fall of the West Bank in 1967.

Jordan’s relationship with Israel is consistent with what I mentioned above — that the regime’s security and continuation rest upon the Western states and upon Israel, which has long declared that it will not allow the regime in Jordan to fall. This is an objective matter, a static relationship that requires no reflection or scrutiny. There is no one in the international arena who provides continuous money and protection for free, and whoever holds the lower hand must offer something in return. Israel wants peace with the Arabs, recognition, and normalization, and subsequently the resettlement of Palestinian refugees and their compensation with a small sum for the damages they have suffered. Israel and America support every Arab regime that follows the guidance of Israeli demands, and punish every regime that deviates.

As for the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel did not treat the group with hostility when it was a mosque group rather than a mobilizing group. The group was automatically accepted and faced no harassment when it remained clerical, concerned only with rituals and supplications, but the eyes of the Israeli occupation opened wide to it once Hamas emerged from within it or out of it. The Israeli occupation had previously arrested a number of Brotherhood leaders before Hamas existed, such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, but that was the pursuit of individuals, not the pursuit of an organization.

The occupation felt a kind of danger with the emergence of Hamas as a major force on the Palestinian scene in 1987, but it turned something of a blind eye to its activities, hoping that its emergence would lead to a conflict between it and the Fatah movement. The occupation went ahead and arrested a number of the movement’s members, but it was not harsh, and it partially opened the field for it to compete with Fatah. This hope on the part of the occupation dissipated after Hamas carried out military operations against Israel, including the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers, and after it deported more than 400 Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders to southern Lebanon in 1992. Tension continued to escalate between Hamas and Israel until it reached its peak with the martyrdom operations of 1996.

In 1996, America brought together thirty-two states in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to deliberate on the most effective ways to besiege Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A number of Arab states, including Jordan, attended the conference, and agreed to classify Hamas as a terrorist movement, and to pursue its members and any funds that might reach them. The Jordanian regime contributed directly to the siege on Hamas’s members, worked to pursue its supporters and put pressure on them, and tightened its monitoring of the movement of funds through Jordanian banks.

The Jordanian regime then went on the attack against the Hamas leaders present in Jordan, and decided to expel them; the state of Qatar received them. The regime had a pretext under Jordanian law, namely that a Jordanian, such as Khaled Mashal, could not be a member of a non-Jordanian organization such as the Hamas movement. But this law is applied selectively, not absolutely. Freemasonry, for example, is not a Jordanian movement, yet a Jordanian is permitted to be a member of it and to carry out its activities openly on Jordanian soil. It is also well known that the American Central Intelligence Agency is active in Jordan, and the King himself has admitted that he provided it with services in exchange for funds that the Jordanian people needed.

In return, King Hussein insisted to Israel on the necessity of sending an antidote for the chemical agent with which Khaled Mashal had been injected in Jordan by Israeli intelligence agents, and insisted on the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from Israeli prison in exchange for the release of the two intelligence agents involved in poisoning Mashal. This kind of tactical step is not unfamiliar to the Jordanian regime, which regarded it as an act that would cover over its strategic positions toward Israel and the Palestinian cause. Such a tactic usually receives very wide media coverage, full of talk about the regime’s concern for the people of Palestine and its commitment to the requirements of sincere relations with its Palestinian brethren.

After Hamas’s Victory

It was not at all difficult for any political analyst following the foundations of the Jordanian regime’s emergence and the elements underlying its continuation to conclude that the regime would not welcome Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, and that it would turn against it with the aim of bringing down its government and returning the Palestinian clock to Fatah rule. The Fatah movement carries the American-Zionist project, which has no relation to the project of the Palestine Liberation Organization or to any other project pursued by any Palestinian faction, and it led the Palestinian people toward accepting the Israeli proposal of establishing a Palestinian authority tied by security coordination to Israel, and turning the Palestinian cause into a humanitarian issue about people searching for a loaf of bread. Hamas’s project, as set out in its charter, is in contradiction with Jordanian policy and with the policy of most Arab regimes.

The political analyst may not be able to predict the details of Jordan’s day-to-day measures expressing the regime’s rejection of the election results, but he can predict, without doubt, the general drift of policy. The Jordanian regime refused to receive Haniyeh, Jordanian intelligence pulled out from its drawers the matter of Hamas smuggling weapons into Jordan, claiming they were to be used against the regime, prevented many officials in the Hamas government from traveling to Jordan or crossing Jordanian territory, contributed to the financial siege imposed on the Hamas government, and received Israeli officials and officials from the Palestinian presidency. And amid this hostility, as is the custom of most Arab regimes, the regime took care to wrap its hostile intervention against Hamas in the sending of food and medical aid to the Palestinian people, and gave this aid, as is also customary, wide media coverage, repeating that it was doing so out of its national commitment and its concern for its suffering Palestinian brethren.

For its part, Hamas realized that most Arab regimes would not be satisfied with it unless it accepted the conditions of the international Quartet, represented by recognizing Israel, abandoning resistance entirely, and accepting the agreements and international resolutions concerning the Palestinian cause, and that the pressures upon it would persist so long as it held fast to its charter and its strategic lines. It therefore tried to maneuver around this as much as possible. For example, Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers appeared on the day of taking the oath before the President of the Authority wearing red ties and official Western suits. This constituted a message to the Western world, Israel, and their Arab followers, to the effect that Hamas was prepared to enter diplomatic halls and back rooms, and that the world was required to deal with it. This gesture proved of no use, nor did any gesture like it.

Hamas repeated its position that it would not stand in Abbas’s way as he continued negotiations, that he represented Palestinian legitimacy, and that it had absolutely no objection to the continuation of what he and his companions had begun in Madrid and then in Oslo. It said that it would attend to internal affairs and leave the external political arena to the President of the Authority. It also repeated its call for the necessity of forming a national unity government with the Fatah movement and other Palestinian factions.

Hamas accepted the National Reconciliation Document issued by the Palestinian prisoners in the prisons of the Zionist occupation, even though the document violates Hamas’s charter in that it affirms the path of negotiations and acceptance of the signed agreements, and it went through long rounds of dialogue in order for Fatah to join the government. Its calls culminated in its acceptance of the Mecca Agreement, which stipulated acceptance of the international resolutions concerning the Palestinian cause and acceptance of the agreements with Israel.

The Jordanian regime praised the Mecca Agreement signed by both Fatah and Hamas, and affirmed its respect for Hamas’s acceptance of the international resolutions and the agreements anticipated with Israel. The regime backed the national unity government that emerged from the agreement, and declared that it would support it and try to lift the international siege from it. But this government did not take a single step forward, because of Israel’s and the Western states’ reservations about it, and the inability of the Arabs to take steps that would reinforce Palestinian accord. The Western-Israeli reservation was far stronger than all the Arab expressions of welcome, which were not backed by any firm political decisions.

After Hamas’s Takeover of Gaza

The Jordanian regime rejected what Hamas did in taking control of the Palestinian security services in the Gaza Strip, and, subsequently, taking control of the entire Strip. The Jordanian newspapers, which are considered an echo of the regime, considered what Hamas did a coup against legitimacy, and demanded that the movement retreat from what it had done, on the premise that the Palestinian presidency, not the legislative council, constitutes the head of Palestinian legitimacy. But the regime called for the necessity of returning to Palestinian-Palestinian dialogue as a practical alternative to an atmosphere of infighting and bloody disputes.

In practical terms, it was clear that the regime stood firmly against the Hamas movement, in favor of the Palestinian presidency. The gate of the Jordanian royal palace remained open to the Palestinian president and firmly shut to the leaders of the Hamas movement; Jordan remained a participant in the financial siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, and Jordanian diplomats worked actively with Egyptian diplomats in contacting Israel and the United States, searching for a way out of a new impasse into which the negotiating process had fallen. More importantly, talk has circulated about the possible bringing in of the Palestinian Badr Forces stationed in Jordan into the West Bank, to help protect the Palestinian presidency and pursue the Hamas movement. It is true that these forces are Palestinian, but it is well known that they are subject to the mood of the regime, and their leaders are close to the Jordanian security services — meaning that they hold no decision independent of the regime’s will. These forces have not been brought in so far, and I do not think they will be moved to the West Bank, because their organizational and combat fragility resembles the fragility of the Palestinian security services, and they could not withstand the Hamas movement.

That said, the regime is likely to send provisions and medicine to the Strip under the banner of brotherhood and shared destiny, as is its custom. The regime is careful to wrap its strategic positions in tactical ones, so that it does not appear to be coordinating its steps with Israel, or receiving orders from the United States.

Conclusion

Hamas is an Islamic movement that wants to establish the rule of God on earth, but it is not prepared to provoke the world, particularly the Arab countries, against it, and it always tries to wear the garb of moderation in accepting the other and holding fast to the democratic option. It clings to tactics in order to reach its strategic goal. From this standpoint, the parent movement did not work against the Jordanian regime, and Hamas did not work against it either. But the Jordanian regime cannot tolerate the strategy of change to which Hamas holds fast, just as the countries that protect it, chief among them Israel and America, cannot allow it to be tolerant. The result is an unavoidable collision, which may be dialectical, or bloody, or one of pressure.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “حماس والأردن” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.