The Weakness of the Jordanian Opposition

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It is noticeable that the Jordanian opposition finds no target before it but the prime minister, upon whom it pours out the full force of its anger, demanding his resignation. The opposition invokes subsidiary headings, such as fighting corruption or amending the electoral law, but the hapless prime minister always ends up standing at the mouth of the cannon. The king has, in the past, dismissed prime ministers in response to the opposition’s demands, and brought in new ones, but nothing has changed, and I do not see that anything will change even if the prime minister is replaced every single day.

The Jordanian prime minister is not the one who makes decisions, nor the one who charts the country’s general policy; he is merely an official like any other official, holding an executive job title. He is a senior official with social influence, but he holds no political or economic influence, unless he happens to be among the wealthy men who carry weight in their own right. He possesses no power to change anything beyond executive-administrative matters of a daily, not strategic, character. It is clear that the Jordanian opposition treats him as an easy target and dares to confront him, using its attacks on him to justify its own existence.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, like most Arab states, is sovereign only at the formal, protocol level, and holds no power to take independent decisions on substantive or strategic matters. For instance, it cannot amend the electoral law unless permitted to do so, since a law genuinely committed to democracy would change the political equation in Jordan, particularly with respect to Israel; it cannot decide to make the office of king a purely ceremonial one; it cannot even decide to link Jordan’s electricity grid to a regional network without permission. And I go further still: it cannot drill artesian wells in the Jordan Valley or on the western slopes of the Salt Mountains without Israel’s permission.

Jordan’s situation is the situation of the Palestinian Authority: its decisions never stray from the will of its financier, nor from the purpose for which it was established. The Jordanian entity, like the Palestinian entity, was established in order to defend Israel’s security and manage the daily, civil life of the citizens in Jordan and in the land occupied in ‘67. Jordan receives money from Western states to cover the large deficit in government expenditure, as does the Palestinian Authority, and civil-servant salaries remain, to a considerable degree, contingent on the will of an outside party whose political and security demands never end.

Yet it is noticeable that American and Israeli demands on Jordan are calibrated to the fragility of the monarchy’s position, and Jordan is not burdened, in public matters, in a way that would accelerate the regime’s collapse. It was said, for instance, that Jordan remained neutral regarding the war on Iraq in 2003, but the practical reality contradicted the media narrative: America used Jordanian airspace to strike Iraq, and American forces remain present in Jordan to this day.

Here lies the exact problem in Jordan. Should the Jordanian opposition struggle against a prime minister who holds no power of decision, or against whoever actually makes the decisions and holds the real authority to carry them out? The correct answer is that the opposition should stand against whoever holds the decision — and since the decision-maker is external, or fortified inside the American embassy in Amman, the opposition’s stand ought to be against the instruments of the Americans and the Israelis. These instruments break down into:

The official level, which includes the king, the Jordanian intelligence apparatus, and certain military leaderships;

The Jordanian Masonic movement, which forms part of the worldwide Masonic movement. It is well known that Jordan teems with Freemasons, and that obtaining a senior position in the state generally requires Masonic membership. Most of the major economists, the owners of capital, the leading media figures, and a large number of professionals — lawyers, engineers, doctors, academics — belong to the Masonic movement. The Masonic movement is the strongest arm in the world for supporting Israel;

The foolish Jordanian-Palestinian disputes manufactured by the decision-maker, carried out through his instruments within both the Jordanian and Palestinian leaderships.

The instruments of the official level are the openly acknowledged decision-makers, dictating their will to the prime minister; the Masonic movement, whose membership is drawn mostly from Palestinians, wields influence culturally, in the media, and economically, and is able to manufacture public opinion and cast a veil over people’s eyes and minds. The members of this movement are influential, powerful figures, and they are the leaders of normalization with Israel.

The Jordanian regime has worked to strip Jordanians of their lands and transfer them to Palestinians, so as to keep Jordanians enslaved to their salaries, unwavering in their support for the king, and to keep Palestinians distracted with money, diverted away from the cause of Palestine. In this way, governance remains in American hands, fronted by a royal-intelligence facade; the economy remains in the hands of Palestinians who have chosen the American line; while Jordanians and the rest of the Palestinians remain enslaved — Jordanians enslaved to government jobs, the security apparatuses and the army chief among them, and poor Palestinians enslaved to hard labor and menial jobs.

And then comes the turn of the fools among the enslaved, who harbor suspicions against one another, one taking pride in the heritage of cooking mulukhiyya, another in the making of jameed, while the conflict between them persists — and they are the victims of it.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “ضعف المعارضة الأردنية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.