By banning the Muslim Brotherhood to placate Trump, Jordan treads a dangerous path
Modern history is littered with acts of tribute that would make imperial Rome proud.
When Vladimir Putin cut the oligarchs down to size by imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of his colleagues presented the Russian state, and by implication the president himself, with a Faberge egg.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer turns out to be a consummate groveller before US President Donald Trump.
First came the announcement of a second state visit for Trump, who has a thing about the British royals. Now Starmer is exploring whether golf bosses could host the 2028 Open championship at Turnberry, which Trump owns. Would Starmer be his caddy, the Guardian asked?
In the same vein, King Abdullah of Jordan could have presented Trump with a carpet or a pair of falcons. But he decided on something far more effective: he banned the Muslim Brotherhood.
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The reasons for placating Trump are powerful. Jordan is among the world’s largest recipients of US aid, which Trump has already once threatened to cut. Trump also selected Eric Trager, a hawk on Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, as Middle East adviser on his National Security Council.
In his first term, Trump toyed with the idea of banning the Brotherhood in the US, and he may well do so in this term. Abdullah’s move firmly places Jordan in the western camp’s push against political Islam.
The move has already paid off. Millions of US dollars for Jordan’s largest desalination plant, which dried up when Trump dramatically cut the foreign aid budget, have been restored, Reuters reports.
Domestically, however, this move is more of a gamble. In banning an organisation that has been around officially in the kingdom since 1945, Abdullah has crossed a line that his father, King Hussein, was careful not to transgress in 47 years of rule.
Hussein's balancing act
Hussein’s relationship with the Brotherhood was complex, but he was a master of balancing global alliances with the challenges he faced domestically. His son has fewer such gifts.
The Brotherhood stood by Hussein in moments of personal peril, including when a 1957 coup attempt by Nasser-inspired nationalists and leftists failed, or in 1970, when Jordan was on the brink of civil war in its fight with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The Brotherhood had a battalion alongside Palestinian forces, but they took no part in the conflict itself.
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was another crisis for the king. Hussein was an ally of Saddam, but he was against the invasion. As a consequence, Jordan suffered from the pressure the West put on it.
To face this huge challenge, Hussein was keen to keep the unity of his people behind him, so he formed a government in which five ministers were from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hussein saw the Brotherhood as a safety valve, defusing anger in the nation at a time of big conflicts
But there were conflicts, too. The Brotherhood opposed Jordan joining the Baghdad Pact, one of many ill-fated attempts to start a regional Nato in 1955. It was also against Hussein’s best-known foreign policy move, the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel.
But Hussein never banned the group, even when he was pressured to do so by Arab leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. Hussein was no sympathiser and always had his own vision of Palestine. But he realised the Brotherhood was peaceful, reformist, and could play an important role for him.
Hussein saw the Brotherhood as a safety valve, defusing anger in the nation at a time of big conflicts. It also had one asset he cherished: the Brotherhood straddled the Palestinian-Jordanian divide within the kingdom.
Hussein’s relationship with Hamas was even more interesting. When Hamas became a power in Palestine during the First Intifada, Hussein was interested in developing a relationship. He allowed Hamas to open offices in Amman. In 1997, Hussein agreed to take Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk after 22 months in prison in the US.
Famously, when Mossad attempted to poison Hamas’s Khaled Meshaal on the streets of Amman, Hussein demanded the antidote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatening to sever diplomatic relations and put the Israeli perpetrators on trial.
He even strong-armed Netanyahu into releasing Hamas’s spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin. No other Arab leader has managed to do this with Israel.
Abdullah's mistake
Under Abdullah, relations with the Brotherhood went into steady decline.
Within months of becoming king in 1999, he expelled Hamas and agreed with the Qataris that their political bureau should move to Doha. He later stripped the Brotherhood’s charitable status and stopped their work.
He thought he had weakened the Brotherhood to the point where he could contain it. It is a mistake he has made frequently, even though the Brotherhood has never challenged the regime, even when that was happening around the Arab world.
The Brotherhood did not raise the ceiling of its demands and chants during the Arab Spring. It did not call for the overthrow of the regime, unlike its cousins in Egypt and Tunisia.
The regime’s other tactic was to encourage splits. In 2015, Jordan granted a licence to a splinter group led by Abdul Majid Thuneibat under the name of the Muslim Brotherhood Association, making the original group unlicensed. It has used “licences” to crack down on the media arm of the affiliated political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF).
But each time Abdullah thought he had political Islamists licked, they demonstrated their popularity.
The Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 turbocharged support for al-Qassam Brigades across Jordan, but especially among the tribes and East Bankers. A year later, the IAF secured 31 out of 138 seats, making it the biggest party in parliament, even as Brotherhood members have been targeted for arrest.
In recent days, journalists, commentators and former officials have all called for the Brotherhood to be banned. The Brotherhood’s calls to head towards the border and to besiege the Israeli embassy have been special irritants to the regime.
But no media campaign is launched in Jordan without someone planning it. There is nothing spontaneous about such campaigns. Just like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, no writer in Jordan is truly free to say what they want - and if they do, it’s not for long.
What we are seeing is not a popular campaign against the Brotherhood, but rather something that has been planned for a long time.
Two currents
There have always been two currents of thinking in the royal court and defence establishment.
The first is to see Israel as Jordan’s existential enemy. This has been loudly voiced by Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, who declared that Israel had killed 30 years of effort to convince people that peace is possible.
In the same vein, well-placed sources told Middle East Eye’s Peter Oborne that Jordan was “ready for war” if Israel forcibly expelled Palestinians into its territory. One source said that Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of Palestinians was an “existential issue” for both Jordan and the Hashemite dynasty, noting that the country is the third-poorest in terms of water in the world.
The same current can be seen in other, less official ways. When Maher al-Jazi, a retired Jordanian soldier, killed three Israelis in September 2024 at the border crossing between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, members of the army went to the family’s mourning ceremony in uniform.
The second current is to see Iran and political Islam as the kingdom’s main enemy - and this has a formidable, if less visible, proponent: Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID), an organisation so vast that it was described to me by one former foreign minister as Jordan’s parallel government.
The Mukhabarat, as it is also known, is essentially a creation of Britain’s MI6, and today serves as the CIA’s main Arab partner in the region.
The CIA provides undeclared financial assistance to the GID over and above the aid that Jordan gets from the US. The relationship between the two agencies is so close that the CIA has operatives permanently stationed at GID headquarters.
In fact, the GID has been regarded as so essential to the CIA’s regional intelligence-gathering on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group during the “war on terror”, and on Syria and Yemen today, that one former CIA official told The Los Angeles Times he was allowed to roam the halls of the GID unescorted.
In addition, Frank Anderson, a former CIA Middle East division chief, told the newspaper that GID interrogators were the best: “They’re going to get more information [from a terrorism suspect] because they’re going to know his language, his culture, his associates - and more about the network he belongs to.”
Another ex-CIA man, Michael Scheuer, who spent four years tracking Osama Bin Laden, told The Times in 2005: “Jordan is at the top of our list of foreign partners. We have similar agendas, and they are willing to help any way they can.” The GID was as capable and professional as Mossad, Scheuer added.
Clearly with this history and funding, the GID will use the brave defiance of Safadi and others as cover, but it will itself pursue a very different agenda, closer to that of the US and Israel.
Clear dangers
There are clear dangers to Abdullah in following this path. He has not yet gone down the full length of it, as the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood has not extended to the 31 deputies of the IAF - for the moment.
But the ban is significant enough in itself. For one, the timing could not have been worse, coming around the Jewish festival of Passover, a celebration of joy and thanks, which became in the hands of religious Zionists at Al-Aqsa Mosque a crude show of religious conquest and hatred.
More than 6,700 Jews entered the mosque’s courtyards to pray, according to the Waqf - more than all the Jewish worshippers who visited during the holidays last year.
Israeli settler incursions at Al-Aqsa Mosque complex have increased by more than 18,000 percent since 2003, when Israeli authorities began allowing settlers to bypass the Islamic Waqf management and enter Islam’s third-holiest site.
This was also a particularly bad year for Palestinian Christians. Reverend Munther Isaac, a Christian pastor and theologian, told MEE Live that this Easter was “the worst ever”.
Israel in all its forms - military, religious, secular - has left all ideas of living with its Arab neighbours and being part of the region behind. Israel is in full Crusader mode. It is clearly bent on dominating the region, and taking control of the holy sites over which the Hashemite kingdom has legal, international and historical custodianship.
Netanyahu’s government is openly flouting the status quo. He boasted about the number of times he had defied former US President Joe Biden’s administration during a recent speech at a Jewish News Syndicate conference in Jerusalem.
At Al-Aqsa, which the king in Amman has a duty to protect, Islamists are providing the only defence against a sustained attack by religious Zionists. Abdullah is patently failing to speak out against the blatant erosion of his custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites, which include Christian churches as well as the mosque.
Banning the Brotherhood, when all Muslims and Christians in the region are under sustained attack, is nothing less than an act of sabotage at a time of war. As a soldier himself, he should realise what he is doing.
In Jordan itself, Abdullah has removed a safety valve that he needs more than ever before.
His father fostered the unity of the nation in moments of peril. Abdullah faces a true moment of peril, and with each move that Netanyahu makes towards the annexation and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the anger of Jordanians is mounting.
The presence of the Brotherhood stopped Hamas recruiting in Jordan because of the agreement between them. But now there is a void. There is nothing to stop either Hamas or any other resistance group from using Jordan as a base for attacks on Israel. All bets are off.
For Israel, Jordan’s ban of the Muslim Brotherhood is proof that the king can be bullied. Israel does not see a strong man in Jordan, as it once did in his father. It sees a shaky man who is under a lot of stress.
If Israel sees that such a king prioritises a ban on the Brotherhood over speaking out against what is happening at Al-Aqsa, it can calculate that it could get away with its next project, which is the annexation of the West Bank.
King Abdullah should be careful not to follow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s footsteps down the plughole of history. Even in his dying days, Abbas has not for one moment become less stubborn.
He will pathologically not reconcile with Hamas and other resistance groups, nor allow a government of national unity to form in either the West Bank or Gaza - even though it’s patently in the interests of Fatah and the PLO to do so.
The result is that Ramallah is crushed, ignored and despised by both Netanyahu and Trump, who now plans to eliminate the US security coordinator’s office to further downgrade ties with the Palestinian Authority. Trump’s contempt is the reward Abbas has received for prioritising a relationship with Washington over his fellow Palestinians.
Abdullah should beware of Abbas’s fate. History will not treat him or the Hashemite kingdom kindly.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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