Tobin - Abdullah’s Hypocritical Lament

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
16 June '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/16/abdullah%E2%80%99s-hypocritical-lament/

Jordan’s monarchs have always gotten a free pass from the Western press no matter what their country did or how despotic the Hashemite regime was. That explains the way King Abdullah turned an interview with the Washington Post yesterday into another commercial for his government as a force for peace and democracy.

Abdullah was in the nation’s capital for talks with President Obama in which he urged him to take “bold steps to “jump-start peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinians. Abdullah seemed to be reading from the Obama playbook when he said that Israel had to act now to save itself: “If it’s not a two-state solution, then it’s a one-state solution,” he said. “And then, is it going to be apartheid, or is it going to be democracy?”

Astonishingly, Abdullah went on to lecture Israel about the need for granting democratic rights to Palestinians and said that the ascendance of right-wing parties in Israel was the result of too much American support: “When you get billions in aid and your weapons resupplied and your ammunition stock resupplied, you don’t learn the lesson that war is bad and nobody wins,” Abdullah said.

That the autocratic, unelected leader of a minority regime such as that of Jordan would be allowed to lecture a democracy like Israel on this score without being challenged is a tribute to Jordan’s incredibly good public relations if nothing else. If anybody needs democracy, it is the Palestinian majority in Jordan that has chafed for generations under minority Bedouin rule. But although he is as much under the gun as other Arab autocrats during the year of the Arab Spring, Abdullah was not asked by the Post about giving his own people some rights.

Yet Abdullah’s carping about Israel is particularly absurd and hypocritical. Israel’s turn to the right, it has little, if anything, to do with American support. Rather, it is the direct result of Palestinian rejectionism that has utterly destroyed the Israeli left in successive elections in the last decade. Israel has already embraced the two-state solution that he advocates but it has been rejected time and again by the Palestinians who even now refuse to even negotiate with the Jewish state. Even worse, the Palestinian “moderates” that Abdullah and Obama want Israel to make concessions to have now embraced a coalition with the Islamists of Hamas making peace even less likely.

If there is any country that has been coddled by the United States it is Jordan, not Israel. It was Abdullah’s father, after all, the charming and popular Hussein, who is responsible for the unification of Jerusalem and Israel’s capture of the West Bank. It was he who embraced Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and war against Israel in 1967. Hussein also supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Though he was loved in Israel for making peace with it in 1994, over the decades he slaughtered thousands of Palestinians in order to hold onto his kingdom. Yet the United States, and Israel have always been so desperate to preserve that monarchy that they have winked at everything its rulers have done.

If Abdullah cares that much about democracy, he ought to try it at home. And if he’s worried about peace, the king and his friend President Obama need to start pressuring the Palestinians, not Israel, to negotiate.

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