Four men stood precariously, supported by outstretched hands, on a rickety metal barricade. All around them, a sea of protesters squeezed shoulder to shoulder. They were gathered near al-Kalouty Mosque, in Amman. It was the closest that Jordanian security forces would allow demonstrators to get to the Israeli Embassy, which was about a kilometre away.
The four took turns using a megaphone to lead the evening’s chants:
“To the Embassy!”
“Open the borders!”
“God, rid us of America’s slaves!”
“They said Hamas were terrorists. All of Jordan is Hamas!”
There have been Pro-Palestinian protests in Jordan since the eruption of the conflict in Gaza, last October. But this was different. It was Friday, March 29th, the sixth consecutive night of vigorous demonstrations near the Embassy after the evening Tarawih prayers that are held during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Palestinian and Jordanian flags swayed above an eclectic crowd of several thousand. There were families with young children, some in strollers; men young and old; gray-haired women; and teen-age girls. The people filled the space adjacent to the mosque and flowed into the street. Black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyehs were draped around shoulders and necks or wrapped around heads. There were also many in attendance who wore red-and-white-checkered Jordanian shemagh scarves.
A wall of Jordanian security forces in navy-blue uniforms and red berets blocked all the roads leading to Israel’s heavily guarded Embassy. On October 17th, ten days after the surprise Hamas offensive that killed nearly twelve hundred Israelis, more than half of whom were civilians, a group of Jordanian protesters broke through a security cordon and tried to storm and set fire to the Embassy. They were met with tear gas and batons. Israel’s Ambassador had already left, and hasn’t returned since.
Now, despite the provocative chants, the crowd was festive and peaceful. They knew that plainclothes security officers moved among them. Hundreds of protesters in Jordan have been arrested—some after speaking with the media—as have at least three journalists covering the demonstrations, according to Reporters Without Borders. Phones held high lit up the space like fireflies as people clapped and followed the lead of the four men on the metal barricade. “Raise your voices from Amman. We are part of the Al-Aqsa Flood,” they said, referring to the name of the Hamas operation.
Flares bathed the crowd in a red glow. The chanters denounced the “land bridge to the occupiers,” referring to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, one of Jordan’s three border crossings with Israel. Rumors had spread that the bridge was being used as a conduit for Israel to continue importing goods through Arab countries, despite the war. In November, Yemen’s Houthis had launched a blockade of Israel-bound ships travelling in the Red Sea, the region’s main commercial corridor. The protesters believed that Jordan was allowing Israel to circumvent the blockade. Bisher al-Khasawneh, Jordan’s Prime Minister, has called such claims “fabrications.”
One of the four men on the barricade, a twenty-four-year-old whom I’ll call Adam, told me that he’d recently skirted almost two dozen temporary checkpoints, set up to prevent protesters, on the hundred-and-twenty-kilometre journey from Amman to the bridge. When he got there, he watched, stricken, as trucks loaded with vegetables entered Israel. (In December, on a news program, the agriculture minister had acknowledged that some Jordanian traders were selling produce to Israel, and told them to “have some shame.”) “Our people are dying of hunger in Gaza,” Adam said. “I feel guilty for sleeping on a bed, for eating while people in Gaza starve. I can’t focus on anything.” Like many other protesters, he had lost faith in international law and human-rights institutions. “Human rights aren’t neutral—they are biased toward some people,” he said.
Near the barricade, I met a middle-aged woman, a Jordanian Palestinian whom I’ll call Zeina, who was smaller and louder than most people around her, repeating the chants with gusto, her short, curly hair bouncing as she punched out the words. She berated a random group of men nearby: “Why are you standing here if you don’t want to chant?” She was on the streets, she told me, for the same reasons I heard repeated by many other protesters: because she wanted her country to cut ties with Israel entirely, and because she feared that Jordan, where half the population is of Palestinian heritage, could become the next Gaza. She cited a speech delivered in March, 2023, by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, who said that there was “no such thing as a Palestinian” because “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” He was standing behind a lectern with a banner that depicted a map of “Greater Israel”—which included all of Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, and also parts of Saudi Arabia and Syria.
Zeina was a secular political independent; the pro-Hamas chants, she told me, were “not about Hamas per se but about anyone who is in a resistance movement. International law says that, if you’re under occupation, fighting is resistance.” Some Jordanians had been claiming that Islamists were behind the protests. Zeina disagreed. They were present, she said, but “the Islamists aren’t pushing us or moving us. Our humanity is moving us.”
During the so-called Arab Spring, in 2011, protesters across the Middle East were propelled by a lack of freedom, dignity, and economic opportunities—and by their resentment of the repressive regimes that ruled them. Today, those same factors are present, and, in some cases, have worsened. Add to that an anguished and suppressed rage about Palestinian suffering, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, owing to increased violence by Israeli settlers, and the silence, if not complicity, of many Arab leaders. “The West thinks that Arab public opinion doesn’t matter,” Marwan Muasher, the vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “No, it does matter. Even in authoritarian states, and particularly in Jordan, where the public mood is boiling. Boiling.”
In January, the Doha Institute’s Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies released the findings of what it called the first survey to gauge public opinion about the Gaza conflict across the Arab world. Ninety-two per cent of respondents said that the Palestinian cause was not solely the concern of Palestinians but of all Arabs, the highest proportion since polling began, more than a decade ago. More than seventy-five per cent considered the U.S. and Israel “the biggest threat to the security and stability of the region.” Two-thirds described the Hamas attack as a legitimate resistance operation. Muasher told me, “Support for Hamas is not out of religious grounds. Today, most Christians in Jordan support Hamas. It is out of a feeling that they are the only ones standing up to the Israelis.”
Following the Trump Administration’s much touted Abraham Accords, in 2020, many pundits and politicos suggested that the Palestinian cause had been forgotten in the Middle East. “New, friendly relations are flowering,” Jared Kushner, a key architect of the accords, wrote in the Wall Street Journal the next year. “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.” But the bilateral agreements to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan were never more than economic deals, quid pro quos inked by autocrats. Well before October 7th, Arab public sentiment rarely aligned with the views of the ruling élites who stood to benefit from the diplomatic concessions, defense contracts, and transfers of military equipment, worth many billions of dollars, that resulted from the accords.
Jordan finds itself in a uniquely vulnerable position. In 1994, it became the second Arab country, after Egypt, to sign a peace agreement with Israel. The Wadi Araba Treaty established close coöperation between the two countries on matters of intelligence and security, and set the table for economic arrangements in areas including water, electricity, and natural gas. (Jordan has an arid climate and a dearth of natural resources.) Jordan is also one of the most pro-Western Arab states. It hosts thousands of American troops and is the second-largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the region, after Israel. In mid-April, when Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, Jordan’s air force intercepted and shot down many of them.
At the same time, Jordan, led by King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, has issued some of the strongest Arab condemnations to date of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza. In March, Rania told CNN that Israel was engaged in the “slow-motion mass murder of children.” Abdullah has denounced Israel’s “war crimes” in Gaza and the West’s double standards. “The message the Arab world is hearing is that Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones,” he said, at the Cairo Peace Summit, soon after the war began. (Jordan recalled its Ambassador to Israel shortly afterward.) In February, standing next to President Biden in the White House, Abdullah, who is also the custodian of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, called for a “lasting ceasefire now” and warned that “continued escalations by extremist settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem’s holy sites and the expansion of illegal settlements will unleash chaos on the entire region.” Last month, in a letter sent to Jordanian officials, Hamas thanked Abdullah for his support of Palestinian rights.