How Israel’s genocide in Gaza is creating enemies on all sides
Demonstrators take part in a march in Amman in support of Gaza and to salute the slain Jordanian who killed three Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge border crossing, Jordan on 8 September 2024
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 11 September 2024:
When three Israeli security guards were killed near the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that Israel was “surrounded by a murderous ideology led by Iran”.
In December, his government said Israel was fighting a war on seven fronts, all led by Iran.
If this is an acknowledgement that Netanyahu’s refusal to end the genocidal campaign in Gaza is making all of Israel’s borders insecure, then it is belated. However, Netanyahu was right to say there is hatred for Israel on the east side of the Jordan Valley.
As the popular celebrations that followed the killings showed, Jordanians have no need for Iran’s active incitement.
The Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the settlers’ terrorism against the Palestinians in the West Bank have sowed the seeds of hatred in a neighbour all by itself. Jordan, which has been quiet for 50 years on the Palestinian question, is quiet no more.
Gaza has radicalised the Arab world in a way not seen for over a decade since the Arab Spring.
Tribal might
First and foremost, Maher al-Jazi, the truck driver who carried out the attack, came from the southern Jordanian town of Udrah in Maan governorate. Haroun al-Jazi, a one-time leader from the same tribe, led Eastern Jordanian volunteers to fight in the 1948 Battle of Jerusalem. Maher is also a descendant of Mashour al-Jazi, the commander of the Jordanian army during the battle between Israeli forces and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Jordanian armed forces over the border town of Karameh in 1968.
Al-Jazi’s town and clan bode ill for those in the wilfully under-informed western embassies in the region, who hope that the embers of this fire can be stamped out soon. For, if the western side of the 335km-long border is being rapidly militarised by the Israeli army and up to a million armed settlers, all that is securing the eastern side of this border are the Jordanian tribes and the Jordanian army which recruits heavily from them.
What tribal leaders thought of the shooting is, therefore, significant for the future stability of this border.