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DUBAI – King Abdullah II of Jordan concluded a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, where he met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah. Zayed. Normalization of Arab-Syrian Relations The government under President Bashar al-Assad is at the top of the agenda.
The visits follow a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Jeddah last week where Jordan pushed for Syria’s return to the 22 Arab League members after its expulsion in 2011. While the meeting ended without a final decision, regional reconciliation with Syria is in its final month.A diplomatic source told Al-Monitor that the document on the normalization of relations with Syria is the top priority of Amman’s Gulf diplomacy, following peace plan It was announced last week.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan visited Damascus this week, the first foreign trip by a senior diplomat from the kingdom in more than a decade. Assad was received in the UAE and Oman, while Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdade visited Tunisia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia this month.
Melissa Kurma, director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, said Jordan has longstanding and strong ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and they share many common interests. The talk of Syria is front and center in a country with its southernmost border and a refugee and drug-trafficking crisis.
“For Jordan, this is a national security issue,” Kurma told the Arab Monitor, which is why coordination and consultation with global and regional partners is crucial, especially when it comes to affecting Jordan and its Gulf allies. on the issue.
According to the Washington-based Arab Center, Captagon has a black market worth billions of dollars and has been produced along the Syria-Lebanon border in recent years. The highly addictive substance reached the Gulf Arab countries via Jordan, where it became the drug of choice for disenfranchised young people, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Jordan also bears the financial burden of Syrian refugees. According to Jordan’s 2022 census data reported by the Brookings Institution, there are about 1.3 million Syrians in the kingdom’s population of more than 11 million. Only 17 percent of them live in the country’s two main refugee camps, Za’atari and Azraq.
Jordan faces an ongoing conflict on its longest western border with Israel, and it is in the interest of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia to resolve it.
“Israel’s right-wing ministers have opposed Jordan’s position on Palestinian identity for decades, but mainly recently,” Kurma said. In March, the far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich denied the existence of the Palestinian people.
“This is an existential issue for Jordan,” she told Al-Monitor. “You cannot separate it from Jordanian society or politics domestically and globally.”
In January, Israeli State Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givr made a provocative visit to the compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, also known as the Temple Mount, which joins other Muslim and Christian sites built after the 1967 war under the custody of Jordan.
During Ramadan in April, Israeli soldiers stormed the compound and arrested nearly 400 Palestinians.
“Based on the surveys and the barometers we’ve seen, this will definitely change the picture, because most Arabs are opposed to the relationship designated by regional leaders,” Kurma said, adding that the Palestinian issue was at the heart of the issue. Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, but it sees resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a priority for regional stability.
The Jordanian king is in Saudi Arabia immediately after the Saudi crown prince met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Riyadh on Wednesday.
Curtis Ryan, a professor of political science at Appalachian State University, said the king’s visit underscores how seriously Jordan places importance on its relations with the Gulf states as well as the West.
“Jordan is an aid-dependent countryso it has made extensive efforts to continually strengthen its relationship with its key allies, from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to the UK and the US,” Ryan told Al-Monitor.
US aid has tripled over the past 15 years and will reach $26.4 billion in 2020, according to a 2022 US Congressional report. In addition, Jordan and the United States signed a new agreement last year, pledging to provide $1.45 billion a year for the next seven years.
Jordan’s marginalization under Donald Trump’s presidency, which runs from 2017 to 2021, appears to depend on personal ties to the leaders of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, he said.
Ryan said this week’s visit and others are aimed at strengthening Jordan and its allies’ position in the region, as well as their economic interests in aid, investment and trade.
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