Originally published at Gatestone Institute.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says that the Palestinians will not accept any Israeli presence along the border between a future Palestinian state and Jordan.

But the question is whether Jordan really wants to have Palestinians on its borders.

In private off-the-record meetings, top Jordanian officials make it crystal clear that they prefer to see Israel sitting along their shared border.

Speaking at a university graduation ceremony in Jericho, Abbas stated that the borders of the Palestinian state would stretch from the Dead Sea in the south and through the Jordan Valley all the way up to the town of Bet She’an in the north.

“This is a Palestinian-Jordanian border and that is how it will remain,” Abbas said. “The responsibility for security along the border will be in the hands of the Palestinians.”

Abbas’s remarks came in wake of leaks by Palestinian officials to the effect that at the current US-sponsored secret peace negotiations, Israel is demanding full control over the border with Jordan in any peace settlement with the Palestinians.

Israel, of course, has its own reasons for refusing to cede control over the strategic Jordan Valley.

Israel’s main concern is that the border with Jordan will be used by Palestinian terror groups and Islamist fundamentalist organizations to smuggle weapons and terrorists into the West Bank and Israel.

However, there’s another reason why Israel remains strongly opposed to surrendering control over its border with Jordan to the Palestinian Authority or a third party.

It is no secret that the Jordanians have long been worried about the repercussions of the presence of Palestinians on their border.

In a recent closed briefing with a high-ranking Jordanian security official, he was asked about the kingdom’s position regarding the possibility that Palestinians might one day replace Israel along the border with Jordan.

“May God forbid!” the official retorted. “We have repeatedly made it clear to the Israeli side that we will not agree to the presence of a third party at our border.”

The official explained that Jordan’s stance was not new. “This has been our position since 1967,” he said. “The late King Hussein made this clear to all Israeli governments and now His majesty, King Abdullah, remains committed to this position.”

Jordan’s opposition to placing the border crossings with the West Bank under Palestinian control is not only based on security concerns.

Of course, Jordan’s security concerns are not unjustified, especially in light of what has been happening over the past few years along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

The Egyptians are now paying a heavy price for neglecting their shared border with the Gaza Strip over the past few decades. This lapse has seen Sinai emerge as a hotbed for Al-Qaeda-linked terror groups that are now posing a serious threat to Egypt’s national security.

Besides the security concerns, the Jordanians are also worried about the demographic implications of Palestinian security and civilian presence over the border.

Their worst nightmare, as a veteran Jordanian diplomat once told Israeli colleagues during a private encounter, is that once the Palestinians are given control over the border, thousands of them from the future Palestinian state would pour into Jordan.

The Jordanians already have a “problem” with the fact that their kingdom’s population consists of a Palestinian majority, which some say has reached over 80%. The last thing the Jordanians want is to see hundreds of thousands of Palestinians move from the West Bank or Gaza Strip into the kingdom.

Although the Jordanians are not part of the ongoing peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, they are hoping that Israel will not rush to abandon security control over its long border with the kingdom. Understandably, the Jordanian monarchy cannot go public with its stance for fear of being accused by Arabs and Muslims of treason and collaboration with the “Zionist enemy.”

The Egyptians today know what the Jordanians have been aware of for a long time — that a shared border with Fatah or Hamas or any other Palestinian group is a recipe for instability and anarchy. The Egyptians surely miss the days when the Israel Defense Forces were sitting along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

Jordan has condemned the plan for a new area at the Western Wall to accommodate the Women of the Wall organization’s demand for an area for them to pray in an “egalitarian” minyan in which they can wear tefillin and read from a Torah scroll. Orthodox Judaism considers women as “equal but not the same” as men, who have an obligation to wear tefillin and pray in a minyan.

Their campaign offended Haredim and many Orthodox Jews, but with broad support from the Diaspora and media outlets that love issues of quality and women’s rights without knowing what they are talking about, The Women of the Wall succeeded.

Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky, appointed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to come up with a solution for the women without causing a religious war at the Western Wall, came up with a compromise for the women to pray as they wish at the southern section of the Wall, known as the Kotel.

The WoW were not happy with the compromise, but that is another story.

More urgent, Jordan also is not happy.

The women forgot that although the Western Wall is the city of Jerusalem, totally under Israeli sovereignty, Jordan thinks differently, despite the peace treaty with Israel.

It states that Israel “respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem…. The Parties will act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions, with the aim of working towards religious understanding, moral commitment, freedom of religious worship, and tolerance and peace.”

Israel has recognized Jordan as the “custodian” of the Al Aqsa mosque built over the ruins of the Holy Temples.

However, Israel did not take into consideration that Yasser Arafat would start a terrorist war to declare the Jewish Quarter of the Old City the capital of a new Arab state. Nor did it take into account that his successor Mahmoud Abbas is as much too clever politician.

Earlier this year, while Israel assumed that the PA was slowing crumbling into non-existence economically and politically, Abbas’ adviser Adnan Husseini declared that the Western Wall “is part of Islamic heritage that cannot be given up, and it must be under Muslim control.”

This past March 31, Abbas and King Abdullah reached an agreement that “His Majesty King ‘Abdullah II, as the custodian of the Jerusalem holy sites, will exert all possible efforts to preserve [these] sites, especially Al-Haram Al-Sharif [The Al-Aqsa Mosque]… and to represent their interests.” The agreement states further that King ‘Abdullah is responsible for ensuring respect for the holy places, guaranteeing the Muslims’ freedom of movement to and from the sites, ensuring their maintenance and representing their interests in the international arena.”

The catch is what is a “Muslim site?”

The Arab world has spent the past few years to translate history into fiction and declare that the Western Wall is a Muslim  site. So who are these uppity Jewish women, Orthodox, Reform or otherwise, to have the chutzpa to make a change at a supposed Muslim site without consulting with the “Custodian”?

Jordanian Minister for Media Affairs, Mohammad Momani condemned Israel’s “construction of a stage in the southern part of the Buraq Square which is adjacent to Al Aqsa-Mosque’s wall,” the Petra News Agency reported Monday.

Note that the Western Wall is now “Al Aqsa Mosque’s Wall,” the one where holy Arabs claim the  holy Mohammed tied his holy horse.

“Momani, who is also government spokesman, said the move is a blatant attack on the Muslim monuments and Waqf land which is an integral part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, demanding Israeli occupation authorities to remove the stage and the damage it caused as soon as possible,” the news agency reported.

Furthermore, “The minister stressed Jordan’s stance in exerting political, diplomatic and legal efforts to protect and care for Muslim and Christian sanctities [sic] in Jerusalem.

“Momani warned of Jewish settlers and extremists’ continued call to storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque under the pretext of Jewish holidays, expressing regret over Israel’s disregard of international conventions and resolutions.”

Are the Women of the Wall listening?

Jordan’s policy is “to protect and care for Muslim and Christian ‘sanctities’ in Jerusalem.”

There is one word missing: Jewish.

The Women of the Wall never even dreamed about praying at the Kotel during the Jordanian Occupation, when Jews and Christians were prohibited from visiting holy places. Jordan has made lots of progress since then.

Now it is willing to open up holy places for Christians, and the Jews can wait for the next peace treaty.

As for the Jews “storming” the Temple Mount, that is the de rigeur term now used by the Arab press when police and Muslim escort Jews to make sure they do not commit the crime of taking a prayer book with them while ascending the Temple Mount.

The Women of the Wall have not spoken out about the discrimination against Jews trying to pray on the Temple Mount.

They have said they are focused on their own self-acclaimed rights.

The Women of the Wall, most of them Americans, do not understand with whom they are dealing. Haredim are not their enemies. Judaism is not their enemy.

Their enemies are those who demand that Jews stop being Jews.

Once they understand that, perhaps King Abdullah and Abbas will understand that while can get what they want if they deal with the Israeli government, they should never test the wrath of women.

Maybe Israel should consider sending the Women of the Wall to negotiate with Abbas.

Originally published at Gatestone Institute.

The downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt has raised fears in Jordan that the Islamists may try to export their crisis to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, one of the first Arab countries to voice support for the bloodless coup that toppled the regime of Mohamed Morsi.

Although King Abdullah appears to have been relieved by the collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, he nevertheless has good reasons to be concerned about increased attempts to undermine his monarchy.

Signs of the impending trouble awaiting King Abdullah emerged in the past few days as supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood recruited Syrian refugees in Jordan to take part in pro-Morsi rallies in Amman and other cities.

Like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is undoubtedly hoping that Morsi’s ouster will undermine his rivals in Hamas, Jordan’s King Abdullah sees the newest revolution in Egypt as a blow to his political foes in the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas and Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood indeed appear to have suffered a major setback as the result of the loss of their patrons in Egypt.

King Abdullah and his loyalists now apparently fear that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is currently working on a plan to stir unrest in Jordan in order to undermine, or possibly overthrow, the monarchy there in retaliation for the ouster of Morsi.

The ultimate and declared goal of the Islamists, of course, is to replace the monarchy with a radical Islamist state that would be a source of instability in the region and pose a threat to Israel, the US and moderate Arabs and Muslims.

Without massive and immediate financial and military aid from the West and oil-rich Gulf countries, Jordan will not be able to withstand the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.

As a precautionary measure, the Jordanian authorities have strengthened security cooperation with Egypt’s General Intelligence Service and army to thwart any attempt to destabilize the kingdom’s security.

In the context of these efforts, King Abdullah this week dispatched his foreign minister, Naser Judeh, to Egypt’s capital, Cairo, for urgent talks with Egypt’s new rulers.

According to the Jordanians, Judeh travelled to Cairo to express Jordan’s support for Egypt’s “prosperity and progress.”

Judeh also delivered a letter from King Abdullah to Egyptian Interim President Adli Mansour “affirming Jordan’s support for Egypt in overcoming the circumstances it is going through and preserving its security and stability.”

In addition to increasing security and political coordination with the new rulers of Egypt, King Abdullah has also unleashed a media campaign to discredit Jordan’s Islamists.

Several Jordanian political analysts and columnists affiliated with the Hashemite monarchy have been recruited to the campaign.

One of them, Mahmoud Kraishan, wrote that Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood needs to “learn the lesson and reassess their policies.”

He also called on the Jordanian security authorities to be on alert for “opportunists and blood lovers who seek to undermine the kingdom’s stability.”

Another columnist, Samer al-Khatib, accused Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood leaders of exploiting and inciting young men against the monarchy.

“Some of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan have displayed a radical and hostile stance against the kingdom through statements based on curses, vituperation, insults and calls for jihad and killing of people,” al-Khatib wrote. “We all remember the fatwa [Islamic religious decree] issued by Sheikh Mohamed Abu Fares, who ruled that anyone killed during demonstrations held by the Muslim Brotherhood [in Jordan] is a shaheed [martyr], while those killed while confronting the protesters will go to hell.”

Many in Jordan fear that the Islamists in their country are, at the behest of their patrons in Egypt, planning violent protests that could plunge the kingdom into a state of chaos and anarchy similar to the one prevailing nowadays in the Sinai Peninsula.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has turned his schedule upside down to keep his three-ring circus from collapsing under his “peace tent” that he has weighted down with his fake smile and iron fist to save himself from looking like a diplomatic clown.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas are not so stupid as to let themselves be blamed for any failure to resume a charade of the resumption of the peace process after a hiatus of more than two years. That leaves Kerry doing cartwheels to get the monkey off his back.

Israel has insisted that there be no pre-conditions, which in today’s diplomatic acrobats would mean acceding whatever Abbas demands, such as a building freeze or accepting a future PA state on the “basis” of the old borders of Israel.

Abbas has insisted that the only thing to talk about is when Israel is ready to accept what he considers a de facto state based on all of his political and territorial demands that the United Nations General Assembly, which is in his pocket, has confirmed through a resolution that is non-binding but which gave the PA a free pass to sit on key U.N. committees such as UNESCO. Next in line is the International Court.

Kerry has brought in Jordan’s King Abdullah into the picture. He is on his knees before Washington because of the spillover of the Syrian civil war into Jordan and the kingdom’s own precarious state in the face of louder tremors from the Bedouin and non-Jordan Arabs (read: Arabs who fled from Israel.) Add to that the up and coming Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and you come up with n explosive mixture that makes the king all the more dependent on the United States for help.

King Abdullah will do anything Kerry tells him to do, and it is in his own best interests to show himself as peacemaker by bringing the three-ring circus into his own court.

Netanyahu has two Israelis who are weighing him down. President Shimon Peres and “Minister of Peace Process” Tzipi Livni, like Kerry, have made as career out of “good will” concessions to the Palestinian Authority.

It is anyone’s guess what will come out of all this, but after wading through all of the trial balloons and media manipulation by the actors, Kerry clearly will be a lot less effective in other parts of the world if he is seen as a failure in the Middle East and cannot pin the blame on Abbas or Netanyahu for failing to resume direct talks.

The worst-case scenario for Kerry, if he cannot pull off a four-way stage show now, probably will be an agreement to continue talk about continuing to agree to talk about an agreement.

The circus must go on.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry may or may come up with results in his peace process trip to the region, but at least he will have a full stomach.

He ate and talked with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Amman Thursday afternoon before flying to Jerusalem, where he and the Prime Minister will dine at 8:30 p.m. Israeli time (1:30 p.m. EDT).

The Secretary of State will meet with chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Friday in Jordan, presumably over lunch or dinner, and is scheduled to meet again with the Prime Minister Saturday night, where he hopefully will get his just desserts.

Here’s some good news to those of you who’ve been following the vote in the Jordanian parliament on Wednesday, to demand that King Abdullah expel the Israeli envoy scrap the peace treaty with Israel.

That treaty, signed back in 1994 on the White House lawn, by his Majesty, the late King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister, the late Yitzhak Rabin, with U.S. President Bill Clinton watching – that treaty regulates the use of regional water by both countries. It’s all in Article 6 of the treaty, which is bigger than all the rest of the 30 articles put together.

The reason is simple: much of the water—just about all of it, really—alongside the border between the two countries happens to be in Israeli territory. Without that water, Jordan goes back to being the proud desert country it’s always been, which is fine if you’re Bedouin, but not so great if you’re a farmer.

Here’s what can happen, should Jordan decide to scrap its peace treaty with Israel: it would have to do without the following items:

Israel accepted responsibility for operating, supplying and maintaining systems on Israeli territory that supply Jordan with water.

In the summer, May 15 to October 15 of each year, Israel agreed to transfer 20 million cubic meters from the Jordan River directly upstream from Deganya gates.

In the winter, October 16 to May 14 of each year, Jordan is entitled to a minimum average of 20 million cubic meters of the floods in the Jordan River south of the Yarmouk. Unusable excess floods that would otherwise be unused, including pumped storage, can also be taken by Jordan.

In addition, Israel agreed to share the Yarmouk River with Jordan. Anything above 12 million cubic meters in the summer and 13 million in winter goes to Jordan.

When you hear about the Kinneret water going below all kinds of red lines? It’s because they’re being diverted north of the lake, at a rate of up to 50 million cubic meters a year.

OK, that was the deal, we wanted a peace treaty and that’s what we had to pay for it. The fact is that Israel’s relations with Jordan are a whole lot warmer than with Egypt—until the Arab Spring thing hits Amman, of course.

But now the Jordanian parliament—which is largely Palestinian, incidentally—has reacted to the fact that Israel, in an unprecedented display of courage, decided to detain the Jerusalem Mufti for his blatant preaching of violence against the Jews. If the Israelis don’t let our holy guy preach murder, we’re scrapping the treaty.

The treaty that’s the life blood of Jordan’s economy—in addition to supplying Jordan with much of its water, much of Jordan’s industry is owned by Israeli tycoons, who relocated factories from Israel, where organized Jewish workers used to burden them with demands for benefits and realistic wages—to Jordan, where a working man gets a pitta and a couple of onions which he shares with his family of 15.

Now, what did Israel just do, following the Jordanian parliament’s threat to call it quits?

Amb. Oded Eran

Oded Eran, Israel’s ambassador to Jordan, was interviewed on Reshet Bet Thursday morning, and he said that Israel has increased the amount of water it diverts to the Hashamite kingdom, in order to accommodate the numerous refugees flooding Jordan from Syria.

Talk about doing the decent Christian thing…

Or treasonous. Potato-potato.

Ambassador Eran also said Israel also allows Jordan to export its goods to the West through the port of Haifa.

The benefits of peace.

So the host, Ya’akov Achi-Meir, asked him how that sits with the recommendation of the Jordanian parliament to kick him out of the country, and the ambassador answered that once the peace process with the Palestinians is on its way, things in Jordan would calm down.

According to Ambassador Eran, the Jordanian government is on very friendly terms with Israel, it’s only the vast population that wants all of us dead.

Now, here’s the zinger: according to Reshet Bet, Israeli sources have said that Israel has increased the amount of water it transfers to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority recently regardless of the increase in the number of refugees from Syria in Jordan.

Jordan’s King Abdullah has given up on negotiations with Syria and has allowed Israel to use its air space to mount drone attacks on Syria, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported.

“Known only to a handful of Western intelligence services, the decision was taken by the Hashemite King during the visit by President Barack Obama” last month, according to the newspaper.

The situation at the border with the Golan Heights has deteriorated in the past several weeks, with occasional mortar shells and artillery directed into Israel. Israel’s drones are armed and can fly at night to avoid detection, an expert told Le Figaro.

It said that Jordan has opened up for Israel two air corridors, one from the Negev and via southern Jordan and the other to the north of Amman, allowing Israeli aircraft to take off from a base near Tel Aviv and quickly reach Syria.

Opening an air corridor in Jordan decreases the necessity to carry out surveillance flights in Syria via Lebanon.

King Abdullah tried to avoid taking the step of cooperating with Israel against Syrian President Bashar Assad, but he reported failed to gain headway with the head of the struggling regime during a secret trip to Damascus in March.

The report also may explain why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a short and unannounced secret visit to Jordan earlier this year.

Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, a leading Saudi cleric, who was imprisoned in the 1990s for speaking in favor of change, and whose Twitter is accessed by 2.4 million believers, published an open letter on the social media site, with a warning to the government of Saudi Arabia—which isn’t accustomed to receiving public criticism—that it would be facing “the spark of violence” if it didn’t act quickly on burning issues like detained dissidents, bad public services and corruption, Reuters reported.

In reaction to the “Arab Spring” of the past two years, the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, pledged $110 billion in social spending, in return for a religious ban on protests.

But according to the conservative Sheikh, nothing significant has changed so far. He described a stagnation, caused by a lack of housing, unemployment, poverty, corruption, bad health and education services, the suffering of political prisoners and the fact that Saudis see no hope for political reform.

“If revolutions are suppressed they turn into armed action, and if they are ignored they expand and spread. The solution is in wise decisions and in being timely to avert any spark of violence,” al-Awdah wrote.

Dissidents have been detained as political prisoners in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. The issue of the detainees has united some Saudi Islamists and liberals against what they see as a punitive state security apparatus.

As of 2012, estimates are that as many as 30 thousand dissidents are sitting in Saudi prisons. They included tribal leader Mukhlif al-Shammari, who was charged with “annoying others” for his op-eds, assistant professor of law Muhammad al-Abdul Karim who published an article on “The crisis of conflict amongst the governing wings in Saudi Arabia,” in 2010.

A week ago, two prominent human rights activists were jailed, having campaigned for years on behalf of detainees. Most demonstrations in support of detainees involve only a few dozen Saudis, but now and then, such as in a late February rally in Bureidah in the central Qassim Province, many more show up. In that instance, 161 protesters were arrested.

Sheikh al-Awdah wrote that his Saudi countrymen “like people around the world” aren’t always going to remain ” silent about forfeiting all or part” of their rights, adding that “when someone loses hope, you should expect anything from him.”

The Saudi authorities do not tolerate public dissent, this is, most likely, because signs of public rage are being closely monitored by the world’s oil industry experts, who make their futures purchases with said dissents in mind.