The Middle East's longest-reigning king heads into a standoff with Trump

Jordan's Hashemite family are masters of survival. In the wake of World War I, they carved out a small desert kingdom from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire with British support. Thirty years later, they watched their profligate relatives in Iraq get butchered in a coup. In the 1967 war, they lost to Israel and, years later, clashed with Palestinian militants.

Despite all the tribulations, they have endured. So when Jordan's King Abdullah II met US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, he could rightly claim to be the world's longest-serving Arab ruler, heading one of its oldest family dynasties. He wants to keep it that way.

King Abdullah's mission was clear. He had to stand his ground and convince Trump that his impoverished and resource-poor kingdom would not accept Palestinian refugees so that the US could "take over" the Gaza Strip and turn it into a "Middle Eastern Riviera". Current and former officials in the US, Europe and Arab countries believe that if hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees flooded into Jordan from war-torn Gaza, it would fatally undermine the Hashemite family's rule, something he and his ancestors have skillfully avoided.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and author of "Jordan and America: The Enduring Friendship," told Middle East Eye: "There must be some second-guessing going on in Amman right now, whether it was wise to rush to Washington to have the king be the first Arab leader to tell Trump face-to-face, 'We're not going to do it your way.'" Analysts say that more than half of Jordan's population is of Palestinian descent, and they would not take kindly to the Jordanian government participating in what the international community and most of the Arab world would consider "ethnic cleansing."

In the fifteen months since Israel launched its war on Gaza, King Abdullah has managed to maintain the 1994 peace treaty with Israel reached by his father, the late King Hussein. But Middle East Eye was the first to report that Trump's call to expel Palestinians to Jordan was so appalling that Amman would declare war on Israel if it actually happened. Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi confirmed this on Thursday, but analysts doubt the Jordanians could make good on the threat.

Jordan is an important US ally. At least 3,000 US troops operate in the Hashemite kingdom, which has a defense agreement with Washington that allows them "unimpeded access" to many Jordanian military facilities. Jordan's intelligence services have long cooperated with Israel, maintaining a cold peace between the two countries. Despite Trump's fondness for royalty, Jordan is the kind of country he despises. Its economy is a mess, it is resource-poor, and its trade with the US is minuscule. King Abdullah likes to pose in military garb, but he lacks the swagger of other Middle Eastern rulers.

Israel and Egypt were spared Trump's foreign aid cuts, including military financing, but Jordan was not. Jordan receives about $1.45 billion annually in military and economic aid from the US, including hundreds of millions of dollars in direct budget support and $350 million in USAID funding. Jordan's other main backers, the wealthy Gulf states, tightened their purse strings years ago. The country's bleak economic outlook threatens the Hashemites, who have historically relied on patronage and government jobs to buy the support of Jordan's East Bank tribes, so called because they resided on the east bank of the Jordan River when the kingdom was founded.

Trump has said he wants Jordan to take Palestinians in exchange for US financial aid. "I said, I would love you to take more, because right now I'm looking at all of Gaza, and it's a mess, it's so bad," Trump said after a phone call with King Abdullah in January. Amer Sabaileh, a regional security expert and university professor in Amman, told Middle East Eye that the Jordanian king will have to humor Trump if Trump insists.

“The worst thing to do now is to say ‘no’ to Trump,” Sabaileh said. “We need to make Jordan more valuable in Trump’s eyes. We need to improve relations with Israel and play the security card. I am not optimistic.” Some analysts say Trump's startling call for the US to take over Gaza may be a negotiating tactic to squeeze more out of Arab partners. Jordan does not have the money of the Gulf states, but Riedel said the king can focus the conversation on the post-war governance of Gaza.

"It's going to be a divisive meeting," he said. "There's no reconciling Jordan's position with Trump's. They can't compromise," he added. "If Egypt caves and takes refugees, that sets a precedent for Jordan and the West Bank." He said: "Jordan thinks Israel is moving in the direction of 'Jordan is Palestine.'" Tariq Tell, a professor at the American University of Beirut from one of Jordan's most prominent political families, told Middle East Eye that King Abdullah may well return empty-handed anyway.

"Should we take this saber-rattling seriously, given Jordan's umbilical relationship with the US? Of course, it's all political posturing designed to mask a long-term process of demographic transfer, sometimes violent, usually gentle, that has inverted the ratio of West Bankers to East Bankers in the Jordanian population," he said. For now, Jordan benefits from the support of the Gulf states and Egypt.

Trump's plan has been vetoed by Saudi Arabia, which this week issued a swift statement rejecting any efforts to displace Palestinians from their homes. The kingdom has also shifted its position from asking Israel to seek a pathway to a Palestinian state to one that insists a Palestinian state must be established before diplomatic relations with Israel can be normalized. "Trump only wants one thing out of the Middle East, and that is a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal," Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, told Middle East Eye.

But deep down, family feuds and palace intrigue undermine the veneer of unity. In July 2021, Bassem Awadallah, an advisor to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for allegedly plotting to install King Abdullah's half-brother, Prince Hamzah, as a rival to the Hashemite throne. Saudi Arabia denied involvement. Prince Hamzah remains under house arrest. Middle East Eye reported that Saudi Arabia had sought to overthrow King Abdullah because he refused to accept Palestinian refugees from the occupied West Bank as part of a failed Saudi attempt to normalize relations with Israel.

"King Abdullah has not forgotten the Saudis funding Hamzah. King Abdullah is much closer to the Emirates now," Riedel said. Several well-informed Jordanians told Middle East Eye that King Abdullah also distrusts Trump's inner circle. The Jordanians were briefly united around Trump's National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, whose wife is a Jordanian-American, and who appeared on the Capitol steps in 2023 as a lawmaker waving a Jordanian keffiyeh. But it is Trump's family that terrifies them.

A Jordanian source told Middle East Eye: "The ideological direction of Trump's Gaza plan is very much being driven from inside the family, from Jared. It's clear they've been discussing it for months." Trump's son-in-law and former Middle East advisor Jared Kushner floated a plan called the "Deal of the Century" during Trump's first administration. The plan called for Israel to annex 30 percent of the West Bank and create a Palestinian quasi-state without an army. The plan sought to entice the Palestinian Authority with $50 billion in economic aid, but it was rejected.

Kushner in February 2024 called for turning Gaza into a real estate development project and displacing the Palestinians there "temporarily". Jordan's now firm stance is complicated by the fact that Jordan has few good cards to play other than telling Trump that his plan could destroy the kingdom of Jordan and trigger the kind of chaos that previous White Houses have sought to avoid.

The Jordanian royal family is secular and Western-educated, but the country's largest political party is the Muslim Brotherhood. Its popularity has soared as Jordanians watch Israel bomb Gaza with American weapons. The fall of Syria's Assad family means Jordan now has an Islamist government as a neighbor. "It's not clear if Trump still prioritizes Syria or cares about the Muslim Brotherhood. It's going to take a very delicate balancing act to explain how this all resonates in Jordan," Khurma told Middle East Eye.