Egypt and Jordan quietly back Abbas, too
Arab governments worry that if Gazans starve, public support may swing behind Hamas.
from the June 20, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Neither country's leaders have suggested that freezing Hamas out of the equation will make an eventual peace settlement any easier, because they doubt that Hamas's support from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians is simply going to disappear.
"For Jordan and the Arab states, things have to return to where they were. We need a reunited Palestinian government, a unity government that includes Hamas. I personally am against what Hamas stands for – religious government – but you simply can't get far towards peace without them," says Mr. Gheishan
For the moment, the two states, as well as Saudi Arabia, which helped broker the unity government that Abbas dissolved after last week's fighting, have confined their public statements to calls for Palestinian unity and the flow of humanitarian aid to all needy Palestinians, whether they live in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip or in the West Bank of Fatah.
But privately they appear to be positioning themselves to weaken Hamas. The Arab-language newspaper Al Hayat cited unnamed sources as saying Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Sulaiman, who has coordinated Egyptian relations in the Gaza Strip, called Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to tell him Egypt was "furious" with the group.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the major political opposition group in both Jordan and Egypt.
"The [Jordanian] government is very anxious and worried, but they are in fact in a much stronger position than they were a few years ago," says Musa Shteiwi, the director of the Jordanian Center for Social Research in Amman.
In an April poll by his organization, 17 percent of Jordanians said they supported the country's Islamists, but that was down from 32 percent in 2005, he said. He says that while most of the shift was due to terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda-inspired militants here, he suspects that "Hamas conduct since coming to power has also played a role."
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