As the first anniversary of Israel’s war with Hamas approaches, anger in neighboring Jordan appears to be spiking, even as the country’s leader, King Abdullah II, works to find a balance between public sentiment and maintaining a three-decade-old peace agreement with the Jewish state. 

Nearly two-thirds of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian heritage and many more identify closely with the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The tension looked set to boil over last week when a Jordanian national – a truck driver transporting goods through the main border crossing into Israel – shot and killed three Israeli civilians. Fury at Israel was also on display last Wednesday when an Islamist party campaigning on an anti-Israel platform significantly increased its share of seats in the legislature in the country’s parliamentary elections.

Additionally, over the past few weeks, the IDF has turned its attention to the Jordanian border, carrying out a military operation to crack down on the flow of weapons through the Hashemite Kingdom to Palestinian militants in the West Bank. The source of those weapons, the army said in a recent media briefing, is Iran.

Touring the Jordan Valley last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted Israel’s “multifront war,” including real threats from the east, and said he would work to bolster Israel’s border fence with Jordan in an effort to prevent the smuggling.

His comments, however, also underscored the peace agreement with Jordan that was signed nearly exactly 30 years ago, on Oct. 26, 1994. “It is important to us to ensure that this border remain a border of peace – and security,” Netanyahu added.

“This is a border of peace,” the prime minister emphasized in a statement later released by his office. “We are cooperating with the Kingdom of Jordan to make sure it stays that way.”

“Pay close attention to Netanyahu’s words, he was careful to include that Israel would cooperate with the Jordanians on security,” Ronni Shaked, a researcher on Arab affairs at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University, told Jewish Insider in an interview.

Shaked explained that despite recent threats, events and pressures internally in both countries, relations between Israel and Jordan remained strong and intact.

“The relationship between the king and the Israeli government is not good but the strategic needs on both sides are greater,” the former journalist, who previously covered Palestinian affairs for Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, noted.

Right-wing voices in Israel, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who accompanied Netanyahu on his visit to the Jordan Valley, have been pushing to annex the West Bank, as well as agitating for changes to the decades-old status quo at the Temple Mount compound, a sensitive site that is holy to both Jews and Muslims. But Israel still relies heavily on the Jordanian military for security, as witnessed last April when a multinational force shot down nearly all of the more than 300 rockets and missiles launched at Israel from Iran.

In Jordan, where large swaths of the population have close familial and religious ties to the Palestinian people and where the king, whose family – believed to be descendants of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad – is tasked with protecting the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, and other Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, there is also an understanding that in order to maintain its own stability, it must also uphold its ties with Israel.

According to Shaked, Abdullah, who has managed to quell destabilization attempts in the past, including from Iranian-backed Islamic groups both inside and outside his country, also relies on Israel economically, including for its water supply and soon natural gas.

“There is a problem in Jordan, the king must find a balance between the anger on the streets and maintaining the relationship with Israel,” Shaked said, describing how Abdullah had adopted policies that allowed his people to express their frustrations at Israel while at the same time clamping down on violence and terror that could spill across the border.  

“Since December, there have been almost daily protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Amman,” he said. “The king allows them to protest but he sets boundaries … they are allowed to chant, hold banners but he will not allow any violence.”

Additionally, Shaked noted, despite the rising power of the Islamist party, which won some 31 seats in Jordan’s 138-seat parliament, there are limits to political power in Jordan with the king still controlling decisions relating to security and foreign affairs.

But Abdullah faces limits too, Daoud Kuttab, a Jordanian-based Palestinian-American columnist writing for Al-Monitor and Arab News, told JI. He said that anger and frustration at Israel – and the actions of its right-wing government – was growing daily in all sectors of society, not only those of Palestinian origin.

“What is happening in Gaza is affecting everyone here,” Kuttab said, describing how young school children were taking up the cause of the Palestinian people and families were divided over boycotting products and companies doing business with Israel.

“This is not driven by ideology, there are Christians here who support the Palestinians, it is not about religion, and it is not about antisemitism, it is because we are human beings,” Kuttab said, adding too, that Iran had little to do with shaping the sentiment or driving people to carry out attacks.

Regarding the shooting attack at the border crossing, he said that even though Jordanian security forces worked hard to defend Israel, “people are angry and upset and because of that will find a way to get around it.”

Physical security, Kuttab continued, “is never 100% – you need both physical security and a political process, you have to remove the sources of anger, and that is my problem with the Netanyahu government – they only think of security from a military angle.”

Despite the rage at Israel, Kuttab noted that Abdullah, who has been outspoken about the need for a cease-fire in Gaza and for keeping the status quo at the Haram al-Sharif, has also clamped down on any violence, preventing it from spilling over the border or from destabilizing the country from within.

Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, said, however, that tensions within Jordan’s borders and beyond are “soaring.”

“Sporadic violence is now commonplace there, while high-level engagement is poor and a joint strategy to face a common enemy is nonexistent,” said Schanzer.

He said that the kingdom, which largely managed to avoid the upheaval that gripped many other Middle Eastern countries just over a decade ago in the so-called “Arab Spring,” was now at “great risk” brought on by its refusal to support its Western neighbor.  

“Jordan’s inflammatory rhetoric [against Israel] has been escalating for years …. It’s a problem across the country’s leadership and media, and rather than seeking its place in a U.S.-led alliance, or even deepening it through the Abraham Accords structures, Jordan has become an outlier,” Schanzer said, adding that “the statements about Israel are sometimes indistinguishable from Iranian regime rhetoric.”

“Meanwhile, Iran is methodically undermining Jordanian security by smuggling drugs, weapons and cash to the east bank,” Schanzer continued. “The drugs stay, and the weapons move into the West Bank.”

“The U.S.,” he added, “is holding the country together with duct tape.”