King Abdullah II, the moderate Muslim monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is in Washington this week for a brief but critically important visit.
ALL ARAB NEWS has learned that His Majesty is holding quiet — and so far unpublicized — meetings with Biden administration officials.
He is also meeting with officials of the incoming Trump administration.
Senior Congressional leaders are also likely meeting with the King, though we have not yet been able to verify this.
With the Middle East on fire — Day 424 of Israel’s raging war with Hezbollah and Hamas, and now rapidly deteriorating security environment inside Syria — the King urgently wants to do everything in his power to strengthen US-Jordan relations and protect the Kingdom from the violence and volatility spreading across the region.
It’s not yet clear how President-elect Trump and his foreign policy and national security teams view Jordan right now.
A political party run by the Muslim Brotherhood has been legalized in Jordan and after recent elections became the largest and most popular faction in the Jordanian parliament.
Senior Jordanian officials have been sharply critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
The King accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza during a speech to the UN General Assembly in September.
In the first days of the war in October 2023, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi was accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
Safadi later accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza and announced that Jordan is backing South Africa’s charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Jordan’s Queen Rania — who was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family — has also sharply criticized Israel’s conduct during the war, as have most Arab leaders.
“The hunger [of Gazans] is not a natural disaster,” she told CNN in March.
“This is a man-made, an Israeli-made disaster,” the Queen insisted, despite Israel’s efforts to facilitate hundreds of shipments of food and other relief supplies into the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war. “It is deprivation by design.”
In an interview with CBS News in May, Her Majesty called the United States an “enabler” of Israeli aggression in Gaza and urged the Biden administration to use its “leverage over Israel” and stop providing “offensive weapons” to Israel.
However, the Queen has also expressed sympathy with the hostages being held by Hamas and their families.
“I challenge myself every single day to put myself in the shoes of an Israeli mother who has a child that’s been taken as a hostage… and I try to empathize and see where they’re coming from,” she told Margaret Brennan, host of “Face The Nation” on CBS.
“We need the hostages to go home as soon as possible,” the Queen added.
“And we need the war to end as soon as possible so that Palestinians can go back to their homes, if they have homes left.”
“When you lose your ability to empathize toward the other side, you become hardened yourself, it degrades your own humanity,” she added, arguing that it is incorrect to assume that “Palestinians only understand the language of violence and force.”
