Plenty. These are not easy times for young Arab potentates. As the Al Aqsa intifada rages, Abdullah, 39, is struggling to keep the fire from spreading to the Hashemite kingdom. Like his counterpart, Syria’s President Bashar Assad, 35, Abdullah was caught off guard by the eruption of violence in the Palestinian territories last fall. Now both leaders, who came into office as symbols of a modern generation of Arab leadership, find their reigns dominated by ancient conflicts.
They face a daunting challenge. In Jordan, Abdullah has been forced to balance his ambition for domestic reform with the need to contain pressures from the war next door. Palestinians, said to make up 60 percent of Jordan’s population, are frustrated and angry. In Syria, Assad faces his own intifada-related problems. He wants to be perceived as tough on Israel. But his backing of Hizbullah in southern Lebanon provoked harsh Israeli retaliation in April, which hardly helped Syria’s sputtering economy or its growing poverty. Both men need to shore up their power bases while avoiding moves that would bring them into a wider conflict with Israel. And they have to do so without losing the momentum for reform they promised when they succeeded their fathers to power.
If anything, Abdullah’s problems are more urgent. His father, King Hussein, signed a peace treaty normalizing relations with Israel in 1994. But many of the expected benefits, including greater trade with the West Bank and investment from the United States and Europe, never materialized. Now his son’s constituents feel betrayed. Abdullah’s main worries are that pressure to abrogate the peace treaty could spill into violence, and that Fatah guerrillas and other West Bank militants will seek sanctuary in Jordan as the Israeli military turns up the heat on them. “Jordan doesn’t want to become a base for Palestinian terror, as it did in the 1960s,” says Radwan Abdullah, an Amman political analyst. That era culminated violently with attempted coups and King Hussein’s expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Jordan in 1970.
The king has tried to tread a fine line. After a Palestinian girl was shot and wounded in the West Bank, Abdullah had her transported to a Jordanian hospital and paid for her medical care. He frequently voices solidarity with the Palestinian cause and donates blood to victims of the intifada. But Abdullah, diplomats say, also followed the advice of his intelligence chief and cracked down hard on protests organized by the fundamentalist group Muslim Brotherhood. Hussein frequently suppressed protests as well. But “King Hussein sat with tribal leaders, sipped coffee with them, spoke their language,” says a Western diplomat in Amman. “He could draw upon that bond in times of crisis.” Abdullah, by contrast, speaks imperfect Arabic and has yet to develop his father’s sure touch with the people.
Bashar Assad was also cast as a progressive when he took power last year following the death of his father, Hafez Assad. A London-educated eye doctor and another self-professed Internet devotee, he stirred hopes of economic and political reforms and a flexible approach toward Israel. Instead, Assad has used the fighting to shore up his anti-Israeli credentials and cement his support among his father’s old guard. In a speech welcoming Pope John Paul II to Damascus earlier this month, he declared that Israelis were “more racist than the Nazis” and compared the killings of Palestinians to the death of Christ. The president has also reached out to Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat and still funnels weapons and provides training to Hizbullah (following story).
Assad is playing a dangerous game. After Hizbullah fighters killed an Israeli soldier in the Sheba’a Farms area in April, Israeli bombers knocked out a Syrian radar station near Beirut, killing three Syrian troops. The message: Israel would strike more Syrian targets if the guerrillas kept up their bloody campaign. As the intifada drags on, Assad wants to keep burnishing his Arab-nationalist credentials without pushing Israel too far. For Abdullah, the challenge will be stopping his people’s frustration from spilling into uncontrollable rage.
