King Abdullah II of Jordan is, in John Kiriakou’s assessment, the best-informed head of state in the Middle East. Asked about the king’s record, Kiriakou goes further than his interviewer: “I would go so far as to say of everybody in the region or everybody who studies the region, no one knows as much as King Abdullah,” and describes him as almost never wrong across twenty-five years of foreign-policy predictions.[1] He calls him “the right leader for that country.”[1]
The succession
Kiriakou’s account of how Abdullah got the throne turns on a misjudgement by someone else. King Hussein was dying slowly of cancer and was, in Kiriakou’s phrase, universally loved — he recalls that his own wife wept at the news while they were stationed in Athens.[2] As the king approached death, the crown prince — Hussein’s brother — began making preliminary changes, including restaffing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hussein’s response, as Kiriakou renders it: “Whoa, I’m not even dead yet. We’re not going to do this. You’re fired.” Abdullah was named crown prince in his place and, on Kiriakou’s telling, was as surprised as anyone: “What? I never wanted to be crown prince.” His father died a couple of months later.[3]
After October 7
Asked at a conference in the weeks after 7 October 2023 whether Jordan would accept Palestinian refugees, Abdullah answered — in Kiriakou’s account — that he was glad to be asked, and that he would not. The reason he gave was not reluctance: “Not because I don’t want them, not because I don’t like them. My wife is Palestinian.” It was that acceptance would settle the question in Israel’s favour — “If I do accept them though, I will give Israel exactly what they want. They will be able to ethnically cleanse the whole area.”[4] Kiriakou pairs the answer with a later image of the king seated beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office while Trump discussed moving Palestinians into Jordan.[5] His own verdict on that prospect is flat: “Not going to happen. It’s just not.”[5]
Why Jordan says no
Kiriakou grounds the refusal in Jordanian memory rather than sentiment. In 1968, he says, the Jordanian military was fighting Palestinians on the steps of the palace as Black September attempted to murder King Hussein and his family and turn the country into Palestine — “and they have long memories in Jordan.”[6] Half the population is Palestinian, the children and grandchildren of 1948 refugees, as is half the royal couple; but, he says, they will never be fully Jordanian. He points to the documents as the proof: Jordanians carry a green passport, and “if you’re Palestinian born in Jordan, you carry a black passport.”[7] The generalisation he draws is broader — governments across the Middle East “say the right things about Palestinians, but when it comes time to put their money where their mouths are, not a whole lot gets done.”[8]