Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [68]
Fast forward two years. I unexpectedly find myself as my father’s successor, the new King of Jordan. Benjamin Netanyahu is still prime minister of Israel, and Khaled Meshaal, now fully recovered, has broken his agreement to restrict Hamas’s activities in Jordan to media outreach. In the last year of his life, my father told me that he was very unhappy with Meshaal’s continued political activity in Jordan—trying to smuggle weapons across the border into the West Bank and interfering in Jordanian politics. He felt that Meshaal, and the rest of the Hamas leaders in Amman, were taking advantage of Jordan’s hospitality.
In countless negotiations and meetings Meshaal and other Hamas leaders residing in Jordan were repeatedly asked to stop activities that violated the conditions they had accepted for their stay in the country. But to no avail. They were obstinate, and wanted to operate with impunity. The government finally asked Meshaal to leave Jordan in August 1999. The Qatari government stepped forward and seemed eager to host him, so Meshaal and other Hamas leaders left for Doha.
A few days before our scheduled meeting, Benjamin Netanyahu made an inflammatory speech at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. In his remarks he accused my father of siding with Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, implied that Jordan might ally with Saddam Hussein in the future, and conjured the image of the Iraqi menace reaching the Israeli border through Jordan.
The speech was widely criticized in the region, and even inside Israel. Ehud Barak, the Israeli opposition leader, said, “There is no pit into which the prime minister has not fallen. The problem is he drags along the entire country into the pit with him. Even during the mourning period for King Hussein, Netanyahu found it fitting to endanger the few achievements of peace left.”
Our meeting was not memorable. In a two-hour session over lunch we discussed the peace process and water rights. But Netanyahu’s mischaracterization of my father’s role in the Gulf War in order to score a few political points had left a bad taste in my mouth. My father did not side with Saddam—he tried to prevent a war that he saw as serving no one’s interests. I came away from the meeting with the sense that getting the peace process back on track was going to be a long, hard slog.
In a country like Jordan, outside pressures force you to focus on foreign policy, but I had some critical domestic issues on my plate. One of my first decisions as king was whether to appoint a new prime minister. Jordan has a parliamentary system of government with a hereditary monarchy. Under the Constitution, Parliament’s upper house, the Senate, is appointed by the king and made up of Jordanians who have distinguished themselves through public service, such as former prime ministers, ambassadors, and senior military officers. The lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, is chosen by a general election every four years. The king, as head of state, appoints the prime minister, who then selects cabinet ministers to form a government. Cabinet ministers could be selected from among members of Parliament or from outside it. This government must then win a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies. If it does not, the government is disbanded and the process begins again.
Separate from the parliamentary system is the Royal Court, or Diwan. Every Jordanian citizen has the right to petition the king directly, on any matter of concern, and these petitions are presented to the Diwan, which people refer to as “the house for all Jordanians.”
A petition can be on