A nation must think before it acts.
Senior Fellow Brandon Friedman Quoted in the Jerusalem Post on Pence Israel Trip
With a Palestinian majority population, the king needs to show he is fully backing the Palestinian quest for an end to Israeli military rule and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital. As Brandon Friedman, a Middle East specialist at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center noted, the king realizes he needs to win over those Jordanians of Palestinian origin and not rely entirely on the traditional East Bank elite that built the Jordanian state.
“This makes him much more sensitive to the Palestinian issue and to unilateral American steps,” he said, adding that Jordanian decision-makers “recognize that the Palestinian issue is almost interlocking with the future stability and success of the Hashemite Kingdom.”