As they look ahead to Israel’s general election vote on Oct. 27, Jordanian officials say they are looking for a government they can talk to.
King Abdullah II and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have not met since the Hamas attack of October 7. Political dialogue between the two neighbors has stopped, reflecting Jordan’s deep opposition to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its policies toward the Palestinians. (Military and intelligence channels continue to share information and keep the peace along the border, Israel’s longest with an Arab state.)
Many Jordanian officials privately hope that Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief leading the opposition, will come out ahead. Yet King Abdullah himself told the United Nations General Assembly last month that he sees little likelihood that Israeli policy will change, and assailed what he called “the world’s political inaction.”
“Netanyahu coming back [would be] a headache for us,” a senior Jordanian official said in an interview with MBN. “All scenarios being discussed are bad for Jordan,” another senior official added. “But Eisenkot leading might be the best of the worst.”
A Tight Race
The race remains close. A poll by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan on Sunday gave Netanyahu’s bloc 51 seats and the opposition, without the Arab parties, 52, both far short of the 61 needed to govern. Eisenkot’s Yashar party leads Netanyahu’s Likud by 23 seats to 21, and about 30 percent of voters are undecided.
Many in Amman expect deadlock instead, leaving Netanyahu in office as a caretaker prime minister while Israel heads for another vote.
Many in Amman expect deadlock instead, leaving Netanyahu in office as a caretaker prime minister while Israel heads for another vote.
Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian deputy prime minister and foreign minister, sees a Netanyahu–Eisenkot “national unity government” as the most likely outcome. “Will Netanyahu leave the political stage after these elections? The answer, in my view, is no,” he said in an interview.
Many in Amman expect deadlock instead, leaving Netanyahu in office as a caretaker prime minister while Israel heads for another vote. It has happened before: Israel held four elections between 2019 and 2021, and Netanyahu stayed in power throughout.
The same sources see a Netanyahu win as the worst outcome, and worry that even if he loses, he will do everything he can to cripple his successor and keep his policies alive.
Trump Weighs In
On Oct. 18, President Donald Trump broke months of silence and endorsed Netanyahu. “Bibi Netanyahu has been Strong, Brave, and Brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition,” he wrote, promising that the Israeli prime minister “WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
“We do not know what Netanyahu promised Trump in return for his backing,” the senior Jordanian official said.
Trump’s endorsement comes as global anger at Israel continue to grow. The war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health authorities, while West Bank settlements increase and settler violence intensifies.
The European Union sanctioned some of these settlers and their organizations in May. Months later, 11 EU countries and Canada, banned imports from Israeli settlements.
No Savior on the Horizon
Jordanian sources hope an Eisenkot government would begin to roll back the damage to ties and allow political dialogue to resume between leaders and ministers, not only between security services.
Joost Hiltermann, special adviser at the International Crisis Group, told me in an interview during his recent visit to Amman he expects a new government to take steps “that are relatively cost-free for Israel, but symbolically significant for the Western world.” Muasher is blunter: “Eisenkot will not have any policy different from Netanyahu’s on the Palestinian question.” One European diplomat in Amman went further: it would be “better if Bibi is re-elected, so we can call their bluff” and impose sanctions.
For Hasan Barari, a professor of international relations at the University of Jordan who has written extensively on Jordanian–Israeli relations, the problem runs deeper than Netanyahu. “Jordan’s challenge is not about Netanyahu personally, but about the trends in Israeli politics that treat the West Bank as an area for expansion and permanent control,” he said in an interview over the weekend.
“We have not seen one positive initiative we could build on to develop a political relationship,” the senior Jordanian official said. The second senior official put it more starkly: “Is this the same Israel we signed a peace treaty with? Who are we dealing with today?”
The West Bank Fear
The UN says settler attacks on this year’s olive harvest have already surpassed last season’s total: nearly 200, against 185 in all of 2025.
Hiltermann, who spent a week in the Jenin area, said he had “never really observed this in the many years I’ve been visiting the West Bank.” A new generation of settlers, he said, is “very violently inclined, very much religious zealots. And they have the full backing of the state.”
Amman sees preventing displacement as inseparable from protecting its own security and sovereignty.
Amman worries about where Palestinians fleeing growing pressure will would go. Official sources worry that people will be pushed to leave the West Bank, and that Jordan, because of demography, geography and family ties across the river, would be their first destination. Many Jordanians of Palestinian origin are refugees who fled the 1948 war; the exact numbers are disputed.
The answer from Amman is blunt. “We will allow in refugees from Syria and Iraq, but we will never let in one Palestinian refugee from the West Bank and Gaza,” the senior Jordanian official said. “We are a country that has an army and sovereignty.” Behind that refusal lie two concerns: that accepting Palestinians fleeing the West Bank or Gaza could facilitate the settlement of the Palestinian question at the expense of Jordan, and that a new mass influx could destabilize Jordan, where Palestinians already make up a substantial part of the population. Amman sees preventing displacement as inseparable from protecting its own security and sovereignty.
Hiltermann does not expect an imminent exodus, “mainly because Jordan will keep its borders closed and Palestinians have no other place to go.”
Hemmed In
In southern Syria, Israel has pushed into areas near the Golan Heights that include springs and tributaries feeding the Yarmouk River, the largest tributary of the Jordan River, and Jordan’s Wahda Dam, which now holds only 13 million cubic meters of water. Amman is worried that Israel could divert some of this water for its own use, at the cost of Jordanian agriculture.
Amman is also alarmed by Israel’s backing for Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the Druze leader seeking a separatist enclave in the Syrian province of Sweida, on Jordan’s northern doorstep.
Amman is also alarmed by Israel’s backing for Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the Druze leader seeking a separatist enclave in the Syrian province of Sweida, on Jordan’s northern doorstep.
Official sources in Amman say Jordan’s security establishment warned Israel that his groups smuggle drugs and weapons, some of which are reaching Israel. Israel replied that it was concerned with the security of the Druze, not with any one leader, but nothing has changed on the ground.
Jordan has rarely felt so hemmed in. To the east, Iran is widely seen as the dominant political force in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led war that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. Hardline pro-Iranian militias have fired missiles at Jordan and attacked American assets at Jordanian bases. To the south, the Houthis, whose conflict with Saudi Arabia shows no sign of ending, have disrupted shipping through the Red Sea to Aqaba, Jordan’s only port. At home, poverty and unemployment are rising.
From Words to Sanctions
Jordan’s answer has been to harden its tone. In his September speech at the UN, King Abdullah raised sanctions, asset freezes and diplomatic isolation as tools to pressure Israel. Muasher called it the start of “an emerging Jordanian approach, based on moving from managing the conflict to working to resolve it.” He cites the precedent of sanctions imposed on South Africa that ended apartheid.
Jordanian officials still hope for a partner. Whether one will appear so far remains unclear.
The pressure is also building at home, where the war in Gaza has strengthened the popular camp opposed to peace with Israel. How strong it is remains hard to gauge: The Muslim Brotherhood, which long gave that sentiment its voice, was banned last year, and Jordanian media may not carry its statements.
Saleh al-Armouti, head of the Islamist Umma Party bloc in parliament, has long pushed for the 1994 treaty to be annulled. “The region around us is burning, and there are Israeli threats targeting Jordan and its existence,” he said in an interview with a regional broadcaster in August. “At the same time, we still maintain economic and political relations with Israel. That is why I say the time has come for us to state our position clearly.”
For now, Amman is waiting. “We will define our choices immediately after the election result is out,” the senior Jordanian official said. If a better government emerges, Jordan will deal with it to protect its interests and the peace treaty. “If there is a government led by this person, Netanyahu,” he said, “we will not trust it.”
Not everyone thinks waiting is wise. Lamis Andoni, a Palestinian-Jordanian journalist, writer and academic and a critic of the Oslo accords, calls the hope of a better Israeli government “a dangerous illusion.” “Frankly, betting on an election that removes Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir [the far-right Minister of National Security] is a cowardly position, or at least one that lacks courage,” she wrote on Monday. Waiting for the results to make fateful decisions, she argued, is “calamity” of short-sightedness “which this stage cannot afford.”
Jordanian officials still hope for a partner. Whether one will appear so far remains unclear.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
