Jordan's Prime Minister Awn al-Khaswaneh submitted his resignation today after less than a year in office. His surprising move reportedly came in protest over the refusal of the Royal Court to allow meaningful political reforms. The last straw, it appears, was the disappointing new election law which failed to respond to long-standing complaints by political activists, parties, and outside analysts. Less than a week ago, I told the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad that I was deeply worried about the kingdom's stability because of its failure to enact any serious political or economic reform or to engage seriously with a growing wave of protest and unrest. The sudden resignation of the respected jurist should draw renewed attention to Jordan's political stability -- and raise important questions about its willingness and ability to reform.

The Middle East Channel has been keeping a close eye on Jordan's ongoing political problems:

"The Implications of Jordan's New Election Law" -- Curtis Ryan, April 13, 2012
"Identity and Corruption in Jordanian Politics" -- Curtis Ryan, February 9, 2012
"Just What Does Jordan's King Abdullah Understand" -- Laurie Brand and Fayyaz Hammad, January 17, 2012
"Jordan's Fictional Reforms" -- Sean Yom, November 9, 2011
"Fragile Hopes for Jordan's New Prime Minister" -- Christine Satkowski, October 24, 2011

We will have more soon on the unfolding developments in Jordan.

The "Arab Spring" is now over one year old. In much of the popular analysis over the past year the term "Arab Spring" has become the defining characteristic of the "new" Middle East emerging from decades of authoritarian and repressive rule. However, one should be cautious about inflating the importance of the democratic uprisings in several Arab countries in shaping the future contours of the Middle East. This caution applies especially to exaggerating both the prospects of democracy -- particularly the unhindered linear transition to representative rule -- in the Arab world and the role of major Arab powers in determining political outcomes in the Middle East in the short and medium-term future.

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FIFA, the international federation for world soccer, is poised to make a decision in a few days that will impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Muslim women -- whether or not to overturn the current ban on the hijab, or headscarf. Matters actually came to a head last summer, in June 2011, when the entire Iranian women's soccer team was prevented from playing in Olympic qualifying matches held in Jordan. The ouster of an entire national team, minutes before a key international match, led to a resurgent global debate on the relations between the hijab, sports, and international politics. Today, however, the winds of change seem to be blowing back in the other direction, as activists, athletes, and allies -- Muslim and non-Muslim -- appear to have met every FIFA objection and will arrive at the March 3 London meeting of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) with a proposal to lift the ban and allow thousands of women an opportunity that is blocked under current rules.

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Women are at a crossroads in the Middle East and North Africa. This is widely reflected in the current battles over the adoption of quotas aimed at improving women's chances of being elected into parliaments. Although women's quotas were introduced as early as 1979 in Egypt, there are new efforts underway in the Middle East to implement them. Last year, Tunisia adopted a law requiring that party lists alternate between men and women. In a more restrained manner, Libya recently drafted an election law that gives women only 10 percent of the seats. However, the struggle for quotas has also met with resistance as in Egypt, which abandoned a 2010 quota law altogether that would have ensured the presence of 64 women in the parliament.  

Quotas are not only being adopted in the legislative arena in the Middle East, they are being entertained in government as well. Recently, the Iraqi cabinet approved a quota system that requires women to make up half of all hires in the ministries of health and education and to account for 30 percent of hires at all other ministries.

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On January 6, 2011, then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Sharm el Sheikh in an effort to resuscitate the flagging peace process. Egypt for many years played the role of regional protector of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which was extremely heavy on process while being ever-more transparently light on delivering peace. It is a role that the new Egypt is unlikely to volunteer for.

Almost exactly one year later, Jordan has gone some ways toward assuming that role by convening Israeli-Palestinian exploratory talks in Amman on Tuesday. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators did not meet officially or publicly throughout 2011 at the Palestinian insistence that Israel first stop settlement activity. It took a considerable effort to make yesterday's meeting happen, given ongoing settlement construction, land seizures, and home demolitions. The meeting, hosted by Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh on behalf of King Abdullah II, brought together Quartet envoys, Yizhak Molcho, legal adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, and the indefatigable chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, awkwardly pictured at the table's head as he presented  positions on border and security (proposals well known to his interlocutors). Following the meeting, Judeh sought to manage expectations while announcing that a series of talks will follow. Preserving an old school peace process is going to be very hard work in the new realities of the Middle East.

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AMMAN—Hundreds of activists filled the streets of downtown Amman on Friday, reiterating their weekly demands for the Jordanian government to implement political and economic reforms. But this week, the chants ringing from the crowd carried a more optimistic tone, as demonstrators and Jordanian lawmakers are cautiously welcoming King Abdullah's appointment last week of a new prime minister, Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh.

Khasawneh is a man unknown to most Jordanians. He has spent most of his long career in public service away from the limelight, as a legal adviser to the late King Hussein and senior official in the foreign ministry. Since 2000 he has served on the International Court of Justice in The Hague, including three years as the ICJ's vice president from 2006-09. Yet many Jordanians believe Khasawneh represents the best chance since the Arab Spring began for Jordan to achieve meaningful reform. With his legal talents and lack of political entanglements, many hope that he will be able to bridge the kingdom's deep political divides and tackle the corruption that is pervasive throughout the Jordanian government.

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Jordan unveiled a package of constitutional amendments last Sunday which offered the most drastic overhaul of the 1952 constitution ever proposed. King Abdullah promised these revisions on June 12 in a surprising televised speech. The new push came in response to five months of increasingly strident protests and criticism, and seemed designed to emulate the constitutional reform gambit of Morocco's King Mohammed VI.

Many Jordanians were stunned by the explicit promise in June of a future system that would draw governing cabinets from the elected parliament rather than appointment by palace fiat. The idea of constitutional monarchy, which entails divesting absolute royal power to the legislature alongside other sweeping institutional changes, captivated the political salons, business magazines, and civic debates of Amman through July. Many intellectuals compared the excitement in the air to 1989, when King Hussein began to end decades of authoritarian closure through unprecedented political reforms.

The revisions unveiled on Sunday made some serious changes, but fell far short of that promise of elected governments. Unlike in Morocco, there will be no popular referendum. The reforms do not curb the king's core powers or move toward a constitutional monarchy in which he would reign but not rule. The election and parties law, unchecked security services, and rife corruption go untouched. Economic development outside Amman remains laggard. Will such a limited reform gambit be enough to blunt popular pressure on the embattled king?

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Historical dates often emerge by sheer coincidence. In 2009, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad formulated an operational goal for his tenure: by 2011 he wanted to build institutions that would justify the proclamation of a Palestinian state. This would not just have symbolic value, as PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat's statement in 1988, but would carry practical implications. Fayyad's efforts have commanded international admiration. The West Bank is indeed run in a way that meets many criteria for successful statehood. As opposed to the past, funds are used responsibly and accounting standards are transparent. The security forces -- originally trained by U.S. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton -- are remarkably effective. Both the Palestinian population and the Israel Defense Forces rely on them more than ever. Hence, September 2011 began to crystallize as a realistic date for the founding of a Palestinian state.

Fayyad's 2011 deadline for the declaration of Palestinian statehood had acquired enormous importance, even though Fayyad never connected it to the bid for U.N. recognition. It has provided Palestinians with a political horizon and a strong motivation to try the route of peaceful resistance and reliance on the international community's support for the new state. The idea of turning to the U.N. for recognition of Palestine seems not to have been a long-term strategy; it emerged as an option faute de mieux, in the absence of negotiations, and without reasonable hope that Netanyahu has the will or the mandate for a meaningful Israeli compromise.

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The Hashemite regime of Jordan is running out of time. Last Friday, a 2,000-strong opposition gathering in Amman dissolved into a spectacle of violence, leaving one dead and over a hundred injured. Although described by the Western media as the country's first repressive crackdown during this winter of discontent, the reality is more complex -- and more unsettling. Opposition activists infused by a new youth movement assembled near the Interior Ministry to vocalize a familiar chorus of democratic demands. Hundreds of armed government loyalists counter-rallied, cursing their fellow citizens and bombarding them with rocks. The street police were complicit in the breakdown of order until special darak riot forces began assaulting activists outright, allegedly using tear gas and then water cannons. Alongside many loyalists, they cheered and marched after "liberating" the circle from the reformist encampment.

This day of violence encapsulated all that has gone wrong since popular protests began three months ago: reform demands falling on deaf ears, apathy by agents of the state, brutality by government proxies. Above all, it exposed the bankruptcy of this authoritarian regime's strategy of coping with the current opposition upsurge by furnishing vague promises of gradual reform while quietly manipulating social divisions from within. It failed in the first but is beginning to succeed in the second, creating a dangerous political climate that could result in further violence. The crisis will end when King Abdullah provides a credible commitment to reform -- one that goes beyond hollow invitations to dialogue and instead furnishes a concrete timetable for change. Yet to do that would require the palace to reverse its stubborn stance, something that might well demand U.S. involvement.

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When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia on Dec. 17 after a municipal worker confiscated his wares, it appeared to be simply another sad story in a region plagued by corruption, brutal state security services, and lack of accountability. But against all odds, his act of desperation has spurred a wave of reform that has engulfed the entire region, toppling the autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and threatening to engulf other countries across the Middle East.

But the uprising has not followed the same course in every country. In Jordan, protests have forced the government to abandon liberal reforms in favor of an unsustainable economic status quo. In Algeria, they have highlighted the public's disaffection with the political process. In other countries, the reverberations from the popular upheaval are still unclear. In the West Bank, for example, opinions remain divided about whether the events represent an opportunity for the Palestinian Authority, or its death knell.

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On Jan. 14, angry over increasing economic hardship in the kingdom, and certainly with their eye on events in Tunis, Jordanian leftists organized a protest march that attracted several hundred demonstrators in downtown Amman. Two days later, a combination of leftist, nationalist and Islamist members of various professional associations held a gathering that attracted several thousand. Those protests have led many observers to focus on the question of whether Tunisia's revolution will spread to the Hashemite Kingdom. There are good reasons to be skeptical, however. Jordan is not Tunisia, and these protests do not likely mean that King Abdullah will follow President Ben Ali into exile.

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On Nov. 9, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan held its sixth round of national parliamentary elections since 1989. Long before Jordanians went to the polls, the elections were immersed in controversy.  The new temporary electoral law announced in May had included few changes, and ceded little ground to opposition demands for greater reform. This, in turn, led to the announcement of an electoral boycott organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and its political party affiliate, the Islamic Action Front. As expected, many secular left activists joined their religious right counterparts in calling for a boycott. While the regime organized a vast get-out-the-vote campaign under the slogan "Let us hear your voice," many in the opposition countered with a campaign rejecting the "sawt wahid" or "one voice" system -- that is, the "one person, one vote" electoral system that they see as undermining prospects for democratic opposition.

Last week's election gave Jordan-watchers a definite feeling of déjà vu, as the 2010 elections seemed reminiscent of the 1997 campaign, with similar points of tension, similar government and opposition standoff, and similar results. Yet in other ways, election day signaled a déjà vu of a different sort, reminiscent of the 1989 political unrest that triggered the liberalization process in the first place. The violence and unrest which erupted on election day was centered mainly within the very East Jordanian communities that are usually seen as the bedrock foundations of the Hashemite regime itself. 

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The parliamentary elections slated for Tuesday to replace the body dissolved late last year have not exactly set the Kingdom's political life onfire.  Some Jordanians will undoubtedly go to the polls to vote.  But there is no election fever, and flaccid election campaigns have mostly avoided reference to the Kingdom's political and economic woes.  The government launched a massive get-out-the-vote effort to counter widespread apathy, but citizens -- if they talk about the elections at all -- seem most excited by the possibility of winning a car. Popular support for the boycott now coordinated by the largest political party, the Islamic Action Front, and the smaller leftist Jordanian Popular Unity Party (Wihda) remains uncertain, but the boycott shows that at least some Jordanians are rejecting the charade of democratic elections.

Freedom House downgraded Jordan's rating from "Partly Free" to "Not free" in January, largely due to King Abdullah II's early dissolution of the last parliament in November 2009.  The regime has since been eager to repair its image and signal that Jordan is back on the democratization track.  But most Jordanians now view the parliament as more of a tribal assembly than one that represents the citizenry, and a weak turnout at the polls will further challenge the regime's proto-democratic credentials. Outside of elite circles, Jordanians are not talking about the election at all; they are talking about the skyrocketing price of tomatoes, which peaked a few weeks ago at two Jordanian dinars (JD) a kilo, 10 times higher than normal.  This vibrant public debate demonstrates that Jordanians can indeed be engaged in politics, but the regime has been unable to capture that energy.

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Tuesday's flare-up on the Israel-Lebanon border continues to be analyzed from every angle. Thus far at least, the deaths of three Lebanese (two soldiers and a journalist) and one Israeli soldier have not spiraled into a broader escalation. The much-dreaded and talked about summer war is still a matter of speculation, albeit now heightened (all of this exactly on the fourth anniversary of the 2006 war).

The exact sequence of events is still unclear. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had informed the relevant UN officials of a planned tree clearance deployment in the border area. UNIFIL updated the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as per protocol while apparently asking the IDF to postpone its activity. The Israelis undertook their somewhat python-esque mission (Israel has none-too-subtle surveillance cameras throughout its border area with Lebanon. The Lebanese don't like it, the trees get in the way, but until this week they were the only innocent victims). An Israeli soldier can be seen almost dangling from a crane to fell the tree - he is clearly over the border fence though the UN has clarified that this particular territory, while on the Lebanese side of the fence, is still on the Israeli side of the UN-demarcated blue line border. The Lebanese seem to be disputing this.

Here is where the respective versions of events go their separate ways. Seeing their side of the fence transgressed and having shouted for Israel to pull back, the LAF either fired warning shots or immediately responded with lethal fire at an IDF position. The IDF either responded with lethal fire of its own on LAF positions or escalated by taking this action. Initial investigations suggest that the Lebanese side escalated. A brief exchange between the LAF and IDF ensued, both sides took casualties, and UNIFIL together with Washington, Paris, and other capitols urgently intervened to prevent further escalation.

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