Mideast Events Push a Pair of U.S. Allies Into a Corner

With their foreign policies tugged between the demands of the United States and the fury of their people, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan find themselves stretched thinner than they have been in years.

The two regimes have staked their survival on cooperating with the United States and pushing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the escalating violence amid the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Israel’s assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and the ceaseless bloodshed of the Palestinian intifada have squeezed both governments into an ever-tighter political corner.

“The public mood is much more anti-Israel and anti-American, which does not play to the hand of Egyptian policy,” said Mostafa Elwi Seif, an analyst at Cairo University.

“The aggression is giving the governments of the Arab world a hard time, widening the gap between the public on one hand and the government on the other,” he said. “The beginning of the second intifada and the assassination of Sheik Yassin are the two landmarks in popular opinion.”

The Arab rulers who cleave to Israel and the United States make an improbable pair. Hosni Mubarak is a war veteran and aging autocrat who kept a tight grip on a restive Muslim nation for decades. King Abdullah II is a young monarch, the head of a country squeezed, geographically and politically, between Jerusalem and Baghdad.

Each ruler, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, will travel to the United States this month to meet with President Bush. In the meantime, Mubarak and Abdullah will struggle to calm their seething populaces and stitch together a semblance of unity after the collapse last month of an Arab League summit.

Palestinian refugees rioted in Jordan recently, smashing cars and stores and burning the Jordanian flag after Friday prayers. Security forces arrested 60 people.

“I think demonstrations should go on, next week and the week after,” said Mohammed Sawanda, 34, a supermarket owner in Amman, the capital. “Because they say we have some kind of democracy here in Jordan, right? If we do, then eventually they will have to listen to us.”

Meanwhile, Muslims massed at Cairo’s Al Azhar, the world’s oldest university and the intellectual center of Sunni Islam, to deride their government, demand the ejection of the Israeli ambassador and call for holy war against “Zionists” and corrupt Arab leaders.

One after another, Muslim leaders rose to lament Yassin’s death and rail against the government.

“Among us there is a fifth column [of American sympathizers] that’s waiting for the Americans to intervene and dominate us,” preached Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the leader of Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

“We have weak institutions. They’re all at America’s mercy and aimed at hurting the Muslim community,” Akef said. “Our rulers are cooperating with them.”

Despite Mubarak’s lengthy campaign of arrest, intimidation and torture of extremists, the Muslim Brotherhood remains a powerful political force in Egypt, and some of its members are in parliament. When excusing the glacial pace of his government’s reform, Mubarak has pointed to the group as proof that a democratic election could leave Egypt in the hands of radical Islamists.

In Jordan, too, Islamists are a potent and growing force in parliament, and they are particularly tied to the Palestinian cause.

Yassin’s slaying exacerbated the strife between secular Arab governments and their Islamist opponents, who were given a new rallying cry. The sympathies of an angry public were driven closer to the Islamists, who articulated a sense of religious betrayal that was absent from the secular condemnations.

Yassin was killed at dawn March 22, and Mubarak was one of the first Arab leaders to declare the Mideast peace talks dead. “What peace process?” he snapped to a reporter’s query. He had been meeting with an American envoy that morning, and his people were taking to the streets to demonstrate against the United States.

But if Mubarak’s anger was serious, it was also short-lived. Within days, his government was back at work on the peace talks.

“Egypt has been doing what it’s supposed to do -- keep the peace with Israel and take moderate stands vis-a-vis the things the United States thinks are important,” said Sharif Elmusa, a political science professor in Cairo and former Palestinian negotiator. “They haven’t sided with their people, they’ve sided with the United States.”

The mood was dark enough before Yassin’s death. Arab countries have been buffeted by domestic and international calls for democratic reform. The invasion of Iraq and a year of bloodshed there have put the Arab world on edge. The lower classes in Egypt and Jordan have been hit with price hikes on basic foodstuffs and higher taxes.

The assassination of the aging Yassin enraged Muslims everywhere; the governments of Egypt and Jordan see it as a price they’re willing to pay. Popular opinion has little hold on Mubarak and Abdullah, who are unlikely to face open elections.

Besides, peace has been profitable for the two nations. Each was rewarded with U.S. aid for signing treaties with the Jewish state; Egypt’s $2 billion a year puts it second only to Israel in U.S. funding.

By contrast, Saudi Arabia has managed to campaign for a peace accord without involving itself with Israel -- telephones in Saudi Arabia, as in other staunchly anti-Israel states, don’t even accept the Israeli exchange. Although it was Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah who drafted a peace plan in which Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders would be rewarded with normalized relations with all Arab states, the royal family has avoided diplomatic contact with Israel.

Egyptian and Jordanian officials insist that to cut ties with the Jewish state would be self-destructive -- and tantamount to abandoning the Palestinians. Both Arab nations say they argue the Palestinian case to Israel. They say they are willing to work for peace on their borders.

To those already questioning their governments’ ties to the United States and Israel, the death of Yassin made Mubarak and Abdullah look like collaborators.

The assassination came as Israel was pressing Mubarak to help secure the Gaza Strip’s southern border in the event of an Israeli pullout from the territory. The sting was particularly keen in Jordan: Abdullah had attended a secret meeting with Sharon just a few days earlier.

When the missiles fell on Gaza, rumors raced that the king might have known about Israel’s plans for Yassin. Abdullah lashed out at Israel, but the damage was done.

“The position of King Abdullah was really, really compromised,” said Palestinian-born Jordanian analyst Labib Kamhawi. “It made him look really bad, both within Jordan and outside. It made people think [either] that Sharon has no respect for the king, or that the king was somehow in cahoots.”

It was Abdullah who once told reporters, “Jordan is the best thing that happened to Israel.” That was during the sliver of quiet in the early days of his rule, after his father, the late King Hussein, had signed Jordan’s treaty with Israel and before the most recent Palestinian intifada flared in 2000.

The intifada hits close to the bone in Jordan, where more than half the population is of Palestinian descent. Jordanians have long fretted that their country could be reinvented as the long-promised Palestinian state, and tensions have been stoked in recent months by fears that a wall that Israel is building in and around the West Bank will lead to the gradual transfer of Palestinians in the territory to Jordan.

During the intifada’s early days, men in Jordan were reprimanded by security forces for wearing checkered Palestinian headscarves. Elmusa quips that “Jordan First,” the kingdom’s official slogan, is code for “Don’t agitate about Palestine. You are guests here.”

“When the peace treaty was signed, everybody was waiting and thinking everything would change and we’d live in peace and the economy would be better,” said Odeh Qawwas, a Jordanian parliament member. “But the opposite has happened. It’s very frustrating.”

Anger has been fueled by other troubles. Arabs were outraged when the United States used its veto to quash a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the missile strike against Yassin.

Then Tunisia dealt an embarrassing blow to Arab leaders by abruptly calling off the Arab League summit. Arab capitals erupted into melees of accusations and hand-wringing, but Mubarak didn’t have time to fret. For the sake of public opinion, American credibility and peer respect from other Arab leaders, he had to act.

“When there’s an absence, everybody looks to Egypt,” said Abdel Moneim Said, director of Egypt’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

In both recent crises, Mubarak’s response was virtually identical: an initial volley of damning rhetoric before reporters, then days of frantic, low-profile diplomacy in an attempt to smooth over the damage. He was soon joined by Abdullah; the two men, along with Saudi Arabia, are trying to put together a second summit.

“Hosni Mubarak has been in this position for too long,” Said said. “I think he’s striking a quiet balance.”

Special correspondent Rana F. Sweis in Amman contributed to this report.