As the US and allied military exit gathers pace, war-torn and Covid-19 ravaged Afghanistan faces a multifaceted transition. The country is once again positioned to embrace a political, economic and security transformation of a magnitude that could seriously impact its survival as a defendable functioning state. The US and its allies have promised to continue their non-combat support, including funding the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF). But this can’t be taken for granted. Afghanistan stands to experience more violent, murky and uncertain times ahead. The direction the country will take after 11 September 2021 will depend on whether its conflict is resolved on the battlefield or through a negotiated settlement.

Afghanistan could follow one of three directions. The first is that it stays on its current course of conflict for some time, with a chaotic and divided system of governance remaining in place in Kabul. This would be contingent on two important imperatives: that the ANDSF remains coherent and effective, and that the US fulfils its promise to meet US$3.3 billion out of the ANDSF’s US$4-plus billion in annual funding and backs with air power the ANDSF’s defensive operations whenever Kabul or another major city is at risk of falling to the Taliban. Even so, as suggested by American intelligence, the weak, divided and kleptocratic Kabul government may not last for more than six months to two years. The expectation is that this buffer would compel the Taliban and their Pakistani backers to become more serious about a political settlement.

The second option points to the possibility of the government in Kabul collapsing sooner under the weight of both the ANDSF disintegrating and the Taliban rapidly advancing towards choking the major cities to surrender. The ANDSF is composed of personnel from various Afghan micro-societies, with a sense of loyalty to their ethnic and tribal stratum. Some have already defected or surrendered to the Taliban with their weapons. Meanwhile, the Taliban have lately made rapid territorial gains, taking over district after district across the country.

If the Taliban take power in Kabul, they are expected to rename the country as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and establish a strict theocratic order, more or less similar to what they had instituted during their previous rule (1996–2001).

However, the Taliban wouldn’t find it easy in any way to impose their writ across the country. The militia isn’t very popular, and its appeal doesn’t cut across numerous political and social cleavages in the country. Localised or regionalised deterrence forces have already started consolidating to fight it. The situation could descend into a devastating, multi-layered civil war, with Afghanistan’s neighbours and other regional actors scrambling for influence by backing different groups, as happened when the Taliban ruled.

It’s important to bear in mind that the Afghanistan conflict has been deeply entangled with many regional and extra-regional problems, including the Indo-Pakistan dispute, Pakistani–Saudi close relations, China–Pakistan strategic ties, Saudi–Iranian rivalry, Iranian–Pakistani distrust, as well as US–Russia and US–China contentions. General Austin Miller, commander of the US-led forces in Afghanistan, has said that ‘civil war is certainly a path that can be visualised … which should be a concern for the world’.

The third option is a negotiated political settlement for power-sharing governance and a transition to a general election for a popularly mandated government within a couple of years. Such a settlement can only work if it has the support of a cross-section of Afghanistan’s mosaic population and regional actors as well as the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Yet, the prevailing situation doesn’t inspire much confidence in this respect. The Doha peace process is stalled. The Taliban are enormously emboldened by their February 2020 peace agreement with the US, involving a ceasefire only with American and allied forces, and no political settlement, as well as by the total withdrawal of foreign forces by September. They have reasons not to be interested in a political settlement; they have already declared victory against the US and NATO and can see the trophy of power within their sights after two decades of fighting.

A Taliban triumph would also mean a boost for al-Qaeda, with which, according to UN reports, the militia still maintains close ties. If the key American and allied objective was to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, whose 9/11 attacks triggered the US-led intervention, they can’t possibly claim to have succeeded.

At this stage, it’s hard to be optimistic about the chances of a settlement, as it may be too late. This is not to say, however, that urgent efforts shouldn’t be made by Afghan leaders within a framework of national unity and salvation, backed by the international community, to persuasively cajole the Taliban and their Pakistani sponsors to compromise in support of saving Afghanistan from more disaster. It is very disappointing to see that the leaders in Kabul are still divided, bickering over the formation of a state supreme council with the necessary executive power to make collective decisions about how to stymie the tide of the Taliban advances and give some certainty to the Afghan people about their future.

The current situation has already instilled panic and fear among citizens within the pervasive environment of violence and insecurity, causing an outflow of much-needed skilled workers and capital. Most people feel that they are caught between the self-centred and self-concerned leaders in Kabul and the very real prospects for the return of the Taliban to power. The threat posed by a Taliban return extends to fears that they will reimpose their discriminatory and brutal theocratic order, thus limiting the rights not only of women but of all citizens in general to a dignified and progressive life.

Yet, the only political settlement that might have a chance of success is one within a paradigm of interlocking national, regional and international consensus and enforceable by the UN Security Council. Failure to reach such a political resolution of the crisis should weigh heavily on Afghanistan’s leaders and the US and its allies.

The two-state solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a yeti—often talked about, but rarely sighted. And like the Himalayan snowfields, its habitat is shrinking.

A familiar combination of domestic Israeli and Palestinian political dynamics, international failures and worsening relations between the two sides created conditions for the outbreak and the continuation of the most recent bloodshed. Those circumstances still apply.

Two decades after the second intifada marked the effective end of the Oslo Accords, there is once again a widespread view among political audiences, on both sides, that the Palestinian–Israeli relationship is existential and zero-sum.

Like love and roses, the latest fragile ceasefire will last while it lasts, nothing more. The coalition that was created to remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power in Israel also faces serious challenges to its durability.

Meanwhile, the political clout and credibility of the Palestinian Authority, already in poor shape before the conflict, has suffered further serious damage. Thanks to its own ineptitude (notably the cancellation of elections), Netanyahu’s drive to survive by accommodating the extremist right, and the failure of the US administration to act quickly and decisively at the outset of the fighting in May, recourse to violence, which the Palestinian Authority is obliged to eschew, has become re-legitimised in the minds of popular audiences on both sides.

Whatever the damage Israel is doing to its support base abroad (and recent polling and US congressional responses indicate that the damage is substantial, including among younger US evangelical Christians), Israelis suffer no pangs of conscience (according to the respected commentator Yossi Klein Halevi) over the deaths of more than 240 Palestinians, including around 60 children, in response to Palestinian rocket attacks.

Israeli opinion seems to have no problem, either, with the decimation of employment-generating civilian infrastructure in Gaza—ranging from bookshops to ice-cream factories—and the damage, collateral or deliberate, to homes and medical facilities.

Palestinians applauded the same indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, ignoring the fact that they cannot make effective appeals for justice when the primary media focus is on missiles and allegations of war crimes. Nor did they advance any other Palestinian interest by doing so.

Three key questions arise from the current situation.

Israel remains unaccountable, but for how much longer?

Can Israel rely, in the US context, on receiving exceptional treatment as a (supposedly) reluctant occupier—based on arguments about foundation myths, the Holocaust and security concerns—in an era of Black Lives Matter, protests against police violence, articulate liberal voices ranging from Bernie Sanders to Peter Beinart, anti-apartheid sentiment and real-time imagery of civilian suffering?

And will those arguments—and the Iron Dome—that suffice for now be enough to satisfy Israelis themselves as time goes on?

Will Israelis be prepared to put the safety of their children, conscripted to serve in the West Bank and elsewhere, at risk when Palestinians both in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel feel disempowered, marginalised and stripped of rights, freedoms and security?

Will they double down on preservation of the identity of Israel as a Jewish state—and the privileges they enjoy within that state—when Palestinians on both sides of the ‘green line’ see no prospects for redress through the existing system?

Will they be willing to do so when the primary beneficiaries of a refusal to countenance fundamental questions are the rabidly racist elements among Israeli settlers whose behaviour is an affront to the values of Judaism and the majority of Israelis?

Can the Palestinians restore international focus on issues of their rights and dignity—which pose existential questions for the future of Israel as a Jewish state—when global media attention is driven primarily (if not exclusively) by the clickbait of violent imagery?

The violence of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians has shaped political culture on all sides. As one Palestinian blogger said, ‘My sister was 8 during the 2008 war, 12 during the 2012 war, 14 during the 2014 war, 18 during the march of return, and now she’s 21 during this.’

But far from encouraging a process of conflict resolution, that violence has, in turn, enabled a deflection of Israeli and international focus on the issues underlying the conflict itself into a sterile discussion of Israel’s security needs.

Among the most infuriating aspects of Hamas’s criminal intervention in the latest conflict was the fact that it stifled a nascent discussion, as a result of the expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, of Palestinian rights (as distinct from interests). A discussion that needs to be had, for the sake of future generations on both sides, about the fact that Palestinians are denied the rights that are accorded to Jewish citizens of Israel to return to property they possessed before 1948 has once again been avoided.

And, in the nature of the news cycle, further non-violent Palestinian resistance to the next round of dispossessions, and the demands of Palestinians for dignity and for justice, will probably be accorded little attention.

Since the two-state solution, like the yeti, is unable to be found, what can replace it?

It is the absence of any recognisable path forward that should be of greatest concern for both sides.

There are no credible advocates among Israelis, let alone political machinery on either side to challenge—as needs to be done—the political and diplomatic infrastructure supporting the convenient fable of a two-state solution.

A one-state approach would require mobilising political support for a fundamental rearticulation of the political, security and social apparatus and identity of Israel. That’s surely less likely than a further shift to the right among Israelis fearing for their future.

Most thinking Israelis abhor it, but the language of racism has become part of Israeli political discourse. Racist demonstrations receive government approval and police protection. And while transactional relationships with regional Arab states, brokered by the United States, are celebrated, they are not affecting Israeli behaviour and attitudes toward Palestinians under their control.

The Palestinian Authority will not relinquish its role, patronage and security networks; and it is unlikely that Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset will withdraw from Israeli politics either.

Meanwhile, Palestinian activists who were born after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 are less responsive to calls for restraint. Ten years after the Arab Spring opened political horizons, and in a more supportive international climate, they are now telling their own story. And Palestinian civil disobedience is now operating across the 1948 line.

The Biden administration will be tempted not to expend political capital by addressing underlying issues which now show even less prospects for resolution, even as they become more dangerous to both parties. It has more far-reaching strategic issues, including the question of relations with Iran, to address with Israel’s supporters in Congress.

But yielding to that temptation would be unwise. The talking points about two states that worked for Washington (and Canberra) in the 1990s no longer apply. And the uncharted direction in which Israelis and Palestinians are heading must make even the yeti ponder its future.

After 12 years as Israel’s prime minister, it appears Benjamin Netanyahu will be deposed next week when a new government is formed under Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Yamina party. The coalition agreement was announced late Wednesday, just minutes before the constitutional deadline that mandated fresh elections if an agreement to form a government wasn’t reached by that time. The government will now have to attain a vote of confidence from the Knesset within a week.

Netanyahu’s arrogance and his cynical approach to politics, primarily guided by his obsession with advancing his own interests, alienated politicians across the Israeli political spectrum from the Labor Party on the left to the ultranationalist Zionist parties on the extreme right. This was the principal reason why the motley collection of parties came together to oust him despite huge differences in their ideologies and economic philosophies, and the clashing political ambitions of their leaders. For the first time in Israel’s history, the ruling coalition will include an Arab party, the United Arab List, one of the last to sign the coalition agreement.

The fragmented nature of the Israeli political spectrum is clearly demonstrated by the fact that it took four elections within the space of two years to lead to this outcome. Netanyahu is a master of political manoeuvring, and after each of the three earlier elections he was able to retain the prime ministership by making promises to political rivals that he inevitably broke, to the great anguish of his coalition partners.

Two major questions emerge as Israel moves into the post-Netanyahu era. The first concerns the stability of the diverse coalition that will take over the reins of power: how long will it last after Netanyahu departs the scene? The second concerns the future of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Will this change in government transform the direction of the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and resuscitate the two-state solution that is now on its deathbed?

While it’s difficult to predict how long the coalition will last, it’s clear that, once the spectre of Netanyahu recedes, issues that divide the coalition partners will gain greater prominence. The outsized ambitions of the different political leaders in the coalition will certainly begin to reassert themselves. Yair Lapid, the leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, which has the largest number of seats among the coalition partners, agreed to accept Bennett as prime minister for the first two years of the current Knesset’s term despite the fact that his Yamina party has seven seats compared with the Yesh Atid’s 17.

The eventual clash of ambitions and personalities will, however, not be limited to Lapid and Bennett. Avigdor Lieberman of the secular right-wing and ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party and Benny Gantz of the centrist Blue and White party must also be resenting the primacy accorded to Bennett whose party has a similar number of seats to theirs.  Another source of tension that is likely to affect the coalition’s functioning is the partnership between the United Arab List, whose demands focus on improving the living conditions of Palestinian citizens of Israel and removing the discriminatory treatment they are subjected to, and the ultranationalist Zionist parties. For most coalition members, the arrangement is a marriage of convenience made imperative because, to quote Bennett, ‘There’s [either] unity or fifth elections.’ One wonders, therefore, how long this unity will last.

No movement can be expected on the Israeli–Palestinian front since none of the major coalition partners are particularly concerned about finding a solution to the conflict. With several ultranationalist Zionist parties in the coalition and with Jewish settlers having acquired enormous influence in the Israeli polity, the coalition government wouldn’t want to get embroiled in controversies about a chimerical ‘peace process’ that could only end up in accelerating its disintegration.

The green line dividing Israel and the occupied territories is now a part of the fictional narrative that’s been devised to keep the myth of the two-state solution alive. It was obliterated a long time ago by the continued building of Jewish settlements on a large scale in the West Bank, the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem, and the construction of Israeli-only roads in the occupied territories dividing Palestinian lands into unviable Bantustans.

The Palestinian Authority, which was perceived by the international community as the legitimate interlocutor on the Palestinian side, has lost all credibility and is seen by most Palestinians merely as Israel’s enforcer in the occupied territories. The idea of a unified entity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which would provide them equal civil and political rights, has increasingly captured the Palestinian imagination as the idea of a just peace based on a two-state solution has receded.

The post-Netanyahu government will therefore be under no compulsion to address the Palestinian issue short of another intifada not only extending across the West Bank and Gaza but also embracing the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out in light of the events of last month that demonstrated that the Palestinians’ perceptions of the predicaments facing them in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel, despite differences in detail, are in essence the same based on the doctrines of dispossession and discrimination emanating from the huge inequality in power between the Israeli state and the Palestinian population.

However, for now, one can assume that the Lapid–Bennett government will demonstrate the same indifference to the Palestinians’ plight as was the case under Netanyahu, especially since Bennett is firmly opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state and favours the absorption of much of the West Bank into Israel. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The latest round of Palestinian unrest and the de facto state of war between Israel and Hamas is the most serious flare up on the Israel–Palestine front since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014. According to reports, 197 Palestinians in Gaza have now lost their lives due to Israeli airstrikes and 10 Israelis have been killed by Hamas’s rocket attacks.

While the ferocity of the confrontation and the rapidity with which it escalated may have come as a surprise, this turn of events should not have shocked any seasoned observer of the conflict. Given the current trajectory of Israeli policy and the reaction that it has produced, it was inevitable that this scenario would unfold sooner or later.

The roots of the conflict go back at least to 1948, if not to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Israeli refusal to relinquish the West Bank, which it occupied in 1967, the deliberate planting of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, and the often-brutal treatment of the occupied population accentuated the problem. However, the proximate cause of the latest conflagration is a confluence of factors that highlight the deep-seated contradictions undergirding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the discriminatory treatment meted out by Israel to the Palestinian citizens who form a fifth of the country’s population.

The current Israeli attempt to evict Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem epitomises the Palestinian plight and is reminiscent of the first war over Palestine in 1948–49, when large parts of what is now Israel was forcefully denuded of its Palestinian inhabitants. Sheikh Jarrah threw into sharp relief the discrimination enshrined in Israeli law that allows Jews to reclaim land in East Jerusalem that they owned before 1948 but denies descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes in the same year any legal means to reclaim their families’ land. The attempt to evict six Arab families (which is dependent a now-delayed appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court) led to demonstrations of support not only in the Arab parts of Jerusalem and the occupied territories but also in several Israeli towns with substantial Arab populations.

The tension was exacerbated by the Jerusalem police’s decision to prevent Arabs from entering the plaza around the Damascus Gate in the midst of Ramadan, thus impeding access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This led to daily clashes between Arab youths and police. The latter’s incursion into the Haram-al-Sharif that houses Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock on 7 May, the last Friday of Ramadan (an important day in the Islamic calendar), added a religious dimension to the Palestinians’ nationalist grievances. Islamist group Hamas jumped into the fray in support of Palestinian demands in Jerusalem and launched rocket attacks on Israel, leading to heavy Israeli retaliation by air and the threat of a full-fledged invasion of Gaza.

Unlike the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014, this time an Israeli ground attack could very well coincide with a new intifada which will not be limited just to the West Bank. There are indications that Palestinian citizens of Israel may also become involved in such a movement. Israeli Arab anger has boiled over after decades of discrimination in arenas including health, education and housing.

Adding insult to injury was the law passed by the Knesset in July 2018 designating Israel as Jewish nation-state, legally making Israeli Arabs second-class citizens. Diana Batutu, a Palestinian political analyst from Haifa, summed up the feelings of Palestinian citizens of Israel, saying ‘We are the people who they mistakenly did not ethnically cleanse from this place.’

The Israeli Arab feeling of alienation, especially after the nation-state law, has prompted them to identify with the cause of the Palestinians in the occupied territories even more than they did earlier. Demonstrations and large-scale rioting in Lod, Ramla and other cities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations, and the participation of Israeli Arabs in the Damascus Gate and Sheikh Jarrah protests provide a preview of what could happen during the next intifada.

The uncertainty over government formation in Israel after the last election has led to competitive extremism among rival political blocs and exacerbated the volatile situation. Extremist Jewish groups have engaged in highly provocative marches through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, shouting incendiary slogans, including ‘death to the Arabs’. They have also randomly attacked Palestinians in cities with mixed populations thus further inflaming Palestinian passions both in Israel and the occupied territories.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has taken the opportunity provided by the Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate incidents to increase its appeal among Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, and has succeeded in great measure. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision in March to postpone elections to the Palestinian parliament demonstrated his apprehension that his party Fatah would be defeated at the polls. It also dismayed Hamas because it deprived it of the chance to demonstrate its popularity in the West Bank.

This cycle of violence seems to be inexorably leading to a full-scale war between Israel and Hamas. All signs indicate that the present crisis, if left unchecked, could act as the trigger for an impending intifada that would encompass Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as Arab-populated regions of Israel. The Israeli government’s assumption that thanks to American support it could continue to dispossess Palestinians and treat Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens seems to be unravelling slowly but surely. Even the decision of US President Joe Biden’s administration to endorse Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ in the current phase of the conflict is unlikely to reverse this trend.

The rift between Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his half-brother, Prince Hamzah, once again reminds us of the patrimonial and, in some cases, polygamic-based sibling and inter-dynastic power rivalry that has traditionally marked political life in many parts of the Muslim world. It has historically yielded grave consequences, contributing to the fragility and instability of the authoritarian rule that continues to feature in many Muslim countries. This has been nowhere more evident than in the Middle East.

A quick survey of Islamic history since the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632 reveals that, despite Islam acting as a unifying religion, the evolution of rule in the Muslim domain has frequently been marked by assassinations and bloodshed. This has in many cases stemmed from sibling and dynastic rivalries. It featured in the Umayyad (661–744) and Abbasid (750–1258) dynasties, as it also did during the Ottoman imperial reign (1299–1918). And it continued to define the dynastic rule in several Middle Eastern countries, most of which gained independence during the accelerated European decolonisation between the two world wars and afterwards. In recent times, the experiences of Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been most illustrative.

In Saudi Arabia, following the death of its founder as a modern state, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who reigned from 1932 to 1953 and produced many male children from at least four concurrent wives, there was a consensus that the seven sons from his Sudairi wife would succeed him in the order of age. However, the succession line didn’t always work as intended.

Although Abdulaziz’s oldest surviving son, Saud Al Saud, succeeded him, he faced continued rivalry from his brother Faisal, who held his own distinct vision for Saudi Arabia. Deposing Saud in 1964, Faisal proved to be a better administrator and more forward-looking.

Faisal was assassinated in 1975 by his American-educated and westernised nephew, Faisal bin Musaid Al Saud. Different sources have attributed his actions to a variety of motives, one of which is that he was not satisfied with the contradictory ways that the Saudi royal family ruled.  He was followed by his Sudairi brothers until the chain was broken by Abdullah bin Saud from another mother, ruling from 2005 to 2015. Abdullah was publicly dubbed as a reformist and, despite being an out-of-the-line successor, was tolerated by his Sudairi siblings partly because he appointed Nayef bin Sultan, one of the sons of a deceased Sudairi, as crown prince, thus projecting a return of rule to the Sudairi line.

However, given that two Sudairis were still alive, Prince Salman Al Saud (the eldest) took power upon Abdullah’s death. Salman was quick to promote his younger son, Mohammad bin Salman (known as MBS). In an unprecedently forceful manner, MBS wrested the position of crown prince from Nayef, putting him under house arrest, along with jailing many more potential princely rivals and their main supporters.

In view of King Salman’s old age and frailty, MBS has managed to elevate himself as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. His autocratic but socially modernising rule has proved to be very controversial in its domestic and foreign policy dispositions, which has confronted the new Joe Biden administration in the US with a serious dilemma about how to deal with the Saudi kingdom as a key ally in an economically and strategically vital region of the world.

A similar development has come to beset the Jordanian dynastic rule. The latest tension between King Abdullah and Prince Hamzah traces back to 1999 when their dying father, King Hussein bin Talal, who had succeeded his father in 1952 under more or less British tutelage, made a dash to Jordan from the US to determine the future of his dynastic rule. He was married three times, with the oldest son, Abdullah, from the British born Muna al-Hussein, and the youngest son, Hamzah, from the American born Noor al-Hussein. As the final and highly glamorous wife, Queen Noor was mostly favoured by the king, as was her son Hamzah. During the king’s months of treatment for terminal cancer in the US, Queen Noor was his constant companion, encouraging him to ensure the position of Hamzah as his successor.

In a quick visit to Amman before returning to the US to die, the king unceremoniously fired his brother Hassan bin Talal as crown prince. Meanwhile, two considerations led him to designate his oldest son, Abdullah, as his successor and Hamzah as crown prince: Hamzah’s young age and the constitutional provision that the king should be succeeded by his oldest son. Yet, he expected Abdullah to relinquish the crown to Hamzah at an appropriate time. But once Abdullah consolidated power, he wanted his son to be his successor. He stripped Hamzah of his position in favour of his own young son, Hussein bin Abdullah (born in 1994), causing a simmering but serious discontent within the royal family. Queen Noor was upset and disappointed with the development, as was Hamzah.

The roots of the current Abdullah–Hamzah tussle lie in this change in succession. As Hamzah matured, he grew critical of the governments, administrative anomalies and corruption under his brother’s rule. He has reflected the voice of many Jordanians whose economic and social situation has been compounded by Covid-19 and a decline in foreign aid, which Jordan is heavily dependent on, especially from the US. The country is also burdened by the influx of refugees from war-torn Iraq and Syria, and indeed from a difficult demographic composition—a majority of its citizens are of Palestinian origin—and Jordan’s location in a highly unstable and problematic neighbourhood, in which the Israeli–Palestinian conflict plays its part.

As the situation stands, neither Saudi Arabia nor Jordan is in serious danger of unravelling. The US and other main regional players do not find it in their interests to see these countries destabilised. While there’s the tradition of mediation, which has seen Hamzah pledge allegiance to Abdullah, the sibling-based dynastic power rivalries may continue to play a prominent role in the governance of many Middle Eastern monarchies for the foreseeable future. To address the problem, there’s a need for a transformation of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and indeed the rest of the hereditary-ruled Middle Eastern states into constitutional monarchies where the powers of the monarchs are balanced by publicly mandated governments.