Jordan’s jailing of a courtier exposes fissures in the kingdom

FOR KING ABDULLAH it is like old times. On July 19th he will be back in the White House, the first Arab leader to meet the new president. Gone are the cast of old antagonists, Donald Trump and his chum, Binyamin Netanyahu. President Joe Biden has ditched Mr Trump’s “deal-of-the-century” for Arab-Israeli peace, which had sidelined Jordan and its king. Naftali Bennett made Amman, Jordan’s capital, his first foreign destination as Israel’s new prime minister. Without Mr Trump’s support, Saudi Arabia has backed off from trying to supplant Jordan as the custodian of Jerusalem’s holy sites. Confident of this geopolitical realignment in Jordan’s favour, Abdullah and his queen, Rania, have taken a three-week jaunt around America.Back home, though, Jordan is seething. Bedouin tribes, historically the regime’s bedrock, openly challenge the king, who has reigned for 22 years. “I’ve never seen such dissent,” says a former official. “It’s seeping into the heart of the system itself.”