Here’s an interesting historical fact. The same family, known as the House of Hashim (or the Hashemites), served as stewards of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina from 967 to 1925. There’s a reason their nearly millennia-long streak came to an end, and it’s relevant to things the fascist regime is threatening to do today.

The second-to-last steward in the line was Hussein bin Ali, the King of Hejaz. He began in the position in 1908 when Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II gave him the appointment. But, after the Young Turk revolution started an anti-Arab process of Turkification in the sultan’s realm, Hussein chafed under Ottoman rule. In 1916, during World War One, which the Ottomans were fighting on Germany’s side, the British enticed Hussein to rebel. This began the Great Arab Revolt which is best known in the West by movies like Lawrence of Arabia.

Assisted by French, British, Australian, Indian and other British colonial troops, the Arabs threw off Ottoman rule. But things didn’t work out quite as planned. The British had promised that if the Arabs were victorious against the Turks, they would gain a unified kingdom spanning from Aleppo in northern Syria to Aden in Yemen. This promise was not kept. Instead, the Brits and French split up the Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire, creating League of Nations “mandates” in Palestine and the countries we now know as Iraq, Jordan, Syria/Lebanon.

This displeased Hussein, but all was not lost for his family.

In the aftermath of World War I, Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, in protest of the Balfour Declaration, a document supporting the Jewish settlers in Palestine, and the establishment of British and French mandates in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. His sons Faisal and Abdullah were made rulers of Iraq and Transjordan respectively in 1921.

He later refused to sign the Anglo-Hashemite Treaty and thus was left in a very precarious position, the British decided progressively to stop supporting him after the proclamation of his caliphate and the refusal to sign any treaty with them. Thus, they decided to support Ibn Saud, who promptly launched an invasion of the Kingdom of Hejaz. In October 1924, facing defeat by Ibn Saud, he abdicated and was succeeded as king by his eldest son Ali bin Hussein.

With the British supporting the Saudis, Ali bin Hussein did not last long in the position of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. In 1925, he fled to Iraq where his brother Faisal had been crowned king in 1921. His brother Abdullah became King of Jordan. The Hashemite line was blotted out in Iraq in a 1958 military coup, but it has lasted in Jordan. In fact, the current king of Jordan is named Abdullah the Second.

King Abdullah II was visiting with the fascist regime in Washington, DC on Tuesday. It did not go well.

But before we get to that, we have to talk about Jordan. It gained its independence from Britain in 1946. In 1948, the Palestine War broke out and while Israel prevailed and established itself as a country, the Jordanians captured and annexed the West Bank.

The West Bank was lost to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and Jordan transferred its claim to the Palestinians in 1988 and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. A predicate to that 1994 peace treaty was the 1993 Oslo Accords which began a process in which a state of Palestine including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be created under the leadership of the Palestine Authority. This obviously has not happened.

Now, one last thing to keep in mind is that Jordan’s relationship with the Palestinians has been uneasy ever since the 1948 war. There was a 19-year period when West Bank Palestinians lived under Jordanian annexation, but there were also hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled into Jordan proper. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), there are currently over two million people living in Jordan who originally lived or are direct descendants of people who lived in what is now Israel. That’s nearly twice as many people in this category who are estimated to live in the Gaza Strip.

That’s a lot of refugees. It’s over a third of the total population of the country, and they have caused the monarchy some rather serious problems:

After the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas relocated to Jordan and stepped up their attacks against Israel and what had become the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were headquartered at the Jordanian border town of Karameh, which Israel targeted during the Battle of Karameh in 1968, leading to a surge of Arab support for the fedayeen. The PLO’s strength grew, and by early 1970, leftist groups within the PLO began calling for the overthrow of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy, leading to violent clashes in June 1970.

Eventually, the Hashemites drove Arafat and the PLO out of the kingdom and into Lebanon. But they remember the instability created by having militant exiled Palestinians launch unauthorized attacks against Israel, inviting lethal revenge strikes. They have also been burdened for over 75 years with the cost of taking care of and policing a huge displaced population of refugees. They cannot afford to take on a new wave of displaced Palestinians.

It’s not just the financial burden that’s a problem, Remember, the Hashemite kingdom lost a war with Israel in 1948, 1956, and 1967. They expelled the Palestinian resistance in 1971, despite their strong Arab street credibility. They signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 based on promises that have not materialized. And they are still allied and dependent on American support and are hosting American troops despite America’s strong military and political support for the utter destruction of Gaza.

In 2021, Jordan and the United States added a defense cooperation agreement that became law by royal decree, bypassing parliament and generating considerable public backlash. Opposition members of parliament denounced the agreement as a violation of Jordanian sovereignty and as a national humiliation. While the backlash in no way changed the agreement, or U.S.-Jordanian relations for that matter, the indignant tone was a harbinger of things to come, as domestic opposition to the US military presence has grown since then. With U.S. support for the Israeli bombing of Gaza, that opposition became louder still.

The kingdom has somehow survived all these disappointments and perceived betrayals, but they can’t survive if they’re seen as facilitating an American annexation of the Gaza Strip by accepting displaced Gazans as refugees. This would be like a second Nakba, the Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” used to describe the 1948 mass displacement of Palestinians.

But, despite all of this history, Trump has proposed to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and relocate them to Egypt and Jordan. He has stated that the over two million resulting refugees would not be allowed to come back to Gaza.

In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Monday, Mr. Trump said he did not envision Palestinians who left Gaza to make way for the redevelopment plan ever returning.

Asked in the interview whether the Palestinians would eventually “have the right to return” to Gaza after his proposed construction projects had been completed, the president said, “No, they wouldn’t.”

As for where they might go, he said: “I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt.”

Then on Tuesday, he hosted Abdullah II at the White House:

Donald Trump on Tuesday pressed Jordan’s King Abdullah to take in Palestinians who would be permanently displaced under the president’s plan for the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip, even as the king said his country was firmly opposed to the move.

Speaking alongside the Arab country’s ruler in the White House, Trump signaled he would not budge on his idea that involves moving the Gaza Strip’s shell-shocked residents and transforming the war-ravaged territory into what he billed a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump has infuriated the Arab world by saying that Palestinians would not be able to return to their homes under his proposal to redevelop the enclave, which has been devastated by an Israeli offensive.

“We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it. We’re going to get it going eventually, where a lot of jobs are going to be created for the people in the Middle East,” Trump said in the Oval Office, saying his plan would “bring peace” to the region.

On one level, what Trump is saying is insane and delusional. He’s asking us to believe that we can convince every Gazan to leave Gaza knowing that they’ll never be allowed back to enjoy the jobs created in the “Riviera of the Middle East.” He can do this without it costing any money or requiring any troops. And these displaced people will be welcomed and cause no trouble to Egypt, Jordan, Israel or the new American enclave.

That’s all preposterous, but he appears to be serious about seizing Gaza and treating it as a choice real estate development opportunity: “We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it.” Just saying this, even if it never happens, is needlessly destabilizing to the Hashemite kingdom. Forcing the king to appear in person and listen to this nonsense is another national humiliation for Jordan that puts the monarchy at risk.

It forced Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi to make the media rounds in an effort to do a cleanup in aisle nine. He announced that Arab nations will produce a “plan to rebuild Gaza without displacing its people” and claimed that the king had explained and that Trump understood that Jordan cannot afford financially or existentially to go along with his plan. There is, alas, no evidence that Trump’s understands anything.

What he’s doing could easily result in the end of something uninterrupted since the 10th-Century, which is Hashemite power in the Middle East. It puts Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel at risk. It also puts Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel at risk. This is true if Trump somehow follows through, and it might be true even if he doesn’t simply because what’s he’s proposing is so irresponsible and offensive.

Remember, the Hashemites lost their thousand-year hold on Mecca and Medina because the Brits and French didn’t like being lectured about their broken promises. The Jordanian monarchy has played nice with the West and its reward is to lose legitimacy with its own people because promises aren’t kept.

Does Trump care about any of this?

No, he doesn’t. He wants Jordanian help in a mass ethnic cleansing project and a second Nakba.

These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.