Jordan postponement of Blinken visit prompts speculation about regional policy

When Jordan announced on Tuesday that the visit of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the kingdom, scheduled for yesterday, was being postponed, speculation arose about possible disagreements over future diplomacy in the region, Quds Press has reported. On Tuesday, a US official said that Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia as part of a regional tour to push for a ceasefire in Gaza “instead of his previously scheduled stop in Jordan due to scheduling requirements.”

However, Jordan’s Petra news agency said on Tuesday evening that Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi spoke with Blinken on the phone and stressed that, “Nothing justifies Israel’s continued aggression” in the besieged Gaza Strip. According to Petra, Jordan’s top diplomat also stressed the necessity of “ending the catastrophe brought by Israel in northern Gaza, where it is escalating its aggression and preventing the entry of food and medicine in clear violation of international law and international humanitarian law.”

According to political analyst Hazem Ayyad, “Blinken’s visit to the region does not add anything to the diplomatic efforts aimed at stopping the Israeli massacres, but rather falls within a path of covering up the Israeli military operations in northern Gaza.”

Ayyad told Quds Press that before starting his visit, Blinken gave the Israeli occupation army 30 days “to continue starving the people of Gaza until the army achieves its goals,” in order to “cover up and justify the crimes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.” He pointed out that Blinken’s visit coincided with the conference held by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to send illegal settlers back into the Gaza Strip, as well as the Likud party’s call to cancel the law of disengagement from the enclave.

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Blinken’s diplomatic efforts do not disrupt any of these paths, said Ayyad, and will not achieve anything politically; they simply act as diplomatic cover for the Israeli army’s criminal operations. “Blinken came to the region to invest in the results of the Israeli military operation and achieve the strategic goals announced by Netanyahu, in which he called for re-engineering the Middle East,” he claimed.

However, the analyst believes that Israel is stuck in a long war of attrition and is unable to achieve its strategic goals, whereas Jordan is not interested in dealing with this kind of diplomacy which does not work sincerely to stop the war and stop the human suffering of the Palestinians.

Ayyad also expressed his belief that Blinken is a partner in the so-called General’s Plan for the starvation and genocide of Palestinians in northern Gaza drafted by retired General Giora Eiland. The US official, he noted, provides Israel with diplomatic, political and even temporal cover with a 30-day deadline to prevent aid from entering the northern Gaza Strip. He added that Eiland has recently rearranged his priorities in light of the heavy losses incurred by the Israeli occupation army by putting Jordan on his list of targets in an article published on Tuesday in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. The occupation army, said Eiland, should prepare to move to the Jordanian front.

“These plans appeal to the US Secretary of State, whom Jordan refused to receive.” In doing so, concluded Ayyad, the Kingdom has sent a “strong message” to both the Americans and the Israelis about their position on the overall developments.