By Rima Najjar
A Conversation on Hope and Silence
I pushed back gently: this isn’t indifference. Across the region, people feel overwhelming rage, grief, and moral clarity about Gaza. The missing piece is political capacity — fragmented societies, criminalized dissent, regimes that survive by blocking mass mobilization. Labeling it apathy, misdiagnoses the problem and risks, portraying immobilized populations as consenting to horror.
Amal agreed, but sharpened the analysis: “Definitely helplessness.” In Jordan, she said, people have internalized a belief that we lack agency — not only as individuals and groups but also as nations. This is “one of the most dangerous internalizations,” she added, echoing Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony unfolding in real time. She hears it everywhere: “What can we do? We can’t do anything.” “The Zionists control everything.” “America controls everything.” “Jordan has no resources.” These comments shrink the imaginable before action can even begin.
Religion gets co opted too. People reduce faith to “only rely on توكل (tawakkul — trust in God),” forgetting the prophetic command: اعقلها وتوكل (“tie your camel, then trust in God”). Prayer becomes a substitute for action, a politically convenient theology of passivity.
Yet faith, when rooted in communal practice rather than isolation, can build extraordinary resilience. In one of my earlier essays on Palestinian endurance in Gaza, I explored how expressions like “Alhamdulillah — Praise be to God” function not as resignation but as gratitude amid grief — a cultural and spiritual anchor sustaining wellbeing and collective memory.Psychological studies support this: communities that integrate faith, social bonds, and historical continuity often exhibit remarkable capacity for endurance. Palestinians survive in part because their fabric weaves submission to God with mutual responsibility and steadfastness.
This same resilient potential exists in Jordan, where deep communal and religious ties bind families and neighborhoods. Yet dominant discourses on Palestine work precisely to sever that resilience from political action, turning balanced tawakkul into fatalism. I have heard its distorted echo in conversations with taxi drivers across Amman, Ramallah, and Beirut, who shrug off risks with “what will be, will be.” Here, faith collapses into a retreat from ethical agency — the very helplessness Amal describes.
Neoliberal stories compound the damage: aid Palestinians with education, jobs, entrepreneurship — as if economic uplift alone delivers liberation. This mirrors the humanitarian trap I critiqued in From Futility to Friction: managing suffering without challenging the structures of domination.
Amal’s heartbreak peaks when describing Jordan’s institutions. Courts degrade into complicity; media parrot power; unions and NGOs prioritize survival over solidarity. “It is disgraceful,” she wrote. “Our civil society orgs have no courage, no sense of deeper responsibility… only to maintaining their existence.” Watching this in real time feels “scary,” she said, predicting “we will learn a lesson here one day and it will be a hard one.”
Yet this helplessness is not merely a cultural or spiritual distortion; it is rooted in a strategic reality whose full contours are deliberately kept out of view.
Erased Strength: Jordan’s Strategic Reality
Amal’s most important point reveals a potential that has been pushed out of sight. Jordan shares one of the region’s most strategically vital borders: approximately 335–400 km with Israel and the occupied West Bank, making it Israel’s longest contiguous land frontier and a critical geographic buffer against threats from the east. This positioning has historically made Jordan indispensable for regional stability, separating Israel from potential adversaries in Syria, Iraq, and Iran aligned networks while serving as a vital corridor for logistics and security cooperation.
Jordan hosts an estimated 3,000 U.S. troops, with surges up to nearly 3,800 in recent years, primarily at facilities like Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq — a hub for drones, fighter jets, and counter-ISIS operations — and smaller outposts such as Tower 22 near the Syrian border. These deployments place Jordan within the wider network of U.S. regional operations, including those intersecting with conflicts involving Iran-aligned militias, even if Amman does not frame its role in those terms. The 2021 U.S.–Jordan Defense Cooperation Agreement grants American forces extensive access, building on ties dating to the 1990s. “If Jordan was not strategic,” Amal asked, “would we have this presence?”
Jordanian officials routinely deny the presence of significant foreign military bases — ritualized denials that preserve the fiction of powerlessness. Concealing this strength hides Jordan’s central role in U.S. strategy — from intercepting drones and missiles aimed at Israel to supporting stabilization efforts after conflicts.
What hobbles Jordan’s strategic weight is that it is tightly bound to external patronage and resource vulnerabilities. Jordan has for years received around $1.5 billion annually in U.S. aid through multi-year memoranda (now subject to partial commitments and review in 2025). This aid blends water support, military financing, and direct budget assistance meant to stabilize a state carrying heavy security and refugee-related burdens.
As of late 2025, UNHCR records more than 600,000 registered Syrian refugees — with government estimates much higher — placing immense pressure on a water-scarce country that already holds one of the highest refugee-to-population ratios in the world. Water scarcity illustrates how strength and vulnerability intertwine. Under the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, Israel supplies Jordan with water from Lake Tiberias and the Yarmouk River. Subsequent arrangements — including the 2021 water-for-energy framework and intermittent extensions — require Israel to provide additional fresh or desalinated water as Jordan confronts climate stress, population growth, and refugee inflows. These deals heighten public frustration: dependency grows even as shortages worsen.
And so, despite tensions over Gaza, pragmatic cooperation persists between Israel and Jordan through short-term extensions, deepening perceptions that Jordan concedes more than it gains.
Visible pushback remains limited today. Pro-Palestine demonstrations, though far less intense than their 2024 peaks, continue sporadically into late 2025, often sparked by regional developments or commemorations. Gatherings in Amman and other cities persist in raising demands to halt gas imports from Israel and reconsider normalization agreements. Authorities respond with restrictions and arrests, yet these limited episodes, though quickly contained, still force the regime to expend political capital on suppression — revealing the underlying fear.
Amal’s diagnosis cuts deep: Jordan’s apparent weakness is not inherent but systematically imposed — through ideology, distorted religion, economic dependency, institutional paralysis, and the deliberate concealment of strategic strength.
Having exposed the hidden leverage that is systematically denied, we can now ask how ordinary Jordanians might begin to make that leverage felt.
From Helplessness to Friction
In a society where open protest invites severe repression, agency emerges through low-visibility, coordinated practices. Professionals withhold routine cooperation. Unions revive dormant committees. Students reconstruct political vocabulary. Journalists circulate restricted facts. Families discuss analyses openly. These actions build resilience across networks without requiring mass confrontation.
The diaspora and digital networks amplify this resilience. Jordanians abroad speak freely on issues risky at home, document regime contradictions, and feed uncensored information inward. Inside Jordan, activists use encrypted platforms — Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups — and VPNs to evade surveillance and blocks imposed under the 2023 Cybercrimes Law, sustaining information flow despite arrests and periodic restrictions.
This capacity for disruption is not new. Jordanians have punctured similar constraints before: in 1989 against subsidy cuts, forcing restored parliamentary elections; in 2011 through sustained demonstrations that extracted concessions and reclaimed public space; and in repeated union-led actions that won gains despite repression.
As of December 2025, ongoing public anger over Gaza — evident in contained but persistent demonstrations — intersects with economic strains. The regime’s acute external vulnerabilities can be targeted by making routine governance increasingly costly and embarrassing.
Professionals, bureaucrats, teachers, engineers, and unions hold subtle leverage in sectors tied to regime stability and foreign alliances. A civil servant could slow visa processing or approvals for U.S. military personnel through repeated requests for “missing documentation” or bureaucratic delays, creating logistical headaches without overt refusal.
Instructors could integrate factual discussions of Palestine into curricula, circulate verified reports on Gaza via parent groups, or organize “silent strikes” by refusing extracurricular activities tied to state propaganda.
Workers in water or energy infrastructure could employ “work-to-rule” tactics — strictly following every regulation to the letter — to delay maintenance and inspections linked to agreements with foreign powers. Port workers in Aqaba could similarly slow customs clearances for controversial transits.
Imams and respected elders can host discussions framing civic responsibility and meticulous action (“tying one’s camel”) as Islamic duty, re-rooting faith in communal agency.
The resilience of Jordanian society extends far beyond urban professionals, encompassing women, working-class communities, rural and tribal networks, and East Bank families whose participation has sustained pro-Palestine solidarity since the Gaza escalation. Women have often borne the brunt of repression yet wield potent networks in neighborhoods, women’s groups, and family circles: hosting private discussions, circulating information through WhatsApp or mosque gatherings, or quietly boycotting normalized goods, turning domestic spaces into sites of defiance.
Working-class actors — day laborers, market vendors, transport workers — can spread oral accounts of regime contradictions, delay deliveries informally, or organize silent slowdowns. Tribal and rural communities in places like Karak and Ma’an leverage mediation traditions to protect participants, host discreet gatherings framing resistance as defense of Jordanian honor, or withhold customary local cooperation.
These actions are deniable, distributed, and scalable, relying on networked coordination rather than public leadership. They require profound courage yet gain strategic protection from their mundane ambiguity: individual retaliation exposes regime fragility, while collective punishment is impractical against decentralized essential work. The regime faces not a leader to imprison, but accumulating costs to absorb.
Their cumulative effect forms the “political or economic barrier reef” James C. Scott describes as the “weapons of the weak” — micro-defiance that forces elites to recalibrate.
Not all targets carry equal weight; prioritize those echoing public anger over Gaza and sovereignty while minimizing backlash risks. Emphasize selective military access or strained resource ties through careful fact‑circulation and subtle administrative delays, framed not as hostility to prosperity but as resistance to arrangements that trade sovereignty for vulnerability: “We are not opposed to Jordan’s prosperity or stability; we are opposed to deals that exchange our national sovereignty for external vulnerabilities that erode genuine independence.”
While these tactics prioritize deniability to minimize danger, no act is entirely risk-free amid sophisticated surveillance and ongoing Cybercrimes Law prosecutions. Essential protections include small trusted cells (3–5 people) on a need-to-know basis, end-to-end encrypted apps with disappearing messages (while avoiding specifics online), in-person/oral transmission in safe spaces, and diaspora support for higher-risk tasks.Build mutual aid in advance: lawyer networks, emergency contacts, community funds. Frame actions publicly as patriotic duties to deprive the regime of divisive labels.
Success is incremental — delays in agreements, expanded cautious debate, forced denials, minor concessions — gradually making concealment costlier than acknowledgment.
The irony is that the state could deploy these same subtle tools upward, yet it has never done so, perhaps because its policymakers have long operated within a framework that renders such options unthinkable.
Friction Upward: Reversing Jordan’s Flow of Control
Citizens reclaim agency through quiet acts that make domination costly from below. Yet the Jordanian state possesses the same repertoire — on a far greater scale — and systematically refuses to direct it upward toward the powers that constrain it, turning these tools inward to suppress the public sentiment it could harness. This is not inevitable weakness; it is political choice. The regime performs helplessness even as it quietly stewards assets that give it real room to maneuver.
Jordan’s external vulnerabilities — U.S. military financing, Israeli water supplies, refugee burdens — are undeniable. But vulnerability is not powerlessness. Smaller states (Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman) routinely navigate asymmetry through deliberate ambiguity, calculated delays, selective cooperation, and bureaucratic obstruction. Jordan has not applied these tactics upward; instead, it performs helplessness abroad while concentrating its coercive capacity inward. Yet it could just as readily redirect this repertoire toward Washington and Tel Aviv.
The simplest arena is administrative tempo. Renewals of U.S. access permissions, equipment movement, personnel circulation — all assume seamless routine. A quiet “completeness check,” procedural review, or clarification request: none amount to refusal, yet when timed with public anger over Gaza, they signal that cooperation has a domestic price.
Diplomatic phrasing offers another channel. Jordan can fulfill commitments while underscoring constraints: slower intelligence-sharing, less frequent joint committees, statements noting “evolving domestic considerations.”This calibrated uncertainty is statecraft Amman has practiced regionally, but rarely with primary patrons.
Most potent is strategic transparency. The regime sustains incapacity’s fiction by keeping leverage invisible. Controlled disclosure — parliamentary questions on foreign agreements, reporting on water shortages tied to Israeli delays, civil society discussion of refugee strains — shifts the explanatory burden upward. Powers dependent on Jordan’s silence are acutely sensitive to daylight.
These moves expose the gap between performance and possibility. When the state insists its hands are tied externally while exercising iron control internally, it is staging helplessness to justify domestic repression. Redirecting even a fraction of its repertoire upward would realign the regime with the public mood it currently polices, reclaiming national dignity while easing internal pressure.
What is required is not dramatic confrontation but acknowledgment:constraints are negotiated, compliance conditional. Once the state punctures its own myth of absolute incapacity, that myth becomes far harder to impose below. The posture of apology gives way to negotiation. And in a political imagination long trained to expect defeat, the sight of the state practicing friction upward — however subtly — cracks the deepest spell: the belief that nothing can ever change.
Conclusion
When we scroll through the Jordanian news stream each day, the spectacle of Israel’s continued impunity works on our minds. It shapes how we are supposed to see the world. It pushes us toward expecting defeat, toward absorbing inevitability as if it were fact, toward confusing the paralysis imposed on us with the actual boundaries of what is possible. That is the deeper cost of witnessing atrocity in real time here — not only the violence itself, but the worldview it quietly trains us to inhabit.
In this essay I have tried to pry open that worldview. Immobilization is not the natural consequence of overwhelming power; it is the result of political architecture designed to make alternatives unthinkable. Once that architecture is exposed, its inevitability dissolves. The field of action widens. The sense of what can be done shifts from resignation to friction, from helplessness to the slow, cumulative work of making domination expensive.
Nothing here promises transformation. What it offers is something more fundamental: a refusal to accept the mental universe that impunity demands. When people begin to see that the paralysis surrounding them is constructed rather than fated, the ground under the regime — and under the entire regional order — begins to move. That movement is small, but it is real. And it is enough to begin imagining a future that does not end in defeat.
*Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.
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