In an interview published in The Washington Post, His Majesty King Abdullah on Monday said that political reform cannot be realised without economic reform. “My mission is as quickly as possible to get Jordan to have a prime minister elected from a political party. We need to create new political parties based on programmes,” His Majesty added.
“The Arab Spring didn’t start because of politics; it started because of economics - poverty and unemployment,” the King said in his interview with The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth, which was conducted during the WEF.
In reply to a question on the new government, the King said the new prime minister, Awn Khasawneh, “has got an impeccable record; he is the ideal person to get us to national elections as quickly as possible”.
On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, King Abdullah voiced frustration with Israel’s current posture.
“They are missing an opportunity here and I am very concerned. This is the most frustrated I have ever been about the peace process. I think a lot of us have come to the conclusion that this particular [Israeli] government is not interested in a two-state solution,” he said.
The current Israeli government is not taking practical and serious steps in accord with the international commitment to the two-state solution, the King explained in the interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper, stressing that regional stability depends on resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Emphasising the importance of continued US engagement in peace efforts, the King told The Washington Post that it is out of desperation and frustration that the Palestinians brought before the UN a membership bid, noting that part of the problem is that the US has other domestic priorities at the moment.
“I think the [Obama] administration would be very wary to step out front without guarantees on the Israeli-Palestinian process, which is a shame because it is desperately needed now,” he told Weymouth.
In reply to a question on developments at the domestic level, the King stated: “We reached out to everybody and got a national dialogue committee.”
“The other thing that made a major impact is that we have had demonstrations for the past 11 months but... nobody has been killed. It was a decision taken from day one that we disarmed all our police. In other countries… their solution was to pull out their guns and shoot.”
On Syria, the King stressed that Jordan has done its best to keep all channels of communication open with the Syrians.“I spoke to [Syrian President] Bashar Assad twice in the springtime,” the King told the Post.
Concerning the developments in Libya, he said: “We were committed to the [National] Transitional Council from day one”, and mentioned an old saying that “peace is much harder than war.” “I think the challenge for Libya now is how to make this transition peacefully,” he added.