"..Abdullah lives in this grey zone... to find an Arab consensus within which to hide.."

Marc Lynch in FP, here

"...Abdullah has been walking a fine rhetorical line throughout the crisis. He has chosen to stick with the U.S.-backed "moderate" camp -- he sent his Foreign Minister to the Abu Dhabi meeting of "moderates" last week, and stayed away from the Doha "rejection" meeting. But he has also tried to align his position with a mobilized Jordanian public opinion which largely supports the "rejection" camp, allowing an unusually large number of pro-Gaza demonstrations ......Abdullah always lives in this grey zone, and wants to find an Arab consensus within which to hide. The grey zone shrinks as lines sharpen, as they have in recent years with American backing. No Arab leader would be more helped by a real Arab and Palestinian reconciliation -- hence Abdullah's call today, yet again, for both....

But as those intra-Palestinian battles escalate, and Americans and Israelis talk ever more openly about inviting Jordan back in to some role in the West Bank, those arrangements may come under strain. Hence the concern over the Islamic Action Front's recent accusation that the Jordanian government is showing unacceptable bias towards Fatah over Hamas...

The increasing popularity in the U.S. and Israel of calls for Jordan to play a security or political role in the West Bank may seem benign. But among Jordanians they arouse deep fears that this will be the first step on a very slippery slope towards the Likud's vision of turning Jordan into the Palestinian state..."