Jordanians Hail as Hero Man Who Killed Settlers at Allenby Crossing

Tamara Nassar

10 September 2024

Maher Thiab Hussein al-Jazi, 39, served in the Jordanian military for 20 years and retired with the rank of first agent. (Family archive via 7iber)

The condolence tent for Maher Thiab Hussein al-Jazi could hardly fit the number of people who came to pay their respects to his family.

“Everyone came to congratulate us,” said his cousin Sheikh Habis al-Jazi at the funeral of the Jordanian truck driver who fatally shot three Israelis at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank on 8 September, and was himself killed by Israeli guards.

“Any man would go crazy due to the Zionist massacres, especially against children, they have not spared a stone, or a tree or a child or a woman,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I am blessed and proud that I raised a hero and a lion cub,” said Thiab al-Jazi, the father of the Jordanian who carried out the shooting.

He described his son’s actions as a “defense of Palestine and the Arab and Muslim nations.”

He said that witnessing Israel’s massacres in Gaza and the West Bank motivated his son to “take up his gun and carry out this martyrdom mission.”

The deadly incident is proving an embarrassment for Jordan’s government, which throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza has walked a tight rope of appeasing the overwhelming public and parliamentary opposition to normalization with Israel, on the one hand, while entrenching the monarchy’s position within the US imperial fold, on the other.

It also underscores the rift between a population that overwhelmingly views Israel as an enemy and a mortal threat in the region, and a state that maintains its status as a US client and a de facto ally of Israel.

Amman certainly didn’t please Tel Aviv by issuing what The Times of Israel called a “belated” and “tepid” condemnation of the attack.

But nor can the Jordanian government join Jordanians in paying tribute to the man who carried it out.

Shooting at Allenby

Maher Thiab Hussein al-Jazi arrived by truck at the goods inspection area on the occupied West Bank side of the Allenby Bridge on Sunday morning and opened fire with a handgun at Israelis operating the crossing.

Yohanan Schuri, Yuri Birenbaum and Adrian Marcelo Podzamczer died of their wounds. All three lived in illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The three settlers were employed as forklift operators by the Israel Airports Authority, a department under the Israeli ministry of transport that manages land crossings.

Israel considers them to be civilians, although they were part and parcel of a military occupation that the International Court of Justice recently declared to be inherently illegal.

Israeli security guards shot and killed al-Jazi on the scene.

Footage circulated on social media, taken by someone from a nearby vehicle behind a fence, shows the lifeless body of al-Jazi. A man with a pistol then approaches the body and shoots al-Jazi in the head at point-blank range, even though he is already incapacitated.

Israel is withholding his body.

This was the first deadly armed attack by a Jordanian citizen against Israeli personnel since the beginning of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Shehab News Agency reported that Jordan and Israel have thwarted over 70 operations planned by Jordanians in recent months, citing an unnamed Jordanian source. However, they had jointly decided not to disclose these busts publicly, the source claimed.

Interrogating Jordanians

Footage circulated by Israeli media shows Israeli occupation forces escorting dozens of Jordanian truck drivers they arrested after the incident. The drivers, dressed in high-visibility vests, are seen being marched with their hands behind their heads:

Israeli authorities “forced them to sleep on their stomachs on the ground, kicked and cursed them, and forced at least three of them to take off their entire clothes,” Jordanian independent publication 7iber reported after speaking to one of the drivers.

For around 90 minutes, Jordanian truck drivers were interrogated about the attack.

Israel shuttered all border crossings with Jordan following the incident.

The Allenby Bridge, also called in Jordan the King Hussein Bridge or the Karameh crossing, lies north of the Dead Sea.

It is the only official crossing point between Jordan and the occupied West Bank, both for goods and for people. It is the primary route for millions of Palestinians to travel abroad.

A second crossing to the north, the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, connects Jordan with the Israeli state directly, not via the occupied West Bank.

“A hero”

Al-Jazi, 39, was from the district of al-Husseiniya, in Jordan’s impoverished southern Maan governorate.

He had served in the Jordanian military for 20 years before retiring with the rank of first warrant officer two years ago, 7iber reported. He then worked in the country’s royal military police, with a brief stint in the security department of the Jordanian embassy in Washington, DC.

The handgun he used was a personal, licensed weapon that he purchased towards the end of his military service, and he has had it for years, his family told 7iber.

While Hebrew media speculated about the motivations or possible backers of the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called al-Jazi “an abhorrent terrorist” and referred to what he called “a murderous ideology led by Iran’s axis of evil.”

But al-Jazi’s family has been consistent in saying he acted alone and in reaction to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

They say they were unaware of al-Jazi’s intention to carry out the attack and his wife learned that he was behind the operation only when her husband’s passport picture circulated, 7iber reported.

The Huwaitat tribe, to which al-Jazi belongs, is holding Netanyahu responsible for the incident.

What happened is “the result of the satanic acts and massacres” Israel is carrying out against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, “which are unacceptable to any human being and unimaginable to any mind,” the tribe said in a statement.

“The full responsibility for what happened lies with Netanyahu, who is the first and last person responsible for what happened.”

The tribe emphasized that “the blood of our martyred son is not more precious than the blood of our Palestinian people.”

The head of the al-Fayez family, a prominent family with close ties to the state and which heads the biggest Jordanian clan, Bani Sakher, welcomed al-Jazi’s operation and called him a hero.

That represented the widespread view among Jordanians who celebrated the operation as a justifiable act of resistance to a settler-colonial occupier and a regional enemy committing relentless slaughter against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

It is also seen as significant that al-Jazi hails from a Jordanian tribal family, and not from the country’s large population of Palestinian origin. That fact is seen as cementing the Palestinian cause as one that unites Jordanians of all backgrounds.

Welcomed by Palestinian resistance

Palestinian armed resistance organizations welcomed the attack by al-Jazi.

“The pistol of the Jordanian hero in supporting our al-Aqsa and our people was more effective than massive armies and a stacked military arsenal,” said Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson of the Qassam Brigades – the military wing of Hamas.

The US-backed Jordanian monarchy has taken diplomatic steps to protest Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, including pushing for UN security council resolutions calling for a ceasefire.

But ultimately, Jordan remains an integral part of US hegemony in the region.

Jordan has carefully managed its diplomatic and humanitarian support for Palestinians to attempt to appease its population, while avoiding any actions that might irk its main patron, the United States.

Jordan facilitated highly publicized but largely symbolic food airdrops over Gaza for months.

These airdrops do next to nothing to alleviate the systematic and intentional campaign of starvation waged by Israel, backed by its American and European allies.

The Jordan-facilitated airdrops also provided public relations cover for countries directly involved in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, while Israel continued to perpetrate one massacre after another against hungry Palestinians waiting for flour trucks.

In the first month of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US stationed additional military forces on Jordanian soil as part of a US military buildup ordered by President Joe Biden.

This buildup came to be used in April when Jordan joined the US, UK and German military action to protect Israel during Iran’s retaliation following Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus earlier that month.

“The close intelligence cooperation between Israel and Jordan is perhaps the only area that hasn’t eroded as a result of the war in Gaza, and it may guarantee a swift and efficient investigation,” Tel Aviv daily Haaretz analyst Zvi Bar’el observed following al-Jazi’s operation.

However, until Israel halts its American-backed genocide, surveillance and repression may not be enough to contain the sentiments of people in Jordan.