The first time I tried to travel to Jordan, Benjamin Netanyahu declared war. It was Friday 13 June, the first day of the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran. I was due to fly the next day, and awoke to two messages from my oldest friend: “Shit, are you still in Jordan? Sounds like it’s getting pretty crazy out there.”
For most of the day I was absurdly confident the trip would go ahead, picturing an airliner cruising and banking between barrages, with tracer fire lighting up my porthole. Obviously, everything was postponed later that day. But when I finally got to Jordan in late October, I thought again of a small, nimble but proud shape, ducking beneath the storm and spittle of regional warfare. Whether from Babylon or Washington DC, Jordan has been caught between superpowers for much of its history, and trampled by foreign conquerors, from Pompey to Allenby. Sliced into existence from the desert by the British, squeezed by the Saudi-Israeli vice, scattered with refugees from its neighbours’ wars. No wonder Jordan is such a strange shape: like an animal’s head in profile, snout tipped back and mouth wide open, perhaps in laughter, perhaps in fear.
This trip began with a slighter misfortune than war, though this time it was happening to me. It was in the early hours, standing by a circling conveyor belt that I realised, somewhere between Heathrow and Queen Alia Airport, that my bag had disappeared. I’m sure some of you have experienced what followed. The slip from resilient enthusiasm to exhausted anguish. The mental review of my check-in to inspect for human error (everything had in fact been as usual: pleasure at keeping well below the baggage allowance; a weightless thrill of freedom as my case was snatched into the bowels of the airport). The only comfort came from the Amman Four Seasons, which provides a wooden-handled razor and paraben-free shaving cream to all rooms gratis, enabling me to at least look clean for my meeting the next day.
Meeting: because this was no holiday, but a trip organised by Visit Jordan to better understand the country’s tourism sector and the difficulties it has faced since the beginning of the war in Gaza, complete with formal, ministerial meetings. Formal: I had therefore brought with me my navy blue blazer, smart trousers and striped tie. Nightmare: because these clothes were now (I imagined) dumped in some warehouse in Hounslow. I was consequently forced to borrow some from one of my generous companions. He was, however – and this was absolutely a question of height rather than width – several sizes up. However deep I tucked his shirt, it billowed around my flanks. But needs must, and so, looking like Jerry Seinfeld circa 1993, I turned the revolving door of the Four Seasons and entered the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Jordan is a country that projects a confusing mixture of woundedness and self-confidence. This, at least, is what I felt as I listened to His Excellency Yazan Alkhadiri, secretary general of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Tourism constitutes 14-15 per cent of Jordanian GDP, and the sector has collapsed since the start of the war. International visiting numbers to Petra fell 70-75 per cent between June 2023 and June this year. Jordan, desperate to improve this, has expanded alternative avenues: medical tourism, wellness retreats and historical re-enactments. I asked Alkhadiri if he was worried about competition from the Ballardian new tourism resorts opening up along the Saudi coastline (the Hashemites and the House of Saud were at one time great enemies). “Not at all actually,” he shrugged. Indeed, he said he’d “welcome any initiative” to collaborate with the Saudis on tourism in the future.
It was a similar story that afternoon in the Jordan Museum. The first exhibits I approached spoke of the country’s limited resources, limited energy supply (no oil in Jordan), and limited water supply. The last of these is striking if you come from a rainy island: Jordan gets much of its water supply from the Israelis, and households get about 36 hours’ supply a week, during which they fill up a tank on the roof, eked out until their next turn. But then, in the next room of the museum: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the might of the Nabateans, the Biblical city of Moab (of washpot fame). “We, Jordanians, are resilient people,” one of the exhibits proclaims.
Another of the civilisations to have crossed Jordan’s deserts – though the Jordan Museum didn’t linger on the fact – was the British. When the Hashemites surged out of Mecca to overthrow the Ottomans during the First World War, it was with British subsidy, and when the Emirate of Transjordan was established in 1921, it was with British licence. The country remained a pensioner of Westminster for the best part of four decades, well after independence in 1946. And while it is commonly believed that, after its Suez binge, Britain went cold turkey on its Middle Eastern adventures, in 1958 Harold Macmillan dispatched paratroopers to Amman to prevent a coup d’état. There was an echo of this during the 12-Day War, during which Britain’s only intervention in the fight between Israel and Iran was to shield Jordan from stray missiles. I was therefore self-conscious of my Englishness in Jordan, compounded by my massive, ill-fitting clothes.
To test the waters, I asked about Glubb Pasha. No one in England knows who Glubb Pasha is, but everyone in Jordan does. At least that’s what I was told: “They know him, they know him – Glubb Pasha!” said Fawzi Abu Danneh, director general of the Department of Antiquities, when I asked him atop the Amman citadel, watching the sun set over the city. John Bagot Glubb was stationed in Jordan in 1930, becoming commander of the Arab Legion in 1939. But he became famous and beloved for his embrace of local Bedouin culture, and was a great friend and adviser of King Abdullah I. Fawzi told me Glubb would test recruits based on whether they pronounced the Arabic word for onion (basal) with a proper Bedouin accent. Under nationalist pressure, King Hussein, Abdullah’s grandson, sent Glubb back to London in 1956. But 30 years later, Hussein would deliver the eulogy at Glubb’s Westminster Abbey memorial.
I suppose this is “soft power”. But if Jordan has a patron these days, it’s not Britain: Jordan receives the third-highest amount of American foreign aid. I received a slightly more contemporary assessment of Anglo-Jordanian relations the next day when we met with the minister of government communications, Mohammad Momani. He delivered what I’ve come to think of as the very particular Jordanian blend of bad and good news. There’s the unemployment rate of 21.3 per cent, the high poverty rate, the drugs and arms smuggling over the Syrian-Jordanian border. But then there’s the country’s sluggish but deliberate democratisation process and its support for refugees (there are 1.3 million refugees in Jordan from Syria alone). We were speaking the week after the ceasefire agreement came into force in Gaza, and Momani referred admiringly to Keir Starmer’s recognition of Palestine. “Some people thought it has no impact on the ground – it has,” Momani told me. “This is… the country of the Balfour Declaration, saying these people deserve a state.”
The Balfour Declaration has been mentioned plenty in Britain, too, in recent months. But it’s still quite something to stop, as we did later that day, to look at the West Bank, and to know what’s happening there, with Israel making little effort to disguise its annexation plans. We drove south towards the Dead Sea, and stopped to scan over the scrubby hills and take in the strip of lights that is Jericho at dusk, and above them the blazing oblong of East Jerusalem. The next morning, I got up early, and (in borrowed trunks) walked down to swim under the sunrise. You don’t exactly swim in the Dead Sea – the salty natural buoyancy means you can’t get your legs under the surface to kick, and so you drift, like a forgotten beach ball. But more than the salt, what you really taste down there is pressure. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth, 440 metres below sea level. Lying there, the hills of desert all around, all you can feel is the weight in the air, like lead, as if the landscape has a headache, as if it has held its breath too long.
We were in the Holy Land that day. Spirited off from the Sea, but still in a world of heavy water and heavy air, we travelled to the site of Jesus’s baptism. The landscape was illustrated like a children’s Bible: white and parched and crumbling, but surprised by the occasional reeds and springs that feed off the sacred river. The site contains the remains of various ancient churches, and is preserved reverentially by the Unesco-approved team “as Jesus and John saw it”. And even if the optimistic archaeology couldn’t quite melt my empiricist heart, overlooked by Mount Nebo, deathbed of Moses… it all stirred some forgotten liturgy. And when our guide talked of Jordan as a beacon for inter-faith partnership, of building “human bridges of love and peace” around the site, you might have believed him.
Something must have taken place at the baptism site though, because it was that day that the trail of my bag warmed up. I had done everything in my power – filled in online forms, made phone calls with long dialling codes, asked firm questions of the organising committee – but someone unseen had tipped the scales, and a car had been arranged. The final act was to sign a contract in Arabic, drafted longhand by our Jordanian guide, to be photographed and sent on, confirming I permitted the baggage people to pass the bag to the tourism people. There were some good jokes about this blind contract: some said I was signing myself into indentured servitude; some said I was renouncing my British citizenship, never to return. I laughed, concerned. Just to be sure, I kept hold of the original piece of paper, with its short, symmetrical Arab script.
And so, freed from earthly concerns, we drove on, to places older than Christianity. Even without the prospect of my own underwear, these would have been charged visitations. I have never felt more like a pilgrim than when approaching the Treasury of Petra. The monument is proof enough that Jordan has been a superpower in its turn, trading and ruling and inventing. It’s hard to add words to Petra’s shroud; you already approach the place wading through expectation. One thinks of John William Burgon, who won Oxford’s Newdigate Prize in 1845 with a poem about Petra, having never seen the site: “Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, / a rose-red city half as old as time.” To such tea-shop orientalism, I can probably add only one anecdote. As I came near to the Treasury, I ruined my first glimpse by charging round too fast and missing the Indiana Jones effect, where the building looms sudden and silent round the rockface. And so I retreated, to go once more, and felt the authentic stresses of romance as I did, heavy arms, fast heart and weakened knees.
Petra was the capital of an empire; modern Jordan is a crossroads for the empires of others. If it is famous, it’s famous for its ruins. Otherwise it’s often forgotten in the West, generally free of the massacres and revolutions and reprisals that keep its immediate neighbours on the evening news. When the British essayist Jonathan Raban visited Jordan in 1978 – only eight years after King Hussein defeated Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation forces, the country’s rare concession to the regional trend for civil war – he said the “Jordanian habit” was “being all right”. And for any attack one might half-muster against the country’s semi-democratic, semi-liberal, semi-secure condition, “being all right” remains a point of pride. Neighbouring Syria demonstrates how quickly “all right” can change, how the routines of a city street can change from sweet tea to sarin gas. In a region as combustible as this, you can see why Jordan counts itself lucky simply to watch the missiles crossing over its head.
From Petra to the desert called Wadi Rum, and here I can happily say I abandoned any aspirations as a geopolitical analyst. Imagine the Alps, naked of snow or pines, and instead baked red in the desert sun. Between the peaks, a wind-smoothed sea of red sand, broken by tufts of desert plants. Millions of years ago this was underwater, but the sea has ascended into an endless blue sky. And then at night, stars with Arabic names rose and fell, and the fine dust of the Milky Way hung in an arc above my head. Here – and perhaps this is the illusion of the visitor – remains unconfined, undisturbed existence. It is over these empty landscapes that the mind-forged borders of the 20th century were imposed. Whatever attempt to remake them in the 21st, you can happily believe that these places will watch and survive.
[Further reading: The vindication of V for Vendetta]
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This article appears in the 06 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Exposed: Britain's next maternity scandal