Last week, a new Jordanian government was sworn in, with Bisher Khasawneh as the new prime minister. Pinḥas Inbari explains the regional implications:

Khasawneh, who was most recently the king’s political adviser, has reportedly held extensive talks with the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman over the past six months and was scheduled to meet with Abu Dhabi’s crown prince. It was also reported that he has a very close connection to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan architect, as well as special ties to Egypt’s President Sisi. The implication: the new government could be an integral part of the Trump Peace Initiative. Until now, Jordan was reluctant or even hostile to Trump’s plan and worked to improve its relations with the Palestinian Authority, emphasizing the coordination with the Palestinians on issues related to Jerusalem.

In presenting his government, Prime Minister Khasawneh laid out twelve planks of its platform. The Palestinian issue and the “Hashemite Custodianship of Jerusalem’s Islamic and Christian holy sites” were only the eleventh item. His message was that Jordan now prefers economic programs to “enhance economic resilience and combating poverty and unemployment” over “political activism.”

Such statements suggest that Amman may wish to put aside rivalries with Riyadh regarding authority over the al-Aqsa mosque and the Israel-Palestinian conflict in order to pursue security and economic cooperation with American support. That, in turn, would bode well for Israel.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.