Many Layers of Meaning in Royal Trip to Ramallah

Mr. Abbas is to hold power-sharing talks with Khaled Meshal of Hamas this week in Cairo to try to put an end to a four-year-old bitter division within the Palestinian movement. Mr. Meshal, who is based in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and has been barred from official visits to Jordan since 1999, has been invited there next week.

As popular upheavals across the Middle East grant Islamist parties more influence, both Mr. Abbas and the king are being pressed to soften their policies toward Hamas. Meanwhile, strong American and Israeli opposition to the reconciliation with Hamas and their Muslim Brotherhood colleagues creates difficult counterforces and the risk of a cut in American aid.

Mr. Abbas makes his second home in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and meets there frequently with the king, so the monarch’s trip here — a quick helicopter ride — was not about finding an opportunity to get together. It was about sending a set of messages — to the Palestinians, to the Israelis and to his domestic audience.

To the Palestinians, King Abdullah was asserting that Mr. Abbas remains the central figure in Palestinian politics, and any talk of reconciliation with Hamas is not aimed at supplanting him.

“One reason for the visit is to assure us that relations with Hamas don’t replace relations with us,” Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in an interview. She was at President Abbas’s office to help welcome the king to Ramallah.

To Israel, the king was eager to make clear that he would vigorously oppose the occasional talk there of Jordan as the alternative homeland of the Palestinians. And to Jordanians, the message was that when Mr. Meshal visits next week, it should not be misinterpreted.

“Bringing Hamas now to Jordan could be like dropping a boulder in a calm lake,” said Amer Sabaileh, a Jordanian political analyst in Amman. “I’m referring here to the Palestinian refugee camps that have been quiet during Jordan’s troubles in recent months. The king’s visit is a message to everyone that Khaled Meshal’s visit will be under the umbrella of Palestinian reconciliation and the Palestinian Authority,” not a gesture to the local Muslim Brotherhood.

Neither King Abdullah nor Mr. Abbas spoke to journalists during the visit. Instead, they sent their foreign ministers, Nasser Judeh of Jordan and Riad al-Malki of the Palestinian Authority, to a news conference. The ministers spoke about the “blessed” visit and the “historic” opportunity, but offered few specifics about its timing, meaning or content.

Mr. Judeh said anyone who thought Jordan could replace Palestine was mistaken.

Some on the Israeli right who want to hold on to the West Bank have long argued this. They note that more than half the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian and say there is no need for another state for them.

But Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a man of the right, made a point recently of shooting down this argument. “Jordan is a stabilizing element in the region in comparison to what is happening in other nations,” Mr. Lieberman said during a discussion at the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, responding to recent reports about discussions of Jordan as Palestine inside the government.

“Discussion about Jordan as a Palestinian state is against Israeli interests and against reality,” he went on. “Saying Jordan is Palestine opposes international borders as well as the peace accord we signed with them.”

At Monday’s news conference, Mr. Judeh, the Jordanian foreign minister, added that the king believed strongly in Palestinian reconciliation and that the ultimate aim was a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which could be achieved only through direct negotiations. He implied that while Israeli settlements were illegal, they could be stopped through negotiations to establish clear borders.

The Palestinians say they will not enter negotiations until settlement construction, both in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, stops.

American officials continue to try to find a way around this to bring the two back to the table. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns met Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Monday as part of that effort. The prime minister’s office offered no other details and declined to comment on King Abdullah’s visit to Ramallah.