

Jordan’s Queen Rania says ‘anti-Semitism has been weaponised to shut down criticism of Israel’ and says ‘being pro-Palestine does not mean being pro-Hamas.’ She said there was a ‘glaring double standard’ around the world when it came to sympathy for the war’s victims.
Her family are Palestinian and Jordan has taken in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, from the initial 1948 Nakba displacement and following violence and settler encroachment on their land in later years.
‘Even if Israel defeats every last Hamas member, then what?’ she said in a CNN interview. ‘Haven’t they left a trail of terrible memories that will create a new generation of resistance that is fiercer and more violent?’ ‘Most networks are covering the story under the title of Israel at War. But for many Palestinians on the other side of the separation wall, and the other side of the barbed wire, war has never left.’
She was born on 31 August 1970 in Kuwait, did a degree in in business administration, worked in marketing for Citibank, then with Apple Inc. in Jordan. After her 1993 marriage to Crown Prince Abdullah she had four children and was crowned Queen when he succeeded his father in 1999.
She is a Sun in Virgo, with a Virgo/Leo Moon and an intense, communicative Mercury Pluto in Virgo as well. Her Mars in Leo conjunct BML squares onto a Neptune opposition Saturn in Taurus. She is go-ahead and attention-seeking as she promotes her favourite causes in seeking to improve children’s education and health and in creating cross-cultural and interfaith dialogue to foster greater understanding and tolerance.
Mars, Saturn, Neptune is a powerful and uncomfortable T Square indicating a life involving risk, hardship and fear along with courage and determination. Transiting Uranus is rattling up the T square from this year right through till early 2026 so her life will be on edge and unsettled. Though she has tr Pluto square her Jupiter in Scorpio in 2024/25 so will be pushing confidently ahead, no matter what; with 2025 being an especially visible year as her lucky SA Jupiter squares her Pluto and a year later her Solar Arc Sun is conjunct her Jupiter so she won’t be backing down.
ADDENDUM:
A wise and informed piece in today’s Times by Max Hastings trying to make sense of an impossible deadlock.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/israel-may-destroy-hamas-but-then-what-d830t9xll
‘In every modern “war among the people”, politics have eventually proved to play a more important role in outcomes than did soldiers. This is not a pacifist argument: force is indispensable to counter-insurgencies, for the elimination of irreconcilable terrorists.’
‘ We should dismiss the nonsensical debate about the characterisation of Hamas. Of course its members are terrorists, just as were the 1950s EOKA killers in Cyprus and the Kenyan Mau Mau, the 1980s German Red Brigades and the IRA. Their chosen method of pursuing political aims is to perpetrate outrageous violence. Margaret Thatcher, as opposition leader, threatened to refuse to meet Menachem Begin because he was a former terrorist, leader of Irgun (militant Israeli group). Advisers persuaded her to relent, since in 1977 Begin had become Israel’s prime minister.’
‘One (Israeli) spymaster avowed that since the 1995 assassination of the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, successive governments had made no serious attempt to pursue a peace process, instead contracting to the security forces the containment of Palestinian rage.’
‘They suspect that Netanyahu identifies his own political survival with a long war.’
‘The question persists: can the IDF defy the precedents of history and destroy Hamas by mere force of arms? It can kill terrorists who have forfeited any claim upon mercy. But can it root out the idea of resistance, among millions of Palestinians in a Gaza reduced to rubble, and the West Bank subject to creeping and indefensible Israeli annexation? The principal motive force among these people is not Islam but despair.’