The Jordanian-Palestinian Relationship

T. Belman.  This article was published in Hebrew in issue # 1 of the journal “National Resilience, Politics and Society” published by the University of Ariel. I posted a Google translation of same.

M. Nisan. Palestinian integration into Jordan as a historical phenomenon of significant political importance, showing why Palestinians are rejected not because they are foreign to Jordan but precisely because they have a very strong affinity for it. The Jordanian kingdom fears closer and closer to it than the foreigner: For her, the Palestinian threat has not weakened through the ages, but has taken on various forms of settlement, involvement and integration, including the possibility that the final stage of his complex relationship with the government – the Palestinians will even take over the kingdom.

The article’s future conclusions are primarily related to policy decisions on this bloody issue: A Palestinian state east of the Jordan River should be established, which will attract the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, develop as a prosperous state and avoid the current Palestinian preoccupation with terrorism.

The Jordanian-Palestinian Relationship

Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem il.ac.huji.mail@nisan.Mordechai

The complexity of the relationship between Jordan and the Palestinians
For over a century, the Jordanian actor has been seeking a role and identity on the history stage. He is often debating whether to grant more or less liberties to his residents, as well as whether to integrate space with radical Arab forces or collaborate with conservative forces. At the same time, he maintains a secret security relationship with Israel on the one hand, and on the other, he is openly alienating himself in international arenas. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein, discovered impressive political art when, in September 1970, for example, he appointed a Palestinian prime minister to lead the military suppression of the PLO uprising, or when he signed a peace treaty with Israel following the 1993 Oslo Accords. His son, Abdullah II, inherited it without any crisis, and he continues to navigate the kingdom without devastating shocks in the face of close developments that do not benefit the entire state’s interests. Without a rooted sense of homeland, without natural boundaries, without a clear and distinct national character, and also in light of the scarcity of material resources – the question of Jordan’s legitimacy remains as a non-dispersive cloud.

The Palestinians also did not have a reliable (narrative) historical narrative at all. The UNESCO Commission – at that time it was a non-biased international body – recommended in 1947 the division of western Palestine into two states, but did not find a people who could identify it as a “Palestinian”, and during this period Jews were And also “Palestinian” Arabs (UNSCOP, 1947). For example, the Muslim representative of India who took part in the committee deliberations located Palestine in southern Syria. The late Professor Bernard Lewis wrote in 1975 that “Palestine is a historical memory as an ideological spark […] and can sink into a doom from which it will not be saved” (Lewis, 1975). Their past, therefore, does not warn, and their future is in the fog.

As no national and cohesive Palestinian will was discovered in the West Bank, not in the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, and certainly not before, a mass influx of Palestinians exiting Palestine began to roar through anxious and confrontational days. Apart from the Jews, the people of the country at that time were Arabs, alleged Arabs, and Arabs of different origins – Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, Bosnian, Kurdish and others, with no common and unified identity or agreed political horizon. All those called “Palestinians” waged a terror campaign against the Jews without building a foundation for a future vision. There were voices calling on the Palestinian refugees to settle in Syria and Iraq (Peters, 1984), however, the Hashemite Jordan was near and accessible as part of the original mandate territory, and led to the idea that there might be a calming downfall for the harsh downfall and escape of the Palestinians.

Occasionally, the Hashem dynasty chose to embellish the significance of its existence in taking on and defending the Palestinian public mission. Jordan was looking for a people, and the Palestinian people – whose existence is an imagined reality as well – had the cash to give content and taste to the kingdom. Abdullah the grandfather, as well as grandson Hussein, uttered the slogan of connecting and merging between “Jordan” and “Palestine” after the occupation of the West Bank in 1948. The annexation of the central mountain areas of Israel – “Judea and Samaria” by biblical names, or the “West Bank” in the Arab era – in 1950, the buds of Palestinian nationalism braked and put the kingdom in place of a never-born Palestinian republic. For a while, the Jordanians continued to contain Palestine and strangle its birth, and the government granted citizenship to all Palestinian refugees and residents (some 300,000) in the kingdom in 1949, unlike other Arab states that alienated them. But the problem of the Jordan-Palestine duo was fully realized when a Palestinian assassinated King Abdullah in 1951 in Jerusalem.

At certain historical junctions, Jordan has decided to free itself, or at least to stay away from the Palestinian nuisance, and enter eastern territory from the river as the kingdom of Kharkba, if not its only territory – that is, Jordan first and foremost (Transjordan First) has also embraced the Palestinian neglect. For example, in 1988, King Hussein declared a Jordanian disengagement from a symbolic or other presence in Judea and Samaria, omitting any pretensions to represent the Palestinians as a political patron.

However, granting a divorce to Palestinians in the West Bank could not really release the charges from the Palestinian bush at their home in the East Bank, because for many decades, many Palestinians settled in Amman, Zarqa and Jerash, after leaving Ramallah, Jericho and Nablus. Alongside them lived Bedouins, Circassians and Chechens, Druze and Christians, who did not really succeed for several generations in forming a distinct and united national core in Jordan. In fact, the entire political being in the state centered around the royal house as a focal point of the state’s ethos – the king’s ceremonies, the king’s uniforms, the king’s actions and pictures of the king decorated the public space.

Later in the article, we will review the process of Palestinian integration into Jordan as a historical phenomenon of significant political importance. In Jordan, despite certain difficulties and limitations, the Palestinians could feel belonging and having a home, as their migration eastward was merely internal migration.

Arabs in Judea and Samaria and their migration east
Palestinians from the west side of the Jordan River began to settle on its eastern side even before the arrival of Amir Abdullah in 1920. Hebron families emigrated to the city of Krakow, and Nablus residents settled in the city of As Salat. When Jordan’s administration was established, Palestinians moved to Amman to serve the new entity and provide a technical workforce that was lacking. Later there were Palestinians who were even the prime ministers: Tawfiq Abd al-Huda of Acre, Ibrahim Hashmi of Nablus, and Samir al-Rafayi of Safed, whose son Zaid also served as prime minister of Jordan in the late 1980s. The eastward migration of Palestinians was in line with the forecast of a senior British Mandate official, Alk Kirkbride, according to which the area east of Jordan will serve as a parcel for the settlement of Palestinian Arabs when the Balfour Declaration is implemented and the Jewish National House is established in Western Israel (Kirkbride, 1956).

Vision of the Arabs in the 1990s amounted to an additional population of about 200,000 residents of Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”) and of about 100,000 in the past Jordan (“East Bank”) based on the Jordanian rule, the refugees became civilians in 1949, and – 1954 the law was approved and expanded. Some of the refugees have settled in camps set up by the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinian Refugees – known as UNRWA – on both sides of the Jordan. The Jordanian government in Judea and Samaria in 1948-1967 feared the large, alienated and hostile Palestinian population. The kingdom did not deal with development and industrialization, did not advance education, suppressed separatist Palestinian sentiment, and caused more than 200,000 refugees to leave and migrate to the center of the kingdom. Some of those who left the West Bank continued on their way to the Persian Gulf, to Europe and to North America, central and southern (Nissan, 1987).

During the Six Day War in June 1967 and in the following summer, about a quarter of a million Palestinian residents of Judea and Samaria crossed the river, and their departure continued for decades. According to Balal Daher (2016), it is not surprising that the departure of Arabs from Judea and Samaria – some 400,000 Palestinians emigrated from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century – has long become routine and perpetual, and according to the demographic of Jacob Faitelson, every year, immigrants 10,000 refugees, if not much more. In 2017, this was given an enlightening reminder , when eight out of nine Amuna villagers were reported near Ofra Haim in Jordan, after fifty years since family members were living in the West Bank (Gabor, 2017).

The reasons for leaving the refugees are varied and have a great impact on the residents’ considerations for their future. For example, the possibility of moving ahead and improving their level, and not just the poverty of Palestinian society, has also been shown to be an incentive to migrate. In addition, the development of the fields of education and vocational studies, as developed during the days of Israeli control, should encourage and enhance immigration, as high-tech, engineers and pharmacists will enjoy the opportunity to obtain a visa to Western countries. Summer Libda (Libdeh, 2010), a journalist from the Jordanian family, believed that the Palestinian young layer would always be ready to seek economic opportunities abroad that did not exist to the same extent in Judea and Samaria. Residents of low-income natural and economic villages, who do not have a significant Islamic element in their lives, will also be prepared to consider immigration at any time.

The picture of immigration is incredibly complex and surprising, and many immigration destinations and world-wide. Christians from Bethlehem and surrounding areas are leaving, as Muslims from the Ramallah region eagerly holding on to the American dream are leaving for America. A study conducted at Bir Zeit University in 2007 found that approximately 40% of Palestinian respondents were ready to emigrate, and in a 2015 survey , 73% (!) Of Arab youth in Judea and Samaria were prepared to emigrate, at least temporarily (Rotenberg, 2016). The effort to obtain a visa to a Western country seems like a hurdle that can be passed, partly through family ties abroad. However, it should be emphasized that it is easier to do “internal migration” to Jordan, which lies across the river and is quite close. Thousands of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley want to move to Jordan due to livelihood difficulties, and there will suffer no agony of cultural, linguistic and religious adjustment.

Compared to the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Cairo Accords in 1994, which sparked hopes that Palestinians would return home from abroad, the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 suppressed the spirit and accelerated the emigration of Palestinians. The disaffected Palestinian Authority closed mouths, channeled money into the pockets close to the PA and left most of the population without a glut of general improvement. Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, has been described as having no future prospects for West Bank residents (Shavit & Bana, 2001). Palestinian resistance in the field to Israeli control is sporadic, without purpose, and without mass mobilization or international aid.

Regarding the Gaza Strip, the UNRWA’s electronic website shows that there are 1.3 million refugees living alongside the veteran residents, and whose unemployment rate is about 40% of the workforce (UNRWA, 2017). Therefore, it is not surprising that the findings of a 2016 survey showed that 45% of Gaza residents would be willing to migrate if given the opportunity (PCPSR, 2016). Even further word , not prominently reported in the media, is not surprising: almost 100,000 Palestinians left the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing in 2018 (Levy, 2019).

To sum up this part, it is clear that allowing refugees to reach an area where their people live facilitates their forced migration. Two international examples from 1947 to 1948 illustrate this very well: the escape of the Hindus from Pakistan into Hindu India, and the escape of Muslims from India to Muslim Pakistan. These examples can also be cited as a local example from the Middle East: the escape of Muslims from the territories of the Jewish State of Israel to the territories controlled by Muslim countries, such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt. There is no doubt that the escape of Jews from Muslim-Arab countries to Israel occurred in the same national format.

The Palestinians in Jordan
The exit station for the Palestinians from Judea and Samaria is not Ben-Gurion Airport or Haifa Port, which is closed to them, but the King Hussein (Allenby) bridge that leads to Amman. From here, Arabs moved from Jerusalem before 1948 and Palestinian refugees in 1948, and Arabs have been following this path ever since. Some 6 million foreigners live in Jordan, along with about 3 million foreigners within its borders: about a million foreign refugees from Syria have reached it in the last seven years – although Palestinian refugees are not allowed to enter the country – and hundreds of thousands have arrived in Iraq in the 1990s, and many foreigners are considered temporary workers. From Kuwait, more than two hundred thousand Palestinians returned to Jordan during the Gulf War in 1991. Estimates of the Palestinian portion of the Jordanian population (without foreigners) range from 60% to 80%. Amman, which has about four million inhabitants, is by far the largest Palestinian city in Jordan, and even in the world. According to the UNRWA commander, the Palestinian population in Jordan has about two million refugees, and some are in the ten camps in the country.

Despite a continuous misery, the Palestinians have climbed up the political, economic and media arena, as well as in the other social and employment sectors of the elite in Jordan. West Bank residents have held high positions as prime ministers, as have been appointed ministers and MPs. Some members of the Token, Nubulsi, and Majali families were prominent Palestinian-Jordanian figures in the political field, and they came to Jordan from Nablus, Safed, Acre, Hebron, and other cities in Western Israel, settled in Jordan, and some even made a force. The Rimawi family, which hails from Ramah House north of Ramallah, was well known to the public, as well as Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Jodah, a native of Amman whose father is from Ramallah, and the Supreme House Speaker of the Legislature, Taher al-Egypt, a member of a Nablus family. However, at the top of the kingdom – in the military and in the security and intelligence systems – the Palestinians were greatly rebuffed, compared to Circassian, Druze and Bedouin people who held key positions in maintaining the king, regime and state. Bassem Awadallah, of Palestinian descent, Formerly the head of the royal court. Needless to say, Raniya, the wife of King Abdullah II, is of Palestinian descent, and that MP Dima Tahbov, a representative of the active Islamic Front on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a native of Hebron.

For several generations, the Palestinians have undergone a process of assimilation into Jordan, adding a “Jordanian” dimension to their identity, and becoming involved in Jordanian society. There is no discernible difference between a Jordanian whose family lived a few generations in the East Jordan, and a Palestinian who has “traveled” as a local, and even in Bedouin tribes one can hear about marriages with Palestinians. In a meeting with the Palestinian Prime Minister in 2015, Prime Minister Abdullah Ansor said there were fraternal ties between Palestinians and Jordanians. He argued that they were not two peoples but a human product composed of both, and only the surnames would reveal the historical-geographical origin of the Palestinians from the west side of the river.

Therefore, there are grounds for believing that the Palestinians and the Jordanians are indeed one people, who have a common dialect in Arabic and whose religion is the religion of Islam according to the Sunni school. In 1950, the founder of the government, King Abdullah, declared that the Palestinians and the Jordanians were one people, and that was also agreed by the PLO’s senior official, Kadumi Kadumi, and none other than Yasser Arafat himself. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein, emphatically set the law “Jordan is Palestine” in 1981 (Nadeva, 1981), stating that his son, King Abdullah II, would now be reluctant to declare it, for the purpose of pushing the Palestinian state west, at the expense of the State of Israel. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Jordan are suffering from some regime harassment and have been denied the citizenship of several thousand (Magid, 2015). Nevertheless, Jordan is considered a national home for the Palestinians, as well as those born on the west side of the river.

In the light of the above, one can understand the perpetual heavy concern inherent in the kingdom’s courtyard. One could argue that except for the lineage, which originated from the Hijaz region of the Arabian Peninsula (the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today), all Jordanian subjects are actually Palestinians on one side of the river or the other. If a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria, an Iranian force will be discovered that will spread eastward to the Palestinian population adjacent to the border. But before this horrific scenario strikes, it is better for Jordan to change its official character and become a Palestinian state by name and designation.

Money, identity and the future
Since its establishment in 1946, the Kingdom of Jordan has been the eye of the West and has received generous and continuous external assistance over the years. Although Jordan has failed to overcome its fundamental problems, its economy is weak and its external debt is large (Libdeh, 2010), it has trading industries, such as banking and tourism, for it is successful. However, the state has no oil, and sometimes the water supply reaches cities only once a week (Pipes, 2017).

A vision of a Palestinian state in Jordan is among the slits, and in light of it, international aid and investment will be used to build the Palestinian state. After many years of support, the UNRWA will also be abolished indirectly and directly, with Palestinian terror and perpetuating the refugee problem. This will allow an annual budget of $ 1 billion , currently funded by 62 countries (Bedein, 2015); The UNRWA website indicates that the 2016 budget was $ 100 million in Judea and Samaria and $ 120 million in Jordan, and that the United States contributed $ 5.6 billion to the agency in UNRWA, 2017 (2016-1955). According to this vision, the United Nations, unlike its hitherto unhelpful counterparts, will also play a key role in formulating a healthy, modern Palestinian society in the Palestinian state that lies east of the Jordan River.

The Trump administration’s moves in January 2018 turned a backlash in the scenario presented here, as the administration determined that instead of allocating $ 360 million to UNRWA, the agency would receive only $ 60 million. The US agency budget cut reflected the United States’ response to the so-called “failed execution” of the Palestinian Refugee Agency. In the future, the road may open to another course of action.

In addition, the multi-year external assistance that has plunged into the Palestinian coffers – about $ 5 billion since 1994 – will pass in light of the vision presented above to the Palestinian state in Jordan and converted to the development of Amman and its daughters. In 2016, the United States decided to transfer bilateral aid to Palestinians worth $ 327 million (Zanotti, 2016). When it was decided at the Paris International Conference in 2007 to donate $ 7 billion to develop the PA, it was misunderstood that some of those billions would be used to inflate the brutal security forces, and be given as grants to Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israelis. With the cessation of the Authority’s activities and its funding, much money will be transferred to the enjoyment of the Palestinian population, which, alongside the abandonment of its miserable past, will also begin to build its good future. Given the Washington decision in August this year to cut more than $ 200 million from Palestinian economic and social projects in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to freeze bank accounts of senior Palestinian officials, the prospect of such a change seems more realistic than ever.

It is clear from the above that the model of the Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria fails, and that Jordan is able to serve as a suitable place for understanding the complexity of the situation of the Palestinians and their national aspirations. Therefore, all the aid the Palestinians have received in the past can go to Jordan, and it is the one that will more faithfully represent the Palestinians and their future.

The annual aid given to King Jordan and the Amman regime is approximately $ 1 billion, and this figure should also be highlighted: The United States provided about $ 10 billion to Jordan in 1996–2016 (CIA, 2016). And yet, the United States’ goals in resolving the conflict between Israel and Jordan were only partially fulfilled: While the two countries signed a peace treaty, it has no public expression, and in fact it remains a “cold” peace, peace “only on paper.” Even worse: The “Palestinian problem” remains unsolved because the Hashemite kingdom has remained out of attempts to resolve the conflict between Israel and Jordan, when in fact – it itself could be the solution! In accordance with the outline of the solution presented here, international funding will serve as a positive economic catalyst for the new Palestinian state to be established in Amman, and as mentioned without the need for UNRWA, the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps even Hashemite Jordan.

Summary
If a Palestinian state in the country of Moab, Ammon and Gilad is established, with all its symbols and meanings, it will transmit a kind of gravity to the Judea and Samaria Arabs, and will begin to move more intensely eastward into familiar districts where their families have lived for decades. Thanks to international and Arab regional aid and generous and generous, new cities will be established, the wilderness will flourish, and in general a vibrant feature of construction and hope will be felt. In this way, the Palestinians will be able to lift their heads up, because some will fall into the grip of state reins, and Palestinian activity will stop focusing on terror. Instead of fleeing from Palestine, the Palestinians will come en masse.

In the current state of the relationship between the Palestinians and the accusers, the gaps between the two sides have not closed, nor do they appear to be closing any time soon. A bitter, frontal quarrel places them in a conflict with no solution to satisfy both sides. Since 1988, Palestinians in Judea and Samaria can only receive temporary passports, as the Hashemite interest is to reduce their official numbers in the kingdom’s population (Gabbay, 2014). Although Jordan has been receiving hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Syria since the outbreak of the war there, since 2012 it has refused to accept Palestinian refugees from there. The Palestinians are rejected not because they are foreigners in Jordan, but precisely because they have a very strong connection with them. The kingdom is more afraid of it than it is of the alien and distant: For her, the Palestinian threat has not weakened through the ages, but has taken on various forms of sedition, involvement and integration, and in the final stage of this complex relationship – the Palestinians may even take over the kingdom.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of Palestinian nationalism and its ways of forming and seeing it as an artificial invention and propaganda only. Indeed, it may be a national fall that has not reached a political institutionalization. In the western part of Jordan, nationalism has had difficulty being an effective and successful force, and this is evidenced by the fact that there is still no Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, despite many years of plans, aspirations, efforts and struggles, international support and a war of liberation. Something futile and rotten prevents the success of the move, other than the barriers Israel places on the Palestinians. In the eastern part of the Jordan River, the Palestinian population grew, participated in political and national affairs, functioned reasonably in the state, and even became the majority of its population. By any measure of democracy and majority rule, or by the principle of “self-determination” at one or the other ideological stage of maturation, the Hashemite dynasty and international elements had to untangle the tangle and politically come to terms with the given demographic-communal situation.

The idea of ??the Arab-Palestinian state east of the river has been diplomatic litigation since World War I on the question of Israel and the conflict between Jews and Arabs. At that time, the biblical fact did not go unnoticed, nor did the mournful desires of the Zionist movement diminish, according to which the areas of the Jordanian past belong to the people of Israel (Grief, 2008). And nowadays, the political act can bring about wise and responsible statesmanship on such a complicated and bloody issue for a long time. From the reality and from history, to their demographic and political components, it is worthwhile to derive the lessons of the future.

The two-state solution to the bitter and prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict would thus, perhaps, be a solid and final realization. Where a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria gets stuck in the wheels and thorns of peace wheels, its location in the past Jordan will pave the way for peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. The river will be a border of reconciliation, and will be used to transport goods and tourists from both directions. Here’s a recipe for a Jewish-Israeli state and an Arab-Palestinian state side by side, uncompressed into narrow territory with constant quarrels over land and borders. The redeeming, simple and logical wording will rest on a foundation of geo-strategic stability. In this way, the international community can also relax and become aware of the idea that Palestinians will finally achieve national independence.

There may also be another scenario: Jordan will indeed absorb more and more Palestinians, but instead of converting the kingdom to a Palestinian republic, they will become citizens of the Hashemite kingdom. There is something to correct and improve in the kingdom’s relations with the important Palestinian public, and the force of the Hashemite establishment to thwart the regime’s change or overthrow, thereby maintaining an “unnatural” and “national” but determined enough to withstand a Palestinian upheaval from within. Days will tell, years will tell.