The Jordanian-Palestinian Relationship

By Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

T Belman. This article was published in Hebrew in Volume 1, No. 2 – Fall 2019 of the journal “National Resilience, Politics and Society” published by the University of Ariel. I posted a Google translation of same. I have now replaced it with a better translation

Nisan. Palestinian integration into Jordan as a historical phenomenon of significant political importance, showing why Palestinians are rejected not because they are foreigners in Jordan, but precisely because they have a very strong connection with it. The Jordanian kingdom fears internal problems more than external ones: For her, the Palestinian threat has not weakened through times, but has taken on various forms of settlement, involvement and integration, including the possibility that in the final stage of his complex relationship with the government, the Palestinians will even take over the kingdom.

The article’s conclusions on the future 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 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 extensively with radical Arab forces or collaborate with moderate 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 with it on the international stage.

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 fundamental sense of homeland, without natural boundaries, without a clear and distinct national identity, and also in light of the scarcity of material resources – the question of Jordan’s legitimacy remains as a cloud that is not scattered. Dark prophesies in the 1940’s and onward in the previous century predicted the demise of the Kingdom every instant but the reality of the Middle East surprises again and again, as frequently is the case.

The Palestinians also did not have a totally credible historical narrative. The UNSCOP Commission  of the United Nations– which at that time 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 nation”, and during this period  both Jews and Arabs were “Palestinian” (UNSCOP, 1947). So, for example, the Muslim representative of India who took part in the committee deliberations placed Palestine in southern Syria. The late Professor Bernard Lewis wrote in 1975 that “Palestine is a historical memory like an ideological spark […] and can sink into a devastation from which it will not be saved” (Lewis, 1975). Their past, therefore, is not glowing, and their future is shrouded in fog.

Since no national and united Palestinian aspiration was discovered in Western Palestine, not in the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, and certainly not before, a massive flow of Palestinians exiting Palestine began in those stormy days of anxiety and confrontation.

Apart from the Jews, the people of the country at that time were Arabs, supposedly Arabs, and Arabs of different origins – Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, Bosnian, Kurdish and others, with no common and unified identity or common political perspective. All those known as “Palestinians” waged a terror campaign against the Jews without building a foundation for a future vision. There were voices calling on the 1948 refugees to settle in Syria and Iraq (Peters, 1984), however, the other side of the Hashemite Jordan was near and accessible as part of the original mandate territory, and led to the idea that there they would find rest and relief from the harsh downfall and escape of the Palestinians.

Occasionally, the Hashemite dynasty chose to embellish the significance of its existence in taking on and defending the Palestinians. Jordan was looking for a people, and the Palestinian people – whose existence is an imagined reality as mentioned – had the opportunity to give content and flavor to sustenance of the kingdom.

After the occupation of the West Bank in 1948, Abdullah the grandfather, as well as grandson Hussein, uttered the slogan of connecting and merging “Jordan” and “Palestine”. When in 1950 the central mountain areas of Palestine “Judea and Samaria” (biblical names), or the “West Bank” (Arab jargon), was annexed, the buds of Palestinian nationalism came to a halt and established the kingdom instead of a never-to be born Palestinian republic. For a while, although the Jordanians continued to hold back Palestine and strangle its birth, they, for example, granted citizenship to all Palestinian refugees and residents (some 300,000) in the kingdom in 1949, unlike other Arab states that ignored them. But the problem of the Jordan-Palestine pair became fully exposed in its intensity when a Palestinian assassinated King Abdullah in 1951 in Jerusalem.

At certain historical junctions, Jordan decided to free itself, or at least to stay away from the Palestinian nuisance, and to enter the territory east of the river as the core of the kingdom, if not its only territory, that is, the other side of the Jordan first and foremost (Transjordan First); a hidden message that the Palestinians were being neglected. So, for example, in 1988, King Hussein declared a Jordanian detachment from any symbolic or other presence in Judea and Samaria, and to let go of any pretension to of representing the Palestinians as a political patron.

However, granting a divorce to Palestinians in the West Bank could not really release the Hashemites from the Palestinian entanglement inside their homes in the East Bank, because for many decades, very 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 developing a recognized, collective, and national nucleus in Jordan. In fact, the entire political existence 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 spaces.

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 only an 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 hit with the prediction of a senior British Mandate official, Alec Kirkbride, according to which the area east of Jordan will serve as a parcel of land for the settlement of Palestinian Arabs when the Balfour Declaration is implemented and the Jewish National Homeland is established in Western Palestine (Kirkbride, 1956).

The spectacle of the Arab escape in 1948 amounted to an additional population of about 200,000 residents of Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”) and of about 100,000 on the other side of the Jordan (“East Bank”) based on the decision of the Jordanian government, the refugees became civilians in 1949, and 1954 the law was approved and expanded. Some of the refugees 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 cities in 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, Central and Southern America (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 following. 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 continual, and according to the demographer Jacob Faitelson, (Faitelson, 2009) every year, about 10,000 refugees migrate, if not much more. In 2017, this fact was given an eye-opening reminder, when eight out of nine land owners of the village of Amuna, near Ofra were reported living in Jordan, after fifty years since family members lived in the West Bank (Gabor, 2017).

The reasons that the refugees are leaving are varied and have a great impact on the residents’ considerations for their future. For example, the possibility of moving ahead and improving their standard of living, and not just a life of poverty of Palestinian society, has proven to be the incentive to migrate. In addition, the development of the fields of education and professional studies, as developed during the days of Israeli control, has encouraged and intensified immigration, as people in high-tech, engineers and pharmacists can enjoy the opportunity to obtain a visa to countries in the West. Summer Libdeh (Libdeh, 2010), a journalist from a Jordanian family, believes that the young Palestinian classes will always be ready to seek economic opportunities abroad that do not exist to the same extent in Judea and Samaria. Also, residents of villages without natural and economic resources, who do not have a significant Islamic component in their lives, will also be prepared to consider emigration at any time.

The picture of emigration is incredibly complex and surprising, and many emigration destinations embrace the world. Christians from Bethlehem and surrounding areas are leaving, like the Muslims from the Ramallah region with the enthusiasm of the American dream are leaving for America. A study conducted at Bir Zeit University in 2007 discovered that approximately 40% of Palestinian respondents were ready to emigrate, and in a 2015 survey, discovered that 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 overcome, among others with the help of family ties abroad. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that it is easier to make “internal migration” to Jordan, which lies across the river and is quite close. Thousands of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley are interested to move to Jordan due to livelihood difficulties, and there they will not suffer any problems 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 increased emigration of the Palestinians. The corrupt Palestinian Authority blocked openings, channeled money into the pockets close to the PA and left most of the population without a chance of general improvement. Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, has been described as one who does not expect any 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 website exhibits that there are 1.3 million refugees living there alongside the veteran residents, and the unemployment rate there 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 given the opportunity (PCPSR, 2016). Also another report, 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. To these examples can also be added 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 framework.

The Palestinians in Jordan

The exit gate 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 people 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 from 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 percentage of Palestinians of the Jordanian population (without foreigners) range from 60% to 80%. Amman, which has about four million residents, is by far the largest Palestinian city in Jordan, and even in the world. According to the CEO of UNRWA, among the Palestinian population in Jordan are has about two million refugees, and some of them live in the ten camps in the country. The status of the refugees from Gaza who arrived in Jordan after the 1967 war is miserable, and they can’t receive work permits or opportunities to acquire an education (UNRWA 2017).

Despite a continuous misery during those years, 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, as was mentioned, have held high positions as prime ministers, as have been appointed ministers and members of parliament. 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 Palestine, settled in Jordan, and some even became successful. The Rimawi family, which hails from Beit Rima north of Ramallah, was well known to the public, as well as Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Jodah, born in Amman whose father is from Ramallah, and the Speaker of the Upper House of the Legislature, Taher al-Mitzri, a member of a prominent Nablus family. However, in the elite of the kingdom – in the military and in the security and intelligence services – the Palestinians were greatly rebuffed, compared to Circassian, Druze and Bedouin people who held key positions in protecting the king, regime and state. Bassem Awadallah, of Palestinian descent, was formerly the head of the royal court. It goes without saying Needless to say, that Raniya, the wife of King Abdullah II, is of Palestinian descent, and that the female member of parliament Dima Tahbov, a representative of the Islamic Front is active 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 integrated and intermingled 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 “Jordanized” like a native-born, and even in Bedouin tribes one can hear about marriages with Palestinians. In a meeting with the PA 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 ancestry. 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, Farouk Kadumi, and none other than Yasser Arafat himself. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein, firmly set in law “Jordan is Palestine” in 1981 (Nadeva, 1981), a ruling 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 of them (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 occupying in the kingdom’s courtyard. One could argue that except for the members of the dynasty, which originated from the Hijaz region of the Arabian Peninsula (the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today), all Jordanian nationals are actually Palestinians on one side of the river or the other. If a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria, an irredentist force will be discovered that will spread eastward to the Palestinian population on the other side of the border. But before this terror strikes it, it is better for Jordan to change its official identity and become a Palestinian state in form and substance.

Money, identity and the future

Since its establishment in 1946, the Kingdom of Jordan has been [the apple of] 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 sectors, such as banking and tourism, which are successful. However, the state has no oil, and sometimes the water supply reaches cities only once a week (Pipes, 2017).

The dream of a Palestinian state in Jordan is barely, and yet, international aid and investment is being used to build a Palestinian state. After many years of support, indirectly and directly, the UNRWA should also be abolished, with Palestinian terror aggravating 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 in total to the agency in the years 1955 – 2016 (UNRWA, 2017). According to this view, the United Nations, in contrast to its hitherto unhelpful conduct could also play a key role in formulating a healthy, modern Palestinian society in the Palestinian state that could be established east of the Jordan River.

The Trump administration’s moves in January 2018 turned around 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 lowered the Palestinian funds – about $ 5 billion since 1994 – will pass in light of the scenario presented above to the Palestinian State in Jordan and converted to the development of Amman and its suburbs. In 2016, the United States had decided to transfer bilateral aid to Palestinians in the following year in the amount of $ 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 not understood that some of those billions would be used to inflate the brutal security forces, and be given as grants to Palestinian families of terrorists who murdered Israelis. With the cessation of the Authority’s activities and its funding, much money will be transferred for the use 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 is a failure, and that Jordan is able to serve as a suitable place to resolve 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 will more faithfully represent the Palestinians and their future.

The annual aid given to King Jordan and to the funds of the Amman regime is approximately $ 1.5 billion, and this fact should also be highlighted: The United States has provided about $ 10 billion to Jordan in the years 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 is established in the country of Moab, Ammon and Gilad, with all its symbols and meanings, it will send a kind of magnetic force to the Judea and Samaria Arabs, and will begin a more intensely eastward movement into familiar districts where their families have lived for decades. Thanks to extensive and generous international and Arab regional aid, new cities will be established, the wilderness will flourish, and in general a vibrant feeling of construction and hope will be felt. In this way, the Palestinians will be able to lift their heads up, because for some of them the need to hold on to the pull for a State will drop, 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 Hashemites, the gaps between the two sides have not closed, nor do they appear to be closing any time soon. A bitter, direct 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). Because 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 it. The kingdom is more afraid of what is close to it than it is of the alien and distant: For it, the Palestinian threat has not weakened through the generations, but has taken on various forms of settlement, 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 the ways of its formation and seeing it as an artificial invention and propaganda only. Indeed, it may be that we’re talking about a national stillborn that cannot become a political institution. 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 actions of 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 on the other side of the Jordan belong to the people of Israel (Grief, 2008). And now in our days, 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 for of the future.

The two-state solution to the bitter and prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict would thus, perhaps, be a solid and final realization. Instead of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria gets stuck in the lightning and thorns of peace wheels, in its place on the other side of the Jordan will pave the way for a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The river will be a border of reconciliation, and will be used to transport goods and tourists in both directions. This is a recipe for a Jewish-Israeli state and an Arab-Palestinian state side by side, not compressed 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 enjoy 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 a state which is not “natural” and not “national” but determined enough to withstand a Palestinian upheaval from within. The days and years will tell.