How the Arabs take care of their own
The New York Times tells us that Jordan is stripping Jordanian citizenship from 'some' Jordanian citizens who are of 'Palestinian' origin. Muhannad Haddad grew up here, went to school here, got a job in a bank here and traveled to foreign countries with a passport from here. Then one day the authorities said he was no longer Jordanian, and with that one stroke they took away his citizenship and compromised his ability to travel, study, work, seek health care, buy property or even drive.But the Times is cagey about the real reason this is happening.
The authorities effectively told him they were doing it for his own good. They said that like thousands of other Jordanians of Palestinian descent, he was being stripped of his citizenship to preserve his right to someday return to the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem.
“They gave me a paper that said, ‘You are now Palestinian,’ ” he said, recalling the day three years ago that his life changed.
In a report titled “Stateless Again,” issued last month, Human Rights Watch said that 2,700 people in Jordan lost their citizenship from 2004 to 2008, and that at least another 200,000 remained vulnerable, largely those who moved abroad at some point in search of work.
The government says it is trying to help by requiring Jordanians of Palestinian descent who fled the West Bank or Jerusalem after the war in 1967 to keep their Israeli documents valid. This has become a more urgent matter recently, political analysts and government officials said, with the accession of a right-wing Israeli government and its ultraconservative foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.
Critics and human rights advocates, however, see a different motivation. They said the Jordanian government acted to preserve its own interest, trying to appease non-Palestinian Jordanians concerned about the growing economic and political influence of citizens of Palestinian descent, a charge Mr. Sharif denied. They say it also appears that Jordan is frightened by talk of declaring Jordan a Palestinian homeland as an alternative to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.The real motivation isn't to placate 'non-Palestinian Jordanians' but the royal family itself. You see, the royal family was transplanted itself from the Saudi Arabian desert:
Jordan is governed by the royal family and its Bedouin elite. Here's how it happened.So you see, it's real simple. Jordan is 'Palestine.' But the 'royal family' doesn't want to let the 'Palestinians' live there.The Emirate of Transjordan was an autonomous political division of the British Mandate of Palestine, created as an administrative entity in April 1921 before the Mandate came into effect. It was geographically equivalent to today's Kingdom of Jordan, and remained under the nominal auspices of the League of Nations, until its independence in 1946.In other words, 'Jordan' is 79% of the Palestine Mandate. Not only is it 'Palestine' - it is the vast majority of the area covered by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
Initially, both the territory to the East and the West of the Jordan river were the British Mandate of Palestine. "Transjordan" was a word coined as a reference to the part of Palestine "across the Jordan", i.e. on the far (eastern) side of the Jordan River. On the western side of the Jordan River was the remaining 21% of the Palestine Mandate, Palestine which contained many places of historical and religious significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.The Mandate for Palestine, while specifying actions in support of Jewish immigration and political status, stated that in the territory to the east of the Jordan River, Britain could 'postpone or withhold' those articles of the Mandate concerning a 'Jewish National Home'.... In September 1922, the British government presented a memorandum to the League of Nations stating that Transjordan would be excluded from all the provisions dealing with Jewish settlement, and this memorandum was approved by the League on 11 September. From that point onwards, Britain administered the part west of the Jordan as Palestine, and the part east of the Jordan as Transjordan....Two thirds of Jordan's population is described as 'descendants of 'Palestinian refugees.''
...
The Hashemite Emir Abdullah, [Abdullah's great-grandfather, who was assasinated by 'Palestinians' in 1951 at the Dome of the Rock. Incredibly, Wikipedia omits this. CiJ] elder son of Britain's wartime Arab ally Sharif Hussein of Mecca [the Saudi royal family. CiJ], was placed on the throne of Transjordan [by the British. CiJ].... In March 1946, under the Treaty of London, Transjordan became a kingdom and on May 25, 1946, the parliament of Transjordan proclaimed the emir king, and formally changed the name of the country from the Emirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. In December 1948, Abdullah took the title King of Jordan, and he officially changed the country's name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in April 1949.
In other words, the cousin of the Saudi Arabian rulers, whose 'Kingdom' was a creation of colonialism so that his great-grandfather would not fight with his great great uncle, is now denying that two thirds of his population is entitled to call his country their home.
And did I mention that Jews were expelled from Jordan in 1923 and denied citizenship since?
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:31 PM
1 Comments:
I have figured a lot of this out from reading the history and have often wondered why it is always omitted from the current version of events, although Melanie Phillips also refers to the role and status of Jordan in her work. I have often quoted these facts to people who are 'righteously' enraged against Israel, and am most often met with completely blank looks, followed by a moment of silence, and then a return to the same diatribe as if none of this information had sunk in. Which it probably hadn't. Good to see another post on this.
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