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Jordan Is Palestinian
Mudar Zahran, Middle East Quarterly
Thus far the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has weathered the storm that has swept
across the Middle East since the beginning of the year. But the relative calm in
Amman is an illusion. The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country's
largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view
the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine -- intruders rather than
legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely
than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of
yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace
solution -- and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a
Palestinian state in Jordan.
Abdullah's Apartheid Policies
The majority Palestinian population of Jordan bridles at the advantages and
benefits bestowed on the minority Bedouins. Advancement in the civil service, as
well as in the military, is almost entirely a Bedouin prerogative with the added
insult that Palestinians pay the lion's share of the country's taxes.
Despite having held a comprehensive national census in 2004, the Jordanian
government would not divulge the exact percentage of Palestinians in the
kingdom. Nonetheless, the secret that everyone seems to know but which is never
openly admitted is that Palestinians make up the vast majority of the
population.
In his 2011 book, Our Last Best Chance, King Abdullah claimed that the
Palestinians make up a mere 43 percent. The US State Department estimates that
Palestinians make up "more than half" of Jordanians while in a 2007 report,
written in cooperation with several Jordanian government bodies, the
London-based Oxford Business Group stated that at least two thirds of Jordan's
population were of Palestinian origin. Palestinians make up the majority of the
population of Jordan's two largest cities, Amman and Zarqa, which were small,
rural towns before the influx of Palestinians arrived in 1967 after Jordan's
defeat in the Six-Day War.
In most countries with a record of human rights violations, vulnerable
minorities are the typical victims. This has not been the case in Jordan where a
Palestinian majority has been discriminated against by the ruling Hashemite
dynasty, propped up by a minority Bedouin population, from the moment it
occupied Judea and Samaria during the 1948 war (these territories were annexed
to Jordan in April 1950 to become the kingdom's West Bank).
As a result, the Palestinians of Jordan find themselves discriminated against in
government and legislative positions as the number of Palestinian government
ministers and parliamentarians decreases; there is not a single Palestinian
serving as governor of any of Jordan's twelve governorships.
Jordanian Palestinians are encumbered with tariffs of up to 200 percent for an
average family sedan, a fixed 16-percent sales tax, a high corporate tax, and an
inescapable income tax. Most of their Bedouin fellow citizens, meanwhile, do not
have to worry about most of these duties as they are servicemen or public
servants who get a free pass. Servicemen or public employees even have their own
government-subsidized stores, which sell food items and household goods at lower
prices than what others have to pay, and the Military Consumer Corporation,
which is a massive retailer restricted to Jordanian servicemen, has not
increased prices despite inflation.
Decades of such practices have left the Palestinians in Jordan with no political
representation, no access to power, no competitive education, and restrictions
in the only field in which they can excel: business.
According to the Minority Rights Group International's World Directory of
Minorities and Indigenous Peoples of 2008, "Jordan still considers them
[Palestinian-Jordanians] refugees with a right of return to Palestine." This by
itself is confusing enough for the Palestinian majority and possibly gives basis
for state-sponsored discrimination against them; indeed, since 2008, the
Jordanian government has adopted a policy of stripping some Palestinians of
their citizenship. Thousands of families have borne the brunt of this action
with tens of thousands more potentially affected. The Jordanian government has
officially justified its position: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the
Interior Nayef Qadi told the London-based al-Hayat newspaper that "Jordan should
be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of unloading the
Palestinian land of its people" which he described as "the secret Israeli aim to
impose a solution of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan." According
to a February 2010 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, some 2,700
Jordanian-Palestinians have had their citizenship revoked. As HRW obtained the
figure from the Jordanian government, it is safe to assume that the actual
figure is higher. To use the words of Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of
the Middle East and North Africa division of HRW, "Jordan is playing politics
with the basic rights of thousands of its citizens."
But Abdullah does not really want the Palestinians out of his kingdom. For it is
the Palestinians who drive the country's economy: They pay heavy taxes; they
receive close to zero state benefits; they are almost completely shut out of
government jobs, and they have very little, if any, political representation. He
is merely using them as pawns in his game against Israel by threatening to make
Jerusalem responsible for Jordanians of Palestinian descent in the name of the
"right of return."
Despite systematic marginalization, Palestinians in Jordan seem well-settled
and, indeed, do call Jordan home. Hundreds of thousands hold "yellow cards" and
"green cards," residency permits allowing them to live and work in Israel while
they maintain their Jordanian citizenship. In addition, tens of thousands of
Palestinians -- some even claim hundreds of thousands -- hold Israeli residency
permits, which allow them to live in Judea and Samaria. Many also hold a
"Jerusalem Residency Card," which entitles them to state benefits from Israel.
Yet they have remained in Jordan. Despite ill treatment by the Jordanian
government, they still wish to live where most of their relatives and family
members live and perhaps actually consider Jordan home.
 Playing the Islamist Card
The Hashemites' discriminatory policies against the Palestinians have been
overlooked by the West, Washington in particular, for one main reason: the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the beating heart of Palestinian
politics, and thus, if the Palestinians were empowered, they might topple the
Hashemites and transform Jordan into a springboard for terror attacks against
Israel. This fear was not all that farfetched. The Palestinian National Charter,
by which the PLO lives, considers Palestine with its original mandate borders
(i.e., including the territory east of the Jordan River, or Transjordan) as the
indivisible homeland of the Palestinian Arab people. In the candid admission of
Abu Dawoud, Yasser Arafat's strongman in the 1970s, "Abu Ammar [Arafat] was
doing everything then to establish his power and authority in Jordan despite his
public statements" in support of King Hussein. This tension led to the 1970
Black September civil war where the PLO was expelled from Jordan and thousands
of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hussein's Bedouin army.
With the threat of Palestinian militants removed, the idea of having the Muslim
Brotherhood entrenched in a Palestinian state with the longest border with
Israel would naturally be of concern to Israel and its allies.
The only problem with this theory is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is
dominated by Bedouins, not Palestinians. The prominent, hawkish Muslim
Brotherhood figure, Zaki Bani Rushiad, for example, is a native of Irbid in
northern Jordan -- not a Palestinian. Salem Falahat, another outspoken
Brotherhood leader, and Abdul Latif Arabiat, a major tribal figure and godfather
of the Brotherhood in Jordan, are also non-Palestinians. Upon President Obama's
announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden, tribal Jordanians in the southern
city of Ma'an mourned the terror leader's death and announced "a celebration of
martyrdom." Other cities with predominantly Bedouin populations, such as Salt
and Kerak, did the same. The latter, a stronghold of the Majali tribe (which has
historically held prominent positions in the Hashemite state) produced Abu
Qutaibah al-Majali, bin Laden's personal aide between 1986 and 1991, who
recruited fellow Bedouin-Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in
Iraq who was killed in a 2006 US raid.
The Hashemite regime is keenly aware of US and Israeli fears and has, therefore,
striven to create a situation where the world would have to choose between the
Hashemites and the Muslim Brotherhood as Jordan's rulers. To this end, it has
supported the Muslim Brotherhood for decades, allowing it to operate freely, to
run charitable organizations and youth movements, and to recruit members in
Jordan. In 2008, the Jordanian government introduced a new law, retroactively
banning any existing political party unless it had five hundred members and
branches in five governorates (counties). Since such conditions could only be
fulfilled by the Muslim Brotherhood, most political parties were dissolved de
jure because they did not meet the new standards, leaving the Islamic Action
Front as the strongest party in the kingdom.
Both Jerusalem and Washington are aware of the Jordanian status quo yet have
chosen to accept the Hashemite regime as it is, seduced by the conventional
wisdom of "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't." The facts on
the ground, however, suggest that the devil they think they know is in deep
trouble with its own supposed constituency.
The Bedouin Threat
Despite their lavish privileges, Jordanian Bedouins seem to insist relentlessly
on a bigger piece of the cake, demanding more privileges from the king, and, in
doing so, they have grown fearless about defying him. Since 2009, fully-armed
tribal fights have become commonplace in Jordan. Increasingly, the Hashemite
regime has less control than it would like over its only ruling foundation --
the Bedouin minority -- which makes up the army, the police forces, all the
security agencies, and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. The regime
is, therefore, less likely to survive any serious confrontations with them and
has no other choice but to keep kowtowing to their demands.
What complicates the situation even further is that Bedouin tribes in Jordan do
not maintain alliances only with the Hashemites; most shift their loyalties
according to their current interests and the political season. Northern tribes,
for example, have exhibited loyalty to the Syrian regime, and many of their
members hold dual citizenships. In September 1970, when Syrian forces invaded
Jordan in the midst of the civil war there, the tribes of the northern city of
Ramtha raised the Syrian flag and declared themselves "independent" from the
Hashemite rulers.
Likewise, Bedouin tribes of the south have habitually traded loyalty for
privileges and handouts with whoever paid better, beginning with the Turks, then
replacing them with the better-paying Britons, and finally the Hashemites. This
pattern has expanded in the last twenty years, as tribesmen exchanged their
loyalties for cash; in fact this is how they got involved in the
British-supported Arab revolt of World War I, in which the Bedouins demanded to
be paid in gold in advance in order to participate in the fighting against the
Ottomans despite their alignment with the Ottoman Empire before joining the
revolt.
This in turn means that the Jordanian regime is now detested not only by the
Palestinians but also by the Bedouins, who have called for a constitutional
monarchy in which the king hands his powers to them. Should the tribes fail to
achieve their goals, they will most likely expand their demonstrations of unrest
-- complete with tribal killings, blockades, armed fights, robberies, and
attacks on police officers -- which the Jordanian state finds itself having to
confront weekly. In 2010, an average of five citizens was killed each week just
as a result of tribal unrest.
The Hashemite regime cannot afford to confront the tribesmen since they
constitute the regime's own servicemen and intelligence officers. In 2002, the
Jordanian army besieged the southern Bedouin city of Ma'an in order to arrest a
group of extremists, who were then pardoned a few years later. Similarly, Hammam
Balaoui, a Jordanian intelligence double agent was arrested in 2006 for
supporting al-Qaeda, only to be released shortly thereafter, eventually blowing
himself up in Afghanistan in 2009 along with seven senior CIA officers and King
Abdullah's cousin.
Palestinian Pawns
These open displays of animosity are of a piece with the Hashemite regime's use
of its Palestinian citizens as pawns in its game of anti-Israel one-upmanship.
King Hussein -- unlike his peace-loving image -- made peace with Israel only
because he could no longer afford to go to war against it. His son has been less
shy about his hostility and is not reluctant to bloody Israel in a
cost-effective manner. For example, on August 3, 2004, he went on al-Arabiya
television and slandered the Palestinian Authority for "its willingness to give
up more Palestinian land in exchange for peace with Israel." He often
unilaterally upped Palestinian demands on their behalf whenever the Palestinian
Authority was about to make a concession, going as far as to threaten Israel
with a war "unless all settlement activities cease."
This hostility toward Israel was also evident when, in 2008, Abdullah started
revoking the citizenship of Jordanian Palestinians. By turning the Palestinian
majority in Jordan into "stateless refugees" and aggressively pushing the
so-called "right of return," the king hopes to strengthen his anti-Israel
credentials with the increasingly Islamist Bedouins and to embarrass Jerusalem
on the world stage. It is not inconceivable to envision a scenario where
thousands of disenfranchised Palestinians find themselves stranded at the
Israeli border, unable to enter or remain in Jordan. The international media --
no friend of the Jewish state -- would immediately jump into action, demonizing
Israel and turning the scene into a fiasco meant to burden Jerusalem's
conscience -- and that of the West. The Hashemite regime would thereby come out
triumphant, turning its own problem -- being rejected and hated by the
Palestinians -- into Israel's problem.
A Pot Boiling Over
The Jordanian government's mistreatment of its Palestinian citizenry has taken a
significant toll. Today, the Palestinians are a ticking bomb waiting to explode,
especially as they watch their fellow Arabs rebelling against autocrats such as
Egypt's Mubarak, Libya's Qaddafi, or Syria's Assad.
The complex relationship between the Palestinian majority and the Hashemite
minority seems to have become tenser since Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999
after King Hussein's death. Abdullah's thin knowledge of the Arabic language,
the region, and internal affairs, made him dependent on the Bedouin-dominated
Jordanian Intelligence Department standing firmly between the king and his
people, of which the Palestinians are the majority. A US embassy cable, dated
July 2009, reported "bullying" practiced by the fans of al-Faisali Soccer Club
(predominantly Bedouin Jordanians) against the fans of al-Wihdat Soccer Club
(predominantly Palestinians), with al-Faisali fans chanting anti-Palestinian
slogans and going so far as to insult Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian
descent. Two days after the cable was released, Jordanian police mercilessly
attacked Palestinian soccer fans without provocation, right under the eyes of
the international media.
Palestinians in Jordan have also developed an intense hatred of the military as
they are not allowed to join the army; they see Bedouin servicemen getting
advantages in state education and health care, home taxes, and even tariff
exemption on luxury vehicles. In recent years, the Jordanian military has
consumed up to 20.2 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
Government spending does not end with the army. Jordan has one of the largest
security and intelligence apparatuses in the Middle East, perhaps the largest
compared to the size of its population. Since intelligence and security officers
are labeled as "military servicemen" by the Jordanian Ministry of Finance, and
their expense is considered military expenditure, Jordanian Palestinians see
their tax dollars going to support job creation for posts from which they
themselves are banned. At the same time, the country has not engaged in any
warfare since 1970, leading some to conclude that this military spending is
designed to protect the regime and not the country -- a conclusion underscored
by the Black September events.
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