Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Wow. I've been reading about this but wasn't sure of the extent of it: Jordan pulls citizenship from Palestinians: US rights group
"AMMAN (AFP) - Jordan has revoked citizenship from nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin and should put an end to the practice, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Monday.
HRW said 2,732 Palestinians were stripped of their Jordanian nationality between 2004 and 2008.
"Jordan is playing politics with the basic rights of thousands of its citizens," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of the US-based group that released the 60-page report at a news conference in Amman.
"Officials are denying entire families the ability to lead normal lives with the sense of security that most citizens of a country take for granted," the report said.
The practice continued in 2009, denying many people basic citizenship rights such as access to education and health care, HRW said.
"We believe the total and actual number of those who have been stripped of their nationality is much bigger," Christoph Wilcke, a HRW researcher, told reporters...[More.]
This really puts people, ordinary people, in a pickle.
It's as if the US were to take naturalized citizens or maybe even people who were born here and decide they aren't Americans anymore. It's really pretty outrageous when you think about it.
In this case, people had considered themselves Jordanian for decades, now they are stateless - one wonders actually how many really self-identify as "Palestinian;" or are they once again being used as pawns?
The corrolary to this is the refusal of Lebanon to naturalize people who have been living there in "refugee camps" for 60 sixty years, even though generations have been born in Lebanon.
Even the children of Lebanese women and Palestinian men aren't Lebanese, although the children of Lebanese men can be citizens of Lebanon.
Meanwhile the non-Lebanese, although they're Sunni Muslim and hail originally from only a few miles away, have few rights and often live in poverty.
I fail to see how any of this "helps" the Palestinians or how it can do anything but contribute to poverty, personal and regional insecurity and probably violence.
This is even more outrageous when you consider that Jordan was carved out of the Palestinian mandate. If anyone is Palestinian, the Jordanians are!
Hi Eli.
Actually, upon looking into it, this problem reflects some issues about nationality vs tribal, ethnic and family affiliations.
"Filistini", Palestinians, are not a single national group and neither are Jordanians. Also, Jordan has its own unique history and it's different from "cis-Jordan," ie the land west of the River Jordan (Israel, Judea-Samaria, ie the West Bank/Palestinian Territories.
We tend to think in the West in terms of nationstates but in the Middle East this is pretty recent in modern times although some nations obviously have ancient roots (Syria, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Arabia...)
So, families, clans, tribal and religious groups remain relatively powerful in relation to national identity although this is changing, however this is challenged now even in Turkey by Islamism. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; according to the attached article even in Jordan which is quite Western in some ways shari'a law is part of the legal system. This isn't all that surprising considering the close links between the Jordanian ruling family and Mecca.
There are many (other) groups in Jordan besides Palestinian Arabs, namely Bedouin, Circassians, etc and the Hashemite family itself comes from the Hejaz, and are direct descendants of Mohammed.
They were instrumental in assisting the British in overthrowing the Ottoman Empire and interestingly Prince Faisal had a relationship with Chaim Weitzmann and Felix Frankfurter and had a good understanding of Zionist dreams. He's worth studying, definitely, as is the British and French duplicity regarding both the Arabs and the Jews and the resonating effects of the Sykes/Picot Treaty which created the modern borders apparently regardless of tribal, religious and other considerations. In fact I've read that the borders of Iraq were drawn up by the British Arabophile Gertrude Bell, who may not have realized what she was doing.
I think, King Abdullah has two worries, one being the relative weakening of various minorities in Jordan and the other being a possible attempt by some Israelis to maybe make Jordan "Palestine," and try to ship West Bank citizens to Jordan - when in fact Jordan has a whole different identity of its own, not to mention ancient connections between the citizens of the West Bank and the land:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan
Sophia,
The biggest group in Jordan are the Arabs known as Palestinians. They outnumber the other groups.
As for They were instrumental in assisting the British in overthrowing the Ottoman Empire one should take it with a grain of salt as, for the most part, that legend was based on the "musings" of Lawrence of Arabia".
One needs to read of the doings of the British after the First World War with all the intrigue and politicking to realise quite how artificial the whole region is.
Hi Cynic, that's true, probably 60% or more of the Jordanian population is Palestinian.
I think Jordan is the only country which has freely offered citizenship to the Palestinians yet there are still "refugee camps" there. I believe well over 300,000 people live in refugee camps in Jordan.
Of course the whole issue of refugee camps, 60 plus years after the war of 1948, drives me nuts as does refugee status by descent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugee
This is unique in the entire world.
How can these "refugees" be resettled even if a Palestinian state is created on the West Bank and in Gaza? They number well into the millions. Unfortunately I think the plan is to force Israel to repatriate most of them. This won't work either - the logistics are impossible even if everybody shared such a desire.
Anyway, agreed the area is artificial in the sense of borders etc and the British were heavily involved, etc; however, the people are real.
And they have very real cultural and other differences as you know of course, which I think is part of what is troubling the King - Abdullah I was murdered by a Palestinian and Hussein was attacked by them, I think he is concerned about further bloodshed also.
As to the attack on the Ottoman Empire: I have very mixed emotions about that. I don't find the British particularly to have been in the right in that regard, especially considering that they subsequently inspired the Greeks to invade Turkey and maintained a stranglehood as long as they could in the Middle East, doing great harm in the process. Their goals were pretty obvious, considering the oil fields, the Suez, etc. and their desire to defeat the Germans and weaken Russia's flank.
One side effect though was the liberation of vast lands and resources which were eventually handed over to the Arabs, who seem unable to grant a small land to the Jews and unwilling to help settle the "refugees" or work more constructively to normalize relations with Israel.
It is frustrating.