You Want To Talk About Apartheid And Palestinians--Look At Jordan

Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage and researcher at the University of Bedfordshire, notes the rather cool relations that Jordan currently has with Israel, and looks at what is behind them.

THE CAUSES of Jordan’s recent line of official hostility toward Israel are deep-rooted in the makeup of the Jordanian state itself. Jordan is a country with a Palestinian majority which allows them little or no involvement in any political or executive bodies or parliament.


This lack of political and legislative representation of Jordanians of Palestinian heritage has been enforced by decades of systematic exclusion in all aspects of life expanding into their disenfranchisement in education, employment, housing, state benefits and even business potential, all developing into an existing apartheid no different than that formerly adopted in South Africa, except for the official acknowledgement of it.

The well-established apartheid system has created substantial advantages for East Bankers who dominate all senior government and military jobs, along with tight control of security agencies, particularly the influential Jordanian General Intelligence Department, all resulting in tribal Jordanians gaining superiority over their fellow citizens of Palestinian heritage.

The fact that East Bankers have done very well under the current situation provides motive for Jordanian officials to maintain the status quo and work on extending it; especially as the helpless Palestinian majority has no say and very little it can do against such conditions.

This policy of denaturalization has apparently not gone on completely unnoticed. Human Rights Watch noticed the problem back in February:

Jordan should stop withdrawing nationality arbitrarily from Jordanians of Palestinian origin, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Authorities stripped more than 2,700 of these Jordanians of their nationality between 2004 and 2008, and the practice continued in 2009, Human Rights Watch said.

The 60-page report, "Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality", details the arbitrary manner, with no clear basis in law, in which Jordan deprives its citizens who were originally from the West Bank of their nationality, thereby denying them basic citizenship rights such as access to education and health care.

...Jordanian officials have defended the practice, as a means to counter any future Israeli plans to transfer the Palestinian population of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Jordan.

So its defensive apartheid.
Maybe they're just in a competition with Lebanon to see which country can get rid of its Palestinians first?

Technorati Tag: Jordan.