Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Jordan



Properly known as Trans-Jordanian Palestine, it was stolen from the Palestinians by the British in 1923, and given illegally to an exiled Saudi Prince named abd-Allah as his personal fiefdom. In 1946 the theft was given international recognition when Palestine was formally removed from the name, and the Palestinian people from any chance of recovering their homeland, let alone equal status with their fellow countrymen and women. The now fully independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has continued to receive vast quantities of military aid from the British (it has topped the British military aid list annually for several decades), principally to ensure that the Hashemites are able to defend themselves against any attempt by the Palestinians to recover their land.

British military aid also enabled Jordan to annex the West Bank, including Jerusalem, in the war to prevent the legal inception of the States of Israel and Palestine in the late 1940s. Jordan returned the West Bank to Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War; in 1988 it permanently relinquished Jordanian claims to the West Bank; in 1994 it signed a peace treaty with Israel – and yet there has been no move of any kind to deal with the more pressing issue, the inexcusable denial to the Palestinian people of more than 90% of their homeland, leaving them only with the sub-sea-level sterility of the West Bank, mob-rule in the style of "On The Waterfront" on the waterfront of the Gaza Strip, refugee camps throughout the Middle East, and the fortunate few who are living under democracy, with high standards of health and education, in Israel.

British defence aid was particularly significant during 1970 and 1971, when Jordan was embroiled in a civil war between the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, led by Yasser Arafat, and the Hashemite loyalists under the Jordanian king – a heroic attempt by Palestinians to reclaim their national heritage from iniquitous Saudi imperialism. Sadly, the Hashemites were victorious, cementing their illegal occupation of Palestinian land by removing the PLO and its supporters to refugee camps in the Lebanon in July 1971. Although some ostensible Palestinian representation has been artificially implanted into the Assembly, Jordan is an autocratic state whose Parliament has no power, and Palestinians in that Parliament, like Palestinians in general in Jordan, are regarded as second-class citizens in a system that is comparable with apartheid.


Marks For: 0


Marks Against:10




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


No comments:

Post a Comment