PROFILE

Jordanians & Palestinians

As Jordan's economy falters, the country's East Bankers increasingly view the Palestinian refugees among them as a burden, says former Institute senior fellow Adnan Abu Odeh.

Left to right: King Hussein of Jordan and Adnan Abu Odeh outside the king's villa, February 1986. The inscription from the king reads: "To my brother and dear friend, Adnan Abu Odeh, my high regard, sincere affection, and best wishes."

lthough accurate statistics are hard to come by, some observers say that over 2 million Palestinians live in Jordan--comprising more than 50 percent of the country's population and exceeding the number of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza combined. Because the majority of Jordan's Palestinians are refugees from the West Bank of the Jordan River, their goal is a Palestinian homeland and their status in Jordan is precarious, even though the government has given most of them citizenship, says Adnan Abu Odeh, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1995-96.

A public debate over the status and future of Jordan's Palestinian refugees swept the country's media after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Oslo Declaration in September 1993. The debate--spearheaded by elites representing Jordan's East Bank population and its Palestinian refugees--revealed a simmering political tension between the two communities. This problem has been exacerbated by Jordan's faltering economy.

Abu Odeh--a Palestinian who served as a cabinet minister and political adviser to King Hussein of Jordan for 24 years--researched the history of Palestinian-Jordanian tensions during his fellowship year. He is completing a manuscript on the subject with a grant from the Institute.

"If a lasting peace is to be achieved in the Middle East, the international community will have to pay attention to this growing problem," Abu Odeh warns. "Otherwise, the latent tensions over Palestinian refugees in Jordan will spill over and threaten to destabilize any peace settlements in the area. You can't have peace in one part of a region and leave the adjacent area boiling with conflict."

An Important Perspective

Abu Odeh grew up in Nablus, on the West Bank, when the territory was under British rule in 1918-1948. His father, a technician in a soap factory, urged his son to go to college, where he studied English and Arab language and literature. Upon graduating, like many young Palestinians, Abu Odeh looked for a job in Kuwait because of the higher salaries there. He taught grades 8 through 12 until his mother fell ill and asked him to return home. He soon found a job as head of the analysis and assessment section of Jordan's intelligence service in Amman. In his new job, he came to the attention of King Hussein, whom he briefed on intelligence matters in the late 1960s.

The king was impressed with Abu Odeh's analytical abilities and quickly made him a member of his cabinet, where he served as minister of information. Later, he was the king's political adviser for eight years. Abu Odeh says that his unique position as both a Jordanian of Palestinian origin and a leading official in the Jordanian government made him especially aware of the growing crisis within Jordanian society, which--after Israel conquered the West Bank in the Six Day War in 1967--had divided into two communities based on whether a person had originally come from the West or East Bank of the Jordan River. Those from the West Bank identified more closely with the cause of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and as a result, they were gradually excluded from participation in Jordan's public sector. "This policy of exclusion generated resentment among Jordanians of Palestinian origin and some liberal East Bankers," Abu Odeh says.

While serving as Jordan's permanent representative to the United Nations in 1992-94, Abu Odeh was impressed with the concept of preventive diplomacy, as expressed in UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 Agenda for Peace. "When I retired from public service in 1994, I decided to write something about the conflict in Jordan that would alert the world to the problem, rather than let it fester and eventually erupt."

History

Jordan has received three waves of Palestinian refugees: the first in 1948 when war broke out between Arabs and Jews; the second in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel seized control of the West Bank, which had been under Jordanian rule since 1950; and the third during the Gulf War in 1990-91 when Palestinians fled Kuwait and surrounding Arab countries.

From the beginning, disaffected Palestinian refugees in Jordan have posed a problem, especially in the 1950s when they identified with pan-Arabists and thus threatened Jordan's stability. Nevertheless, Abu Odeh says, the king considered the conflict with them an internal matter requiring an internal solution.

However, when Arab leaders founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, dedicated to obtaining a homeland for Palestinians, the organization provided Palestinian refugees in Jordan with outside leadership, Abu Odeh says. As a result, Jordan's problems with them shifted into the regional sphere.

Jordan's relations with Palestinian guerrillas on its territory continued to deteriorate after the Six Day War, and in 1970, when law and order in his country reached the brink of collapse, the king drove the PLO from Jordan. Nevertheless, a sizable population of Palestinian refugees sympathetic to the PLO remained.

During the Gulf War, about 300,000 Palestinians and Jordanians fled the Gulf states to Jordan, swelling the ranks of the unemployed to about 20 percent. At the same time, because Jordan supported the economic boycott of Iraq, the country lost billions of dollars in revenues--about $3 billion alone in the first year after the war ended.

As a result, tensions have increased between Palestinian refugees and East Bankers. The East Bankers see the refugees as competitors for a shrinking piece of the country's economic pie and are "wrongly convinced" they cannot be loyal to Jordan, says Abu Odeh. "Undeclared but de facto national duality is now in the making," he says. The problem is further aggravated by mutual distrust between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority.

Abu Odeh says that the solution to the problem is complex. First, Jordan needs to develop its nascent democratic institutions, thus encouraging citizens to align themselves according to programs and platforms instead of according to their origin. Second, King Hussein, who is a Hashemite and a descendant of the prophet Mohammed, is viewed in the region as being supra-tribal, supra-sectarian, supra-national, and supra-regional, Abu Odeh says. "This fact enables him to act as a unifying force among Palestinians and Jordanians as his grandfather and father did, and as he himself has done since the unification of the West and East Banks in 1950."

Finally and most importantly, the international community--especially the United States--needs to help Jordan develop its economy through loans and investments, and thus alleviate a primary source of conflict, Abu Odeh says. These factors combined could avert a potential conflict and help establish regional peace, he says. "It is not too late to prevent a conflict, as long as Jordan is under the rule of a Hashemite, a supra-regional leader." © 1996 United States Institute of Peace