Volume 7, No. 2, February 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The Expulsion of Palestinians to Jordan: Palestine exclusively for the Jewish State
Over the years it has been argued that Israel wanted to expel the Palestinians from the Lebanese refugee camps and maintain a complete blockade of their return to Palestine. This would leave the Palestinians no other alternative but to move to Jordan and work for the creation of a separate new Palestinian homeland in Jordan. This strategy was Israel’s way of achieving the two-state solution envisioned in the UN mandate of 1947 and more or less accepted conveniently by the pertinent international players. Such an achievement would end any claim of the Palestinians to Palestine itself, leaving it exclusively for the Jews and the State of Israel.
This approach was undergirded by the fact that there were already substantial Palestinians in Jordan holding some of the critical political, military and social leadership positions. Jordan hosted the largest number of Palestinian refugees, most of whose families came to Jordan between 1947 and 1967, although some Palestinians were already resident in Jordan when Transjordan (now simply Jordan) annexed part of Palestine in 1946. The UN estimates that today more than two million registered Palestinian refugees live in Jordan and that Jordan hosts the second largest number of refugees per capita worldwide. Around three quarters of these hold full Jordanian citizenship and therefore have a national identification number, which allows them access to the labour market, public health and education services, etc. Although most Palestinians have Jordanian citizenship and many have integrated, Jordan still considers them refugees with a right of return to Palestine. However, around 150,000 Palestinians, mostly from Gaza but also those who remained in the West Bank after 1967 and only later came to Jordan, are denied citizenship and thus these rights and privileges. Jordan, nevertheless, is the only Arab country to almost fully integrate the Palestinian refugees of 1948 onward. Given this context, Israel assumed that theoretically, setting up a Palestinian state in Jordan would be a relatively easy task. This attempt to remove Palestinians completely from Palestine was a total adaptation of the South African apartheid position behind the creation of the Bantustans, with the end goal of completely evacuating the Blacks out of the South African political state structure.
This, however, was clearly an Israeli fantasy and pushed the whole of the Middle East into chaos, especially challenging the leadership of King Hussein in Jordan once again. This fantasy had already caused massive crises, difficulty and chaos in 1970 during the critical civil war in Jordan, rightly called Black September by the Palestinians because of the thousands of Palestinians who were killed. Between September 16-27, 1970, there was a bloody conflict between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Certain aspects of the conflict continued until July 17, 1971, when it was finally settled. The king emerged victorious because of his intelligence service, the loyalty of the army, and because of a helping hand from Pakistan, most specifically Brigadier Ziaul Haq.
Following the loss of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians flocked to the anti-Israeli guerrilla fedayeen movement which was mostly located in Jordan. The realisation having dawned that none of the surrounding Arab nations would help them in acquiring any territories for themselves, Palestinians now comprehended that they had to fight for themselves against an ever usurping and violative State of Israel. This, however, threatened King Hussein, who feared that this build-up could threaten his rule. So in 1970, Hussein sent his troops against strongholds of the Syrian-backed fedayeen, principally in Amman and Irbid, and dispatched Zia north to assess Syria’s military capabilities. Brigadier Ziaul Haq of Pakistan was officially stationed in Amman from 1967 to 1970 as the head of a Pakistani training mission to Jordan. Officially he was to train the Jordanian forces in the art of suppressing popular uprisings, particularly the newly invigorated Palestinian fedayeen. Zia reported back to Hussein that the situation was difficult but not totally out of control and recommended the deployment of a Royal Jordanian Air Force squadron to the region. He himself led the tank command in the region, and according to CIA official Jack O’Connell, Zia personally led Jordanian troops during the battles in September 1970.
Thus Zia had personally become involved on the Jordanian side of the military conflict and took part in the massacre known as Black September against Palestinian insurgents who were ruthlessly suppressed, and many suspected militants expelled from Jordan. For this some have called him the “Butcher of Palestinians”. This blatantly violated the terms of his secondment to the Jordanian army. Major-General A O Mitha states that Brigadier Ziaul Haq was to be court-martialled on the recommendation of the then Head of the Pakistan Military Mission in Amman, Major-General Nawazish, for disobeying General Headquarters’ orders by commanding a Jordanian armoured division against the Palestinians. However, Lieutenant General Gul Hassan Khan, the Chief of General Staff, interceded for Zia after which President Yahya Khan let Zia off the hook. On the other hand, for his services to the monarch of Jordan, Zia was awarded the highest order of the Kingdom of Jordan, the “Order of Al-Hussein bin Ali” as well as the “Order of the Star of Jordan” and the “Order of Independence”.
General Zia later became the Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army and the most oppressive and obdurate of Pakistan’s military dictators from 1977 until his death in 1988. Raza Naeem, a senior journalist and scholar, correctly evaluating Zia’s role in Black September states: “…a then-obscure Pakistani Brigadier bearing the uplifting name of Ziaul Haq performed yeoman’s service for King Hussein by blatantly violating the terms of his secondment to the Jordanian army by taking part in the massacre – undoubtedly valuable match practice for what he was to wreak in his native country just seven years later as its worst military dictator.”
Tariq Ali refers to the significance of this massacre – Black September – in his book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Ali quotes the legendary Israeli military commander and statesman Moshe Dayan’s[1] self-serving statement that in Black September, King Hussein “…killed more Palestinians in 11 days than Israel could kill in 20 years.”
The Cry of “Antisemitism” – Israel’s Ubiquitous Cudgel Against Criticism
In the recent “Independence Day” celebrations mentioned earlier, tens of thousands of “Jewish nationalists” marched through the Old City of Jerusalem, especially the Muslim quarter, threatening Palestinians’ life, property and businesses, and openly confronting and humiliating them, while Israel’s police and security apparatus looked on. This show of contempt for the Palestinians culminated in the visit of no less a person than the Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to Al-Aqsa Mosque on May 21, 2023. He proclaimed: “We are in charge here,” and that the Israeli police presence at the site “proves who is in charge in Jerusalem.” As a continuing insult to the Palestinian Muslims, he proclaimed on the social media site Telegram, alongside a picture of himself at Al Aqsa: “Jerusalem is our soul.”
These nationalists also regularly attack all Left-wing political groups, especially the Jewish organisations who take umbrage at such vile behaviour, castigating them by stating that they have more in common with Islamic terrorists than with their fellow Jews. So the long and horrendous European persecution and the Holocaust is conveniently forgotten and all the blame for the historical Jewish suffering and dislocation is being placed now on the shoulders of Muslims and ‘Islamic terrorist’ groups. This placates and absolves the west from their long-term guilt vis-a-vis the Jews and conjoins this with their deep anti-Islamic bias. For these Israeli nationalists, Left politics is at the best very naive and indeed hypocritical in looking for intersectionality, which these nationalists regard as a deadly disease driving the current trend of Interfaith Dialogue. All of these Left groups are of course willy nilly branded as antisemitic because they critique the horrendous policies and practices of the State of Israel.
It is staggering how swiftly the ubiquitous negative stigma of ‘antisemitism’ is now applied on anybody who ethically and/or morally judges, critiques or condemns the State of Israel for its highly immoral, malevolent and vicious handling of the Palestinian people. This pernicious stigma is especially applied against Israeli and other Jews who criticise these policies, and they are even spitefully labelled as “self-hating Jews”. So, the claim to being the only democratic country in the region is to be questioned, as it is completely blind to the innate values of democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of critique and any ethical judgement. If such an attitude and judgement is so pervasive, then the democratic credentials of Israel have to be challenged simply because Palestinians are denied full citizenship and have at best a minimum of rights, and anybody who fights for their rights is equally victimised. The democratic credentials of the State of Israel are stated as the major raison d’etre for the massive aid packages given to Israel every year by the US and a number of its allies. This consciously ignores all non-democratic realities and practices on the ground and overlooks all the horrible legislative, political and military actions taking place in Israel today against the Palestinians and in violation of all international laws, norms and regimes that these countries claim to be universal.
It is as if the whole State of Israel has become the embodiment of the white supremacist Afrikaner Broederbond. Or worse, Eugene Alexander de Kock, the colonel in the South African Police (SAP) and commanding officer of the counterinsurgency unit that kidnapped, tortured and assassinated numerous anti-apartheid activists and was aptly nicknamed the “Prime Evil” by the press. De Kock was to South Africa what “Bull” Connor was to the American South. The latter was the Commissioner of “Public Safety” in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s, and during the despicable Jim Crow era violently enforced racial segregation and denial of any civil rights to Black citizens.
These historical references to non-democratic extremes are especially pertinent here given the fact that similar techniques and methods of restrictions against the Palestinians are now being applied in the State of Israel and are the pervasive and dominant discourse amongst the conservative Jewry in the US.
It is very surprising that many Jewish temples and synagogues in the US proudly display the Israeli flag and blatant Israeli propaganda outside these temples. Why is that even possible given the deep commitment the US has for the “Pledge of Allegiance”, which is to be recited with hand on heart, that “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”? Thus, it is rather odd to have these foreign Israeli flags boldly present especially where the American Jewry worships, given that Israel is a totally separate state from the US. Despite my deep theological and ecumenical commitment to intra-Christian and inter-religious amicable coexistence and dialogue, one has to raise a question about the loyalties of American Jews to the US, purely for the sake of operational logic. You will never be allowed to hang a flag of Iran, Türkiye, Pakistan or Indonesia, etc., in front of a mosque in the US. Such a mosque would be totally vandalised if not set alight by the neo-fascists with passive support of the liberals.
In this context, it is important to remember that for a long time, the loyalty of the Roman Catholics to the US was questioned because of their religious loyalty to the Catholic Church and the Pope. This generally remained the case until the 1960s when John F Kennedy was finally elected president (1961-63). A similar logic surely must apply to the Jews and their loyalty to the State of Israel. While the former is a case of religious loyalty outside the US, the latter is clearly a political loyalty to a foreign state, i.e. Israel. While Catholic loyalty was questioned and viewed with deep suspicion for a long time, questioning American Jewish loyalty to the State of Israel seems to be unthinkable, and is indeed viewed as one of the high markers of ‘antisemitism’ according to the definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This seems not only to be dubious, but clearly malfeasant.
Notes:
[1] It is good to remember that Moshe Dayan was himself a member of the Haganah mentioned earlier as one of the terrorist organisations. He was trained in guerilla warfare by the British to counter Arabs who were fighting against British control of Palestine. In 1939, Britain finally outlawed Haganah and Dayan was imprisoned for two years. Upon his release, however, he fought alongside the British army against the Vichy French control of Syria and Lebanon. He remained active in Haganah right up until 1948, cf. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/moshe-dayan.
(To be continued)
The writer is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Justice and Christian Community (Emeritus), Director of Islamic Studies (Emeritus) Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota and the Desmond Tutu Professor of Ecumenical Theology and Social Transformation in Africa (Emeritus), University of Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.