‘Radical pragmatism’ and the Jordanian option

[rayofreason]

Give PA to Jordan? Who'd of thunk it?

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/06/radical_pragmatism_and_the_jordanian_option/

[LeftishBrit]

1. As with some other simplistic 'single-state' solutions, there seem to be two problems with this one;

(1) The Palestinians don't want it.

(2) The Jordanians don't want it.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

2. Wasn't this idea discarded in the 80s?nt

[Phx_Dem]

3. I think the idea was discarded in 1970. nt

[Shaktimaan]

4. Of course it was.

Right around the time that Jordan expelled 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Jordan, stripping them of their citizenship, leaving them stateless, right? And you refer to that as a "rejected idea." Cute.

If Israel did something similar, do you think you'd be using that same language? Or would the terms "illegal", "immoral", "disgusting", "racist", "apartheid", "banthustan" and even maybe "the reason why Palestinian militants are forced to still resist Israel today... they are merely fighting for their human-right to regain their original Israeli citizenship!"

Seriously, can you imagine the uproar (as there should be) if Israel expelled a million Palestinians? (Along with their land, of course.) Then Israel could issue a statement that their citizenship was considered and then "chose to reject the idea." There would be an official UN committee for them and they would be given official refugee status for the rest of their living bloodline.

On that note, is it funny to you at all that most of those Palestinians who were citizens of Jordan were still holding official UNRWA refugee status? Or that even now they are considered refugees from Israel, not from Jordan? Why is that, anyway?

[Violet_Crumble]

5. It's a bit hard to be all outraged about something that never happened...

Right around the time that Jordan expelled 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Jordan, stripping them of their citizenship, leaving them stateless, right?

Considering the population of Jordan in the late 1980's was only around 3 million, if yr claim was true then there'd be a cause for outrage about any country that'd expel half its population. It'd be one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the twentieth century and we'd be reading about it in history books. But it didn't happen. There was no expulsion of 1.5 million Jordanian citizens from Jordan....

[oberliner]

6. Black September?

How would you define/describe/label the events that took place in Jordan during September of 1970, sometimes referred to in history books as Black September?

[LeftishBrit]

8. As a major crime of ethnic cleansing...

I think Violet's point was that the number was fewer than one and a half million. This is probably indeed the case, given the current demographics of Jordan and Lebanon (where most of the expelled Palestinians ended up); but it's been proving remarkably difficult for me to find the exact number - if you have it, I'd be grateful.

Regardless of the exact number, it was a very nasty action.

[Violet_Crumble]

26. Didn't that have something to do with a few planes being hijacked?

Yeah, I remember now. It was a failed coup, and the hijackings were pretty much the final straw after the PLO had set up a state within a state, controlled parts of Jordan including Amman, and there'd been one or two assassination attempts on the King. The PLFP hijacked four planes, three of them landing in Jordan. They blew up the planes and declared that part of Jordan a liberated area, and it was on for young and old after that, what with the threats to Jordanian sovereignty and all. Syria invaded Jordan but Jordan and outside pressure (the US put a fleet off the coast of Israel and the Israeli airforce was doing reconnasance flights over the Syrian forces) turned them back. Fighting between Jordan and the guerrilas claimed over 3,000 lives, though there doesn't seem to be an exact number killed, and it's safe to assume that a lot of civilians (both Jordanian and Palestinians) were killed. The PLO were expelled from Jordan. I don't know how many were expelled, nor how many non-combatants were caught up in that, but even if everyone driven from Jordan was a non-combatant the numbers would be nowhere even remotely close to the 1.5 million Shakti claimed...

Now I'm interested to know how you'd define/describe/label those events. Any different than how I did?

[LeftishBrit]

7. I have been having a lot of trouble finding out how many...

the sources tend to say 'thousands', but not to be more precise than that. Perhaps it's not actually known precisely?

Most of the Palestinians who were expelled from Jordan ended up in Lebanon. There are currently about 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in total; so the number expelled from Jordan must be significantly smaller than that.

Regardless of the exact number (and I would like to know the exact number, if anyone here has it), it was indeed an inhuman act.

[Vegasaurus]

9. And had Israel perpetrated that act

we would never hear the end of it.

The fact is that the Arab countries have treated the Palestinians far, far worse than Israel ever could.

They are denied the most basic rights in Lebanon, and the Arab world keeps the Palestininans in perpetual victim, refugee status, because it suits their political agenda.

It is high time people begin to demand that the Arab countries stop mistreating the Palestinians, offer them citizenship, and stop using them as pawns.

[Shaktimaan]

10. Sure there was.

In 1988 Jordan severed its ties to the West Bank, ceding it to the PLO. More importantly, it took Jordanian citizenship away from all of its citizens of Palestinian origin who were living there... 1.5 million people. It also dissolved its cabinet, which was made up of many representatives from the West Bank, and stopped paying salaries to 20,000 Jordanian civil servants who lived there.

I'm surprised to hear that you didn't know about this event, V. It certainly happened and you can read about it in most history books. Maybe not in your books, but that hardly means that it never occurred. In 1988, 1.5 million Jordanian citizens had their citizenship and all of its benefits stripped from them. Merely look at the Palestinian population of the west bank today if you still disagree with the numbers. Aside from the newly born, all of those people were at one time citizens of Jordan.

How did you not know about this?

In 1988 a royal speech announced the administrative severance between Jordan and the
West Bank. This rendered one and a half million Palestinians with Jordanian passports
(citizens of Jordan) Palestinian nationals. The royal speech, delivered by King Hussein on
the evening of 31 July 1988, declared: ‘Today, we respond to the wish of the PLO, the
sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and to the Arab orientation
to affirm the Palestinian identity in all its aspects ... It has to be understood in
all clarity, and without any ambiguity or equivocation, that our measures regarding the
West Bank concern only the occupied Palestinian land and its people. They naturally do
not relate in any way to the Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origins in the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan. They all have the full rights of citizenship and all its obligations, the
same as any other citizen irrespective of his origin’ (Kassim 1987).

Thus, all those living in the West Bank became categorized as ‘Palestinians’. In this case
‘Palestinians’ signified people residing in the Occupied Territories and had no legal
status. Though the king’s speech contained administrative directives which were not
constitutional, they nonetheless created further anxieties and uncertainties for the
Palestinians (Shiblak 1996).

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:cr5ULQWguL8J:www.forcedmigration.org/guides/fmo025/fmo025.pdf+jordan+palestinian+1988&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[bemildred]

11. You play with words.

What you describe is not expulsion, and the result is not a people with no legal status.

[Vegasaurus]

12. What legal status did they have?

They were made stateless and they remain stateless.

[bemildred]

13. "Stateless" does not equal "no legal status".

They are still persons with legal and human rights, and government agencies of various sorts have responsibilities for them and to them, including the Israeli government as an occupying power, as the King points out. And as I said, they were not expelled. Palestinians (some) were expelled from Israel, they were not expelled from Jordan. It is true Jordan kicked Arafat and his minions out.

[Shaktimaan]

16. Who said they had no legal status?

The article I quoted said that the term "Palestinians" had no legal status, meaning that it did not represent the people of a recognized state, thus the term "Palestinian" lacked any real meaning or concrete benefit. It was the term, not the people that lacked legal status.

If you have a problem with the term "expelled" then don't use it. I wasn't trying to be deceptive in any way, I thought I was clear in my post that the Jordanians/Palestinians in question did not lose their land (which Jordan also abandoned any claim to.) Regardless, Jordan took away their citizenship without their consent, leaving them without any legally recognized state, which as far as I know is illegal.

My original point was to imagine what the reaction would have been if Israel has ever done something similar, cutting free from Israel areas that are heavily populated by Arab-Israelis. That and to question why these Palestinians are still considered to be refugees. Most of the time refugee status ends once they become citizens of another state, as these people did. If they are refugees from any state now it would be Jordan, not Israel.

(BTW, expelled does apply to this situation. They don't have to be physically ejected from land to be expelled from Jordan via losing their citizenship. One of "expels" common definitions is "to take away rights or privileges of membership." Again, I wasn't playing fast or loose with words, nor did I intend to trick anyone. I thought everyone would know what I was referring to.)

[bemildred]

17. Post #10:

"In this case ‘Palestinians’ signified people residing in the Occupied Territories and had no legal status."

[bemildred]

18. Like I said, you are playing with words. nt

[bemildred]

19. The fellow quoted in Post #10 largely pulls his argument out of his ass too.

It is simpler and more correct to assume that "palestinians" means what it usually does, rather than "members of the non-existent Palestinian national state", but that does not fit his purpose.
But that is another subject.

[bemildred]

20. How does a word have "no legal status" anyway?

Are there legal and illegal words? Are Palestinians not allowed to call themselves that until a Palestinian state is established? Were Jews not allowed to call themselves Jews while the Jewish state did not exist? Does that sentence mean anything at all? As near as I can tell, it does not.

[LeftishBrit]

22. They're allowed to call themselves what they want...

but they aren't citizens of any particular state (where they were previously citizens of Jordan). This reduces their formal rights and status.

No one has treated the Palestinians well. Israel certainly hasn't - but neither has Jordan. Frankly, some of the arguments here, about why Jordan hasn't really done anything that bad, remind me strongly of arguments used by RW defenders of Israel to excuse the Occupation and other harsh acts toward Palestinians. It's not OK from Israel - and it's not OK from Arab states either.

[notfullofit]

24. Let's face it,

everybody has treated the Palestinian people like shit.
Nobody wants them but everybody uses them in one way or another.

[bemildred]

25. Well is it the word or the people that have no "legal status"?

If what is meant is that the people are stateless, that's what one ought to say. Even there, what one means is that the people become citizens of PLO, which is not a state. If what one means is that the King's reference to them as Palestinians does not mean they have a state, then one ought to say that, although there is really no reason why one would think that in the first place. The usage given conflates the two.

[bemildred]

21. "Jordan" is not, BTW, something you are a "member" of.

Expulsion from a state or territory is distinct in meaning and usage from expulsion from a school or club. That is why the dictionary has two entries for the two usages. One ought not conflate the two in the way that you have. In particular, expulsion from a state or territory does include the meaning of physical removal outside of the territorial boundaries.

[bemildred]

14. The problem is that if you fail to treat the meaning and usage of words

with some minimum level of respect, soon you find that you cannot think at all. All you are capable of is repeating meaningless words and phrases as emotional weapons. A fruitless and unappetizing activity that will only ruin your day.

[bemildred]

15. The use of phrases like "radical pragmatism" is a good indicator of the problem.

When you think that terms like "radical pragmatism" refer to something meaningful, you are in a state where anything at all can be said to make "sense", and thus where you have no ability to discriminate, i.e. you cannot think at all. You are just a series of emotional states and reactions being manipulated by meaningless words. "Pragmatism" implies willing to negotiate and compromise and "work things out". "Radicalism" implies inflexible and extreme, the opposite of "pragmatism". Hence "radical pragmatism" lets you have it both ways without meaning anything particular at all. This is why politicians love oxymorons, they provide emotional warm-puppy feelings without meaning anything whatsoever, thus avoiding any later political accountability for what was said.

[LeftishBrit]

23. I agree on that one...

it sounds a bit too much like something that Blair might say. Very sound-byte-y.

[Violet_Crumble]

27. Ceding a claim of sovereignty is NOT expelling 1.5 million from Jordan...

Of course I know that Jordan ceded its claim over the West Bank in 1988. That'd be why I've mentioned it in the past. The issue here is that I've never before seen anyone try to claim that ceding a claim over territory is a mass expulsion of people. Probably that's because most people know that expulsions involve the physical forced movement of people, usually over a border. So, yr trying to say that Jordan expelled people from Jordan who weren't even living in Jordan, and who were not moved from where they were living to anywhere else. That's not expulsion...

Also, when Jordan ceded its claim to the West Bank, all Palestinians living in Jordan continued to be Jordanian citizens. Palestinians in the West Bank were (maybe still are) issued Jordanian passports for travel purposes, but are not Jordanian citizens.

You do realise that Jordan's annexation of the West Bank was every bit as illegal under international law as Israel's occupation is, right? It's just that yr coming across like you think Jordan doing the right thing and renouncing its claim was a terrible thing for it to do...