Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0204/02045.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 29KB | 461 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02045}
$Pretitle{234}
$Title{Jordan
Chapter 2C.   The Palestinians}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{women
family
social
honor
urban
families
educated
life
palestinian
palestinians}
$Date{1979}
$Log{}
Country:     Jordan
Book:        Jordan, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1979

Chapter 2C.   The Palestinians

     The term Palestinian usually refers to those who left or fled Palestine
after the mid-1940s, but Palestinians had entered the area as individuals,
families, or clusters of families in preceding centuries. Many of these were
so thoroughly integrated with the local society as to be indistinguishable
from their neighbors. The Majalis, for more than a century the leading group
in the Al Karak area, came originally from Hebron in what in 1979 remained
Israeli-occupied Territory. For political and social purposes, they and others
like them are considered Jordanians. Other Hebronis in the same area, who came
as merchants well before 1948, remained to a considerable degree outsiders,
for the most part taking their spouses from the Hebron area and maintaining
economic and other ties there. They and Palestinians like them were for
practical purposes Jordanians, however, having cast their economic and
political lot with that country.

     The same may hold for those like the Ghazawis (people from the Gaza
Strip), who came to the Al Karak area after 1948. Their integration may be a
little slower, in part because of the bitter circumstances affecting their
departure from Palestine, in part because the older generation remembers life
in Gaza. In their case and that of the Hebronis, however, gradual changes in
Karaki society itself, particularly that pertaining to the lessening
significance of a tribal system that has inhibited the integration of
outsiders of any kind, should lead to their incorporation into the local
community.

     Al Karak is not, however, representative of the impact of the
Palestinians on East Bank society and culture. The great bulk of the refugees
inside and outside of refugee camps live in Amman and areas to the north,
although there was an emergency camp at Talbiah south of Amman but
substantially north of Al Karak. In mid-1978 UNRWA estimated that of the well
over 1 million Palestinians in the East Bank, half were registered as
refugees; of that half, one-third actually resided in camps. Clearly most of
those registered as refugees lived outside the camps, and a good deal has been
written of their poverty as well as that of camp residents. There is no doubt
that many noncamp refugees live on the fringes of the economy in urban centers
and that they and those living in the camps have produced what appeared in
1979 to be an increasing number of persons involved in crime and juvenile
delinquency. It has been suggested that many of those in the camps have not
attempted to seek legitimate work because to do so requires a good conduct
certificate from a government agency, and they fear that the agency may have
information on their earlier antiregime activities, making them subject to
arrest.

     A substantial number of Palestinians possessed on arrival the kind of
education and entrepreneurial capacity that enabled them to achieve
substantial economic status. A few may have come from Palestine with some of
their wealth. Some became large landowners or businessmen; others
professionals or technicians. Many work for the government, often in posts
requiring substantial training. There are indications that some extended
families included persons in several of these categories. Many Palestinians,
however, were simply merchants on a small or medium scale, craftsmen or
skilled workers, or farmers. The heavy emphasis in the press and other reports
on the importance of highly educated Palestinians to Jordan's economic,
administrative, and technical functioning, on the difficult position of camp
refugees, and on the political militants has obscured the economic, social,
and political situation of substantial numbers of Palestinians that do not
fall into these categories. In late 1979 there were no published reports of
a systematic study of this range of subject matter.

     Whatever the social and economic situations of Palestinians were in the
late 1970s, the nature of their integration into the society, even one
substantially modified by their presence, depends on international political
developments with respect to a Palestinian political entity on the one hand
and the attitudes and interests of the Palestinians in the East Bank on the
other. Financial Times correspondent Rami G. Khouri, in a 1978 article, refers
to one estimate of Palestinian sentiments. Taking the population as 2 million
and those of Palestinian origin as 1.2 million, he states that there are "as
many as 500,000 people . . . who say they are Palestinian nationals owing
allegiance to a Palestinian state and displaying a cohesive Palestinian
national sentiment distinct from a Jordanian national sentiment." Khouri does
not, however, provide information on the educational, social, and economic
characteristics of those sharing that sentiment. It may, perhaps, be expected
that most of the refugees in camps (estimated at more than 220,000 in 1978)
would fall into this category. But these are precisely those who lost a great
deal in their flight and have gained least in Jordan. If nearly half of those
exhibiting clear Palestinian national sentiment were camp refugees, the others
may range over the entire socioeconomic scale, but that is not certain. The
sentiments and material interests of those 700,000 Palestinians outside the
category noted by Khouri were also not clear. Some certainly were so well
established in Jordan that a move elsewhere would be unlikely, especially if
the crowdedness of a Palestinian state in its likely site, the West Bank,
were taken into consideration. There is also the possibility that particular
Palestinian families, even if they shared the same sentiments on the issues,
would arrange to have a part of the family go to a Palestinian homeland while
others remained in Jordan. Palestinian families have shown the capacity to
maintain their connectedness despite separation, if that separation is seen
to be in the interests of the family as a whole.

The City

     From ancient times society in the Middle East was characterized by
interaction of the nomads and peasants with the urban centers. The region's
highest achievements in cultural, political, economic, and intellectual life
took place in the vibrant cosmopolitan centers. The claims of Arab-Islamic
culture to status as one of the world's major civilizations rests largely on
products of city populations. In addition city dwellers have traditionally
been both initiators and transmitters of social change.

     Except for Jerusalem, however, which the Israelis have held since 1967,
no major urban center existed in Jordanian territory until the late 1940s.
East Bank towns served as local markets and administrative centers rather than
centers of high culture; the territory formed the hinterland of cities outside
it. Truncated by external political considerations rather than by internal
social or cultural realities, the East Bank consequently lacks the kind of
long-established metropolis that has for centuries dominated other parts of
the Middle East.

     Amman, the major city of the East Bank, has ancient roots but as a
modern city is scarcely more than a generation old; it passed its first
decades as a provincial trading center and garrison on the margin of the
desert. In 1943 Amman had only 30,000 inhabitants. Its position as a capital
of the new kingdom impelled it to grow in thirty-five years into a booming,
overcrowded metropolitan center (see Population, this ch.). As a result it
lacks both the old quarters characteristic of most Middle Eastern cities and
an established urban population with a unified cultural outl