Another Tack: (Trans) Jordan is Palestine

Sarah Honig
JPost
07 August 09

If anyone can lay claim to consummate mastery of the thriving art of history-forging, it's the Jordanians. Their entire state, nationhood and very identity are counterfeit. Had the international community not been sympathetically predisposed to lap up the lie, Jordan obviously couldn't pull it off. Its wholesale fabrication hinges on a world that contentedly collaborates in hoodwinking itself.

So deceit blithely marches on.

Its latest installment is the artificially concocted kingdom's decision to strip untold numbers of Palestinians of Jordanian citizenship. Those who were Jordanian for decades suddenly aren't. It's like the infamous Soviet encyclopedias' loose-leaf pages, which were removed and replaced with the latest authoritative versions of what once was.

The past is ever-malleable in the service of current agendas.

According to Jordanian Interior Minister Nayef al-Kadi, the aim is to preempt the possibility of anyone resurrecting reminders that Jordan is part and parcel of what's called Palestine. It's indeed the largest chunk thereof. That being the case, Palestinians - whether born east or west of the Jordan River - are Jordan's natural citizens (regardless of whatever name it or they adopt). Kadi, under his monarch's orders, is now out to underscore the falsehood that "Jordan is not Palestine just as Palestine is not Jordan."

Thereby no future peace deal could rubber-stamp Jordanian domicile for so-called Palestinians. Instead they'd be driven to overrun Israel and turn it into the third Arab state in the original jurisdiction of the post-World War I British Mandate over Palestine.

Otherwise Jordan would forfeit all proceeds from the gargantuan deception it labored so hard to market to a world eager to be deceived - i.e., the synthetic Jordanian and Palestinian ethnicities, along with the notion that these recent-vintage nationalities are dissimilar from each other and deserve self-determination in separate homelands: Jordan and Palestine.

This cock-and-bull contention begat the image of the stateless Palestinians - aggrieved indigenous inhabitants striving desperately to throw off the yoke of foreign (Jewish) occupation.

Until 1948 Palestine was synonymous with the Hebrew Eretz Yisrael. The "Palestinian" epithet was largely reserved for Jews and used by them. Local Arabs preferred allegiance to Greater Syria or Iraq.

Golda Meir used to quip: "I am a Palestinian, but don't like the name. Palestine is a name the Romans gave Eretz Yisrael with the express purpose of infuriating defeated Jews... Why should we use a spiteful name meant to humiliate us?... Christendom inherited the name from Rome and the British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine. Local Arabs picked it up as their nation's supposed ancient name, though they couldn't even pronounce it correctly, and turned it into Filastin, a fictional entity."
(Full article)
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