Jordanian Parliament - Water, Energy, and Trade? Who Needs Those?

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
09 May '13..

As Jonathan noted yesterday, it’s hard to blame the lack of Mideast peace on Israel’s “occupation of Arab lands” in 1967 when peace was singularly lacking even before 1967. But this theory rests on a more fundamental fallacy: that all human beings basically want the same things – peace and a good life – and therefore, what Westerners consider a reasonable compromise should satisfy Middle Easterners as well. To understand just how false this is, consider Wednesday’s unanimous vote by the lower house of Jordan’s parliament to expel the Israeli ambassador.

On Tuesday, a group of Jews visited Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. They didn’t engage in “provocations” such as praying or reciting Psalms, but to many Arabs, the very presence of Jews at the site to which Jews have prayed for 3,000 years is a provocation. Palestinians therefore began hurling rocks and chairs at them, causing the police to intervene. And according to the Jordanian parliament, this sequence of events constituted “criminal attacks by the settlers” – i.e. Jews.

That alone is troubling enough. But parliament’s decision to respond by voting to expel the ambassador is even more troubling given how much Jordan would lose by ending its peace with Israel.

First, under the peace treaty, Israel provides Jordan with tens of millions of cubic meters of water each year. Recently, it even increased this amount to help Jordan cope with its flood of Syrian refugees. Scrapping the treaty would thus greatly exacerbate Jordan’s already severe water shortage.

An Interview with an Arab Dissident

Yoel Meltzer
American Thinker
13 March '11
H/T Danny Hershtal


http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/an_interview_with_an_arab_diss.html

Mudar Zahran is a Palestinian Jordanian who fled Jordan and currently resides in England. A former political insider, he is very critical of the Hashemite regime in Jordan, both vis-à-vis its treatment of its majority Palestinian population and in its belligerent attitude towards Israel. He is convinced that the Hashemites are an impediment to a resolution of the Palestinian issue and hence to regional security.

Zahran's English articles have been published by the Hudson Institute and the Jerusalem Post.

The following interview reveals a picture of Jordan unknown to most outsiders. Equally important, the ideas and suggestions of Zahran provide some hope for the future of the troubled region.

YM: To most outsiders Jordan is considered somewhat modern and pro-western. Is this assessment true?

MZ: Not at all, Jordan is a dictatorship whose rulers have always posed as modernizers while they are indeed dictators. Jordan is not a peace-loving regime either.

King Hussein engaged in all wars against Israel and only gave up when he knew he could not beat Israel at war. Today his son exhibits serious hostility against Israel and shows strong closeness towards Hamas. For some reason all this goes under the media radar screen....not sure why.

YM: When you say "dictatorship" do you mean like Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Syria during the time of Hafez al-Assad?

MZ: Yes, only with a much lower level of brutality. While those two used killing and imprisonment whenever they could, the Hashemites kill and imprison only when they need to. Meanwhile the king is a sole ruler. You can go to jail for three years for merely criticizing the state or the king and the parliament is a joke. One man rules, only this man speaks good English and appears on daily television shows.

YM: Is there freedom of expression in either the media or in the academic world?

MZ: Not at all. For example, according to Human Rights Watch (in Arabic) a Jordanian professor faced a court martial for asking her students to remove the king's photo from the classroom while Reporters Without Borders has labeled Jordan as a country without real freedom.

However it's more complex. For example most Bedouins can criticize anything as long as they do not directly bad-mouth the king while a Palestinian would think twice before asking a policeman for directions. So just like in Syria a small minority is ruling an oppressed majority. In this case the majority Palestinians do not have any form of freedom and would not even dare go to the police station to file a report if harassed or abused by a Jordanian.

YM: Is there a difference between the father, King Hussein, and his son, King Abdullah? Was the father more liberal and open than the son?

MZ: The father was way more tolerant than the son and he never bothered the Palestinian population. The son however is totally different. Unlike his father, he has developed a strong lobby in Washington D.C. which allows him to get away with a lot. He is very anti-Israel and constantly speaks against Israel in the government controlled media and he is playing with the basic rights of his Palestinian citizens.

YM: Is his anti-Israel behavior any different than other Arab rulers? Even in Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, there was/is much anti-Semitism. Thus for an Arab ruler to be anti-Israel or perhaps anti-Semitic does not seem so strange.

MZ: Anti-Semitism is the scapegoat for Arab dictators; everything that goes wrong in their countries is a "Zionist plot". Yet in the case of Jordan, the King has been de-naturalizing his Palestinian majority, taking away passports and citizenship from the Palestinians and ordering them to "go home to Palestine". The king's old guards, who hate Israel, claim this is a method to "turn the demographic bomb on Israel". At the same time Jordan uses this demographic threat as a way to request more aid money in the name of "hosting" the Palestinians. In other words Jordan thinks it can blackmail both Israel and the US by playing with the Palestinians who comprise the vast majority of the Jordanian population. This is unacceptable and this is political terrorism.

Also the King does a good job demonizing Israel. He called it a state like North Korea in the New York Times and he went to the UN, amid the Palestinian Israeli talks six months ago, and openly said that unless Israel stops settlements "there will be war". This of course puts the pressure on Abbas since if he caves in on the settlement demand he will look like a traitor. Jordan has a done a great deal in complicating the peace process and it has always played one card, the demographic card.

Bye-bye Jordan

The Muqata
15 January '10

Posted before Shabbat

The Muqata blog would like to say good-bye to all our readers in Jordan.

As you Jordanian readers know The Jordanian government has ruled that electronic communication like websites will be subject to the country's Press and Publications Law.

Presumably that means that websites such as ours that advocates that Jordan, with it's overwhelming Palestinian majority is a de facto Palestinian state under illegal Occupation by the Hashemite government, will not be taken too well by the authorities over there and will result in the Muqata blog being censored.

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