On September 23, King Abdullah of Jordan addressed the UN General Assembly. He devoted much of his speech to lambasting Israel. He maintained that what he called “one of the world’s longest-running occupations” broke international law, and that the world had ignored it for decades.
Of course he had nothing to say about the Jordanian monarchy’s unhappy relationship with the Palestinians, with its own history of violence, repression, and unresolved grievance, nor of the several charges of flouting international law that Jordan has been accused of over the years.
In the 1948-49 war, for example, Jordan’s Arab Legion took control of the West Bank. On April 24, 1950, the Jordanian parliament approved its annexation, declaring “complete unity between the two banks of the Jordan” in a single Hashemite kingdom ruled by King Abdullah’s great-grandfather, Abdullah I. Arabs resident in the West Bank became Jordanian citizens.
The Arab League refused to recognize Jordan’s annexation. So did the rest of the world, with the sole exception of Britain and, it has been suggested (though details remain unclear), Pakistan.
The UN characterized Jordan’s annexation as lacking international legal validity. International law does not recognize the acquisition of territory through force as a lawful basis for acquiring sovereignty.
If Jordan flouted international law when it annexed the West Bank, it compounded its disregard for the legal niceties when it reversed its decision.
Until July 31, 1988, most Arabs living in the West Bank were, as a matter of Jordanian law and practice, Jordanian citizens. On that day, King Hussein, Abdullah’s father, announced that Jordan was ending its legal and administrative relationship with the territory effective immediately.
Loss of Jordanian nationality
Under the disengagement regulations, some one million Arabs resident in the West Bank were suddenly stripped of their Jordanian citizenship. All at once, they were no longer Jordanian.
Human Rights Watch describes them as becoming stateless Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Over time, their Jordanian passports were replaced with temporary Jordanian travel documents that did not confer citizenship.
Loss of nationality had serious legal consequences. They had no right of residence in Jordan. Non-citizens could not vote or stand for office. They were excluded from state employment and faced serious obstacles in accessing work, education, health care, and other services.
International human rights law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of nationality. Article 15(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.”
The fact that Jordan’s 1988 disengagement stripped a defined population of its existing nationality without an individualized process and without a replacement nationality makes the charge against Jordan of arbitrary illegality a powerful one.
In his speech to the UN, Abdullah called on world opinion to denounce Israel for Palestinian deaths. He might also have acknowledged that Yasser Arafat once accused King Hussein, his father, of killing 25,000 Palestinians – a figure generally believed to have been wildly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
The episode is usually called Black September, although it lasted from September 1970 until the following July, and the death toll remains disputed. The commonly cited estimate of Palestinian deaths is in the low thousands, including both fighters and civilians. Jordanian soldiers also died.
What is not disputed is that the events of 1970-71 left a deep and bitter Palestinian-Jordanian legacy.
After the Six Day War in 1967, it was from Jordan that Palestinian fighters began mounting guerrilla operations against Israel. By 1969, Arafat was the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an umbrella body in which his Fatah movement was dominant.
The organization and its constituent groups started functioning increasingly from within Jordan. Armed groups established bases and checkpoints in and around cities and refugee camps, acting as a law unto themselves, sometimes defying the police and civil authorities.
Soon King Hussein was facing an armed Palestinian movement operating inside his kingdom and challenging the authority of the state. He decided to move against Arafat’s PLO and its armed forces, the fedayeen.
The crisis came to a head in September 1970. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a constituent body of the PLO, hijacked several international passenger aircraft.
Three aircraft were eventually taken to Dawson’s Field near Zarqa, Jordan, where passengers were removed and the aircraft blown up before the world’s television cameras – a spectacular display that humiliated the Jordanian authorities.
For Hussein, the question was no longer how to restrain the fedayeen, but who governed Jordan. On September 16, he declared martial law. The following day, the Jordanian Army opened a major offensive against Palestinian positions in Amman, Zarqa, Irbid, and elsewhere.
The operation was considerably more than a simple expulsion. For a time, it amounted to a civil war between the Jordanian state and heavily armed Palestinian organizations. The fighting was intense and involved artillery, tanks, and infantry. Jordanian forces attacked PLO positions. Palestinian fighters resisted and, in some places, effectively controlled territory.
A ceasefire hammered out in Cairo on September 27 proved totally ineffective. The Palestinian militias remained entrenched and operative within Jordan. In early 1971, Hussein resumed the campaign against them. Finally, the Jordanian Army succeeded in driving the fedayeen out of their remaining urban strongholds.
The last major encounter took place in July 1971, and organized Palestinian resistance in Jordan was effectively destroyed. Arafat and senior PLO figures fled. They escaped across the Jordanian-Syrian border and regrouped in Lebanon. Thousands of Palestinian fighters were driven out of Jordan and followed them.
It had been a bloody encounter. As well as Jordanian soldiers, thousands of Palestinians, including civilians, had been killed. The episode produced a particularly bitter Palestinian-Jordanian legacy. In 1971, a militant Palestinian group, which subsequently called itself the Black September Organization, assassinated Jordan’s prime minister Wasfi al-Tal.
None of this unhappy history dispels any moral or legal questions raised by the current situation, but it does complicate Abdullah’s posture of unqualified moral denunciation of Israel.
In short, standing at the UN podium vilifying Israel, King Abdullah might have borne in mind the adage: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
The writer, a former senior civil servant, is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com