Abstract
According to official figures, Palestinian-origin Jordanians account for about 43% of the population. The majority hold Jordanian citizenship which was given to all those residing in Jordan after Al-Nakba; the Palestinian “Catastrophe” of 1948 when Israel was founded on the land of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were dispossessed from their homes.
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Notes
- 1.
The percentage was mentioned during a press conference by the then Prime Minister Ali-Abu al-Ragheb, quoted in al-Ra’i, 3rd September 2002, taken from El-Abed et al. (2014). In some literature and policy reports (without any referencing), it is claimed to be 60% of the Jordanian population.
- 2.
As per the agreement between King Abdullah I of Jordan and Palestinian leaders in Dec. 1948 which expanded the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to include the West Bank and the East Bank of River Jordan.
- 3.
A substantial labour force had exerted sizeable influence in the economic life of Palestine in the form of the Palestinian Arab Workers Society, founded in 1925 (Brand 1988, p. 154).
- 4.
Since Jericho conference late 1948.
- 5.
Gaza strip was under the administrative and military rule of Egypt since 1948. People in Gaza (locals and refugees) held Egyptian travel documents when they arrived in Jordan. These were eventually replaced with provisional Jordanian travel documents. They were never accorded the Jordanian citizenship.
- 6.
About 70,000 of the Palestinian refugees were from Gaza.
- 7.
Who, in the year 2000, were given a national identity number to differentiate between the travel documents not connoting citizenship and rights and the Jordanian passport connoting citizenship and Jordanian nationality.
- 8.
Oral Communication 2019, September.
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El-Abed, O. (2021). The Invisible Citizens of Jordan. In: Maggiolini, P., Ouahes, I. (eds) Minorities and State-Building in the Middle East. Minorities in West Asia and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54399-0_5
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