Abstract
Despite the escalation of protests that led many demonstrators to demand the abdication of King Abdullah II and the end of Hashemite governance in the winter of 2013, the Arab Spring in Jordan has not produced the same political upheaval seen elsewhere in the Middle East. Commentators and scholars reason that this is due to the Jordanian security forces’ deftness at curbing the revolts; particularly in preventing the sustenance of cross-cutting societal alliances capable of maintaining sustained protests as seen elsewhere in the Arab world (Abu-Rish 2012).
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Notes
- 1.
According to UN estimates, as of 2019, there are over 2 million registered Palestinian refugees living in Jordan UNRWA (2019). Among them, nearly 370,000 registered Palestinian refugees are living in the 10 Palestinian refugee camps recognised by UNRWA in Jordan. The number of Palestinian refugees living in the Kingdom, however, is much higher if we consider that many Palestinians did not fall or did not want to fall into the category of “Palestinian refugee” set by the UN at the time of their displacement. For this reason, with the term “Palestinian refugees”, I am here referring to all those people that have been evicted from their lands by Israel in the context of its occupation and colonial practices.
- 2.
I have sought to transliterate phrases and terms in a way that best reflects their pronunciation among my research informants. Since the local variant of Levantine Arabic in the field is above all a spoken language, I kept to a minimum the use of diacritical marks.
- 3.
- 4.
Part of it, however, is also informed by previous and subsequent researches carried out here and in other Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan.
- 5.
See also: Farah (2000).
- 6.
It must be noted, however, that the bloody confrontation between the Palestinian guerrilla fighters and the Jordanian Army did not see the juxtaposition of two distinct groups. Not only did most Palestinian-Jordanians partake in the civil strife, but a sizable minority of Transjordanians also joined the Palestinian rebels in their fight against the monarchy (Fruchter-Ronen 2008).
- 7.
In Jordan, this discourse was expressed in terms of muhājirīn (immigrants, i.e. the Palestinians) versus anṣār (supporters, i.e. the Transjordanians). Muhājirīn and anṣār refer, respectively, to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, who fled to Medina to escape their persecutors, and the people of Medina, who welcomed the Prophet. In the Islamic tradition, the two terms signify the establishment of the first Islamic state. The reference to these two concepts of the Islamic tradition was made for the first time by King Hussein in the wake of the civil war. While the King’s intention was to invoke this distinction in order to reinforce national unity, Transjordanian nationalists reinterpreted these concepts to indicate the temporary presence of Palestinians in the Kingdom (Abu-Odeh 1999).
- 8.
As Laurie Brand summarises: ‘[T]he signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) was a kind of watershed. The prospect of a Palestinian entity put the question of who would be citizens squarely on the table. In Jordan, where the Palestinians hold citizenship, the issue of Palestinian political allegiance […] had suddenly become very real’ (Brand 1995, p. 57).
- 9.
On the reverberation of Oslo in Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan, see: Achilli (2019).
- 10.
Aqaba is a coastal city located in the south of Jordan.
- 11.
See also: Hart (2008).
- 12.
See also: Appadurai (1998).
- 13.
This belief was widespread to the extent that even Arafat was not immune to similar allegations. There were even people who told me that the leader of Palestinian resistance was a “mustarab”: literally “fake Arab”, the term was used to indicate a Zionist spy trained since the childhood to speak and behave as Palestinian.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Under King Abdullah II, the regime has drifted away from the social compact that traditionally underpinned Hashemite strategy. When Abdullah II first assumed the throne of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the state underwent substantial restructuring. The turn has been accompanied by a shift from state politics aimed at securing political loyalty through an inflated public sector and patronage to a markedly capitalist-oriented economy and agenda of privatisation. Since the beginning, this change was defined by a dramatic process of privatisation: water, telecommunication, tourism, and the state’s most vital sectors and assets were rented and sold to private companies and foreign investors. As Tariq Tell aptly puts it, ‘this coalition shuffling pitted the traditionally dominant and largely Transjordanian military-bureaucratic elite against an upstart coterie of younger, more entrepreneurial digitals – urban-based, globalised rivals with ties to capital networks in the Gulf’ (Tell 2015, p. 1). An analysis of the causes that have prompted the raise of Al-Ḥirāk goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Others have thoroughly addressed the origin of the discontent see, for example, Tell (2013). and the new geographies of inclusion and exclusion that neoliberal reforms have engendered in Jordan (Hourani et al. 2014).
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Achilli, L. (2021). The Deep Play: Ethnicity, the Hashemite Monarchy and the Arab Spring in 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_7
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