Tthe Hashemites have done more for the Palestinian Arabs than any other Arab leader or Arab country

After all they have managed to retain 78% of Palestine as an exclusively Palestinian Arab domain for the last 91 years. They have done this at great risk and personal danger to themselves. They should in my view retain power in an expanded Jordan but in the end it is the will of the people who will determine the outcome.

The Palestinian Arabs have made some very bad choices in those 91 years. I hope they would not fall into the same trap again. Reunification of the two banks of the Jordan River under Hashemite rule as existed between 1950-1967 – so far as circumstances on the ground now permit – will in large part lead to a return to the status quo as existed at the outbreak of the Six Day War. What happens after that is outside anyone’s control.

The Hashemites have extended refuge and citizenship to millions of Palestinian Arabs from the remaining 22% of Palestine and from Kuwait when 300000 were tossed out. Compare Jordan’s treatment of these emigrees to the treatment of their fellow Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon and Syria.

No doubt there is discrimination and an attempt to strip some citizenship rights. Again compare this to what is happening in other Arab countries

Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh is spot on when he states:

“… the Jordanian and Palestinian peoples are the two most homogeneous and closest Arab peoples, given their ethnic, cultural and religious commonality. We are actually one people, as Arab clans on both sides of the River Jordan have one common ancestry.

This indisputable fact should debunk all the myths about any proclaimed intrinsic distinctiveness, let alone contradictions, between Jordanians and Palestinians.

It should also demolish all parochial ideologies such as territorial nationalism, namely exaggerated Palestinian and Jordanian nationalisms, ideologies that grow out of fanatical tribalism which Islam condemns as acts of Jahilyya or ignorance.”

Amayreh further states:

“Palestinians should welcome and encourage any Jordanian orientation to cancel or reconsider, even if gradually, the unwise Jordanian decision of 1989 to dismantle the administrative and legal ties with the West Bank. The Re-institution of these ties should strengthen the Palestinians’ ability to survive and thwart Zionist efforts to empty our homeland of its real people.

In the final analysis, the people of Jordan and the People of Palestine can’t and will not have separate fates. According to the Islamic prophecy, the liberation of Palestine from the hands of Zionist Jews, will come from the east, namely from Jordan.

Our fate, our kismet is that we are one people. We must not escape this ineluctable fate.”

An attempt to overthrow the Hashemites in 1970 was a disaster.

Trying to repeat that failed attempt in the next 12 months could be even more disastrous.