Hypocrisy?

King Abdullah II of Jordan was off to Russia this week. But before he left, His Majesty had some important words for members of parliament and the cabinet. According to the AP, as reported in Ha’aretz, the monarch declared that the issue of Palestinian refugees will not be settled “at the expense of Jordan”. (Read the report here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/613469.html.) According to the article,

“Jordan already hosts 1.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants displaced in two wars with Israel since 1948. The government argues that accepting more refugees may disturb this country's fragile economy and its demographic balance.” [emphasis added]

As with Lebanon, Jordan has expressed its opposition to settling Palestinian refugees on the grounds that doing so would disturb a fragile “demographic balance”. In Lebanon, this means an increase in the number of Sunni Muslims. In Jordan, it means not rocking the ethnic boat where Palestinians already outnumber the Bedouins who form the core of Hashemite support.

This is all very interesting. Let Israel express opposition to accepting a wholesale “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their offspring because of its effect on the Jewish nature of the state, and the world cries “racism” and “theocracy”. Yet not a word of criticism is heard about Jordanian expressions of the need for ethnic balance, or Lebanese ecumenical concerns.

HM King Abdullah II would do well to remember when expressing his concerns about delicate “ethnic balances” that his kingdom was carved out of the proposed Palestine Mandate, and that his mother, Princess Muna (formerly Antoinette Gardiner), was the daughter of a British innkeeper. Further, at about the same time that his great-grandfather and namesake was traveling the 800 miles from his native Mecca to impose his kingdom in Amman, the parents and grandparents of Ariel Sharon were on their 1,000 mile journey from Azerbaijan – also a former Ottoman province – to Palestine. There is, however, one thing that the monarch doesn’t have to worry about. Jordan is legally judenrein, it being illegal for a Jew to be granted citizenship in the Hashemite Kingdom.

All in all it seems that the concept of “indigenous” is highly relative in the Middle East. It has one meaning for Arabs and Muslims and, apparently, quite a different meaning when it comes to Israelis and Jews. And in the Hashemite case, it all depends on which side of the river you happen to be standing.