Palestinian Rights and Accusations of Apartheid
Palestinian scholars and political activists including Samer Libdeh and Mudar Zahran have described the political system of Jordan as anti-Palestinian apartheid. According to Libdeh, the royal policy of "ethnic cohesion" amounts to discrimination against the Palestinians, who comprise the majority of Jordanian subjects. In a more scholarly article, Zahran details what he calls the "apartheid policies" by which positions in the ranks and, especially, in the officer corps of the army and most jobs in the civil service are filled by Bedouin despite the fact that Palestinians are in the majority, and census returns and election districts are rigged so that Palestinians are underrepresented in Parliament.
Palestinians are underrepresented in parliament and senior positions in the government and the military, as well as in admission to public universities. They have limited access to university scholarships. Many observers believe the electoral system is intended to reduce the representation of areas heavily populated by citizens of Palestinian origin.
There were three groups of Palestinians residing in Jordan, many of whom face some discrimination. Those who migrated to the country and the Jordan-controlled West Bank after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, received full citizenship, as did those who migrated to the country after the 1967 war and hold no residency entitlement in the West Bank. Those still residing in the West Bank after 1967 were not eligible to claim full citizenship. These individuals have access to some government services, but pay non-citizen rates at hospitals, educational institutions, and training centers. Refugees who fled Gaza after 1967 are not entitled to citizenship. These persons have no access to government services and are almost completely dependent on the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The government reports that there were approximately 165,000 Palestinian refugees, mostly of Gazan origin, who do not qualify for citizenship.
A Human Rights Watch report claims that more than 2,700 Jordanians of Palestinian origin have had their citizenship revoked starting in 2004. The government maintains this policy is in line with its efforts to implement its disengagement from its former claims to the West Bank.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Jordan
Famous quotes containing the words palestinian, rights and/or accusations:
“I have told my husband that if he denies women equality, I will be in the vanguard of women on the streets, protesting outside his office in the new Palestinian state.”
—Suha Tawil (b. 1963)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)