On October 7, 2023 a non-state entity called Hamas, which the U.S. government declared a terrorist organization in 1997 (followed by Canada, under Jean Chrétien, in 2002) attacked the Israeli border, or armistice line, with Gaza in the southwest of the country.
The attackers used motorcycles, boats, paragliders, and drones to overwhelm Israeli border forces. Then they engaged in an orgy of violence, beheading children and killing as many Israeli citizens as they could until the attackers were either killed or captured by late coming Israeli forces. They also took Israeli hostages back to Gaza.
Many of the Hamas terrorists, mostly young men in their twenties, were on drugs. They had no problem killing men, raping and torturing women, and massacring children as they had been brought up and indoctrinated to regard Jews as sub-human. Not surprisingly, one of the most widely translated books in the Arab world is Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (I have seen it for sale in bookstalls in Cairo).1
Nevertheless, the international left have declared that this latest attack, however Nazi-like, can be justified because, due to Israel’s “occupation,” the “Palestinian people” do not have a homeland and so, in their eyes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
But the entire premise, applied by the left in Canada and elsewhere to the Palestinian problem, is false.
For more than one hundred years there has already existed a fully Palestinian Arab Muslim potential state in the faux “Kingdom of Jordan.” In this essay I will describe its origin, nature, and potential.
Before I do so, even though it will become clear that the Palestinian people already have a fully functional national homeland in the heart of the modern Arab Middle East and which comprises much of the Biblical Land of Israel, this means little to many in the contemporary Arab world.
That is because the majority of Muslim Arabs are not really nationalists in the modern sense. Most Arabs actively or passively encourage jihad and want to return the Near East back to the first one hundred years of Islam, when Arab dynasties ruled an empire from Morocco (or indeed, some of the time, southern Spain) to Central Asia. Which dynasty is or was in charge does not really matter to jihadis, as long as Muslims are the rulers.2
One of the key elements of traditional jihad is a widespread Muslim belief that any piece of land which was once under Muslim authority, can never be allowed to revert to the authority of its original owners. Or if it does, it must be reclaimed.
And so when one reads the Hamas Charter it is clear that it is a charter for a jihad dedicated to the destruction of the world’s sole independent Jewish state, Israel.3
Theirs is a religious war, not one of national liberation, but here’s the rub: When the supporters of the jihad against Israel speak English, they usually use Western terms like “national liberation,” especially on American and Canadian campuses. And so, at least for Westerners, it is important to show that the people who have recently come to call themselves Palestinians, do actually have a selfdeclared homeland in Jordan.
The land of Israel, on both sides of the Jordan, what Christians and Westerners have referred to as “The Holy Land,” is one of the most mapped and studied areas in the entire region. This is largely because during the 19th century, Britons and to a lesser extent Europeans and Americans turned both secular and religious eyes to the land which gave birth to their religion or religions, various expressions of Christianity.
Western Christians, driven by their faith and their secular-scientific ideals, wanted to use the techniques of modern history, comparative linguistics, and archaeology to learn as much as they could as to the material and historical context of the rise of Judaism and Christianity. And so, they formed the Palestine Exploration Fund, which with Imperial Ottoman permission allowed them to map the region on both sides of the Jordan and to excavate key sites.4
By the start of the First World War these scholars and excavators clearly understood that the Jewish people had built their nation there, finalized the Torah (Old Testament) there and written the New Testament there (Jesus and his followers being committed Jews). They also realized that the Jews had been a majority on both sides of the Jordan, as a nation for more than 1700 years until the Byzantines and then the Muslim conquerors made life difficult for them in their homeland, where they were subject to religious and legal persecution.
Today’s college students do not study this history — for with the rejection of Christianity, and with it the 19th and 20th century Judeo-Christian ethic, there comes a denial of the historical and legal land rights of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. In turn there comes a delegitimization of the State of Israel which receives ugly expression through movements such as Israel Apartheid Week, which began at the University of Toronto and has now spread to many colleges and universities in both Canada and the USA.5
Nevertheless, Canada is still a largely Christian-based country with a biblical heritage and a sense of being part of the history of Christian nations, its systems of values and ethics ultimately inspired by the Old and New Testaments. 51% of Canadians still self-identify as Christians and therefore believe the Bible has something to teach us and that we are not (yet) a nation of completely ahistorical atheists and cultural relativists.
At the same time, an informed Canadian Christian’s sense of history does not stop with the end of the New Testament. They know they are part of the history of Christian nations, and should be capable of understanding that from the point of view of the Ottoman Empire and its subjects the First World War was a jihad against the West. (The Sultan in Constantinople-Istanbul publicly declared it to be so).
Let us now travel back 3000 years to a small strip of land in the Eastern Mediterranean, that is to say the Holy Land.
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The Holy Land, Terra Sancta in Latin, is a Christian phrase which refers to the places both east and west of the Jordan river, where the peoples of the Old and New Testament — that is to say, the Jewish people — lived as a majority in the land for centuries. Today this area includes the countries of Israel and Jordan.
The more than 2000-year-old phrase for the region in Hebrew is Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. The name that the Romans gave to Eretz Yisrael after Titus conquered the Jewish people on behalf of his father the Emperor Vespasian, in 70 AD, is Palestine, taken from the word Philistine whom the Romans knew had once defeated the Israelites. Archaeologists know this well. To take one example, American archaeological historian Burton MacDonald wrote East of the Jordan: Territories and Sites of the Hebrew Scriptures, published in 2000.6
My favorite part of MacDonald’s book is Appendix 9, a list of over one hundred sites which are mentioned in the Old Testament, and which demonstrate that the Jewish people often lived, fought, died, and flourished in that part of the Holy Land east of the Jordan River.
The Israelite presence east of the Jordan did not simply begin around 1000 BC and end in 500 BC. It continued throughout the Hellenistic, Maccabean (Hasmonean), and Roman periods when Jewish kings like Alexander Yannai and subject kings like Herod the Great, ruled both sides of the Jordan.
The land west and east of the Jordan river was filled with Jews and Jewish villages and the New Testament bears witness to this, illustrated by the fact that John the Baptist carried out his ministry east of the Jordan river.7
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So we must ask the question, how was it that a good chunk of the Biblical land of Israel, east of the Jordan River, an area which was extensively mapped out for the allies by British and European biblical explorers, geographers, mapmakers, and archaeologists, got hived off and given to an oft-defeated tribe of Bedouin Arabs imported from the Hejaz in southwestern Arabia during the early 1920s when my late father was three years old? Well, the answer is that we must return to the aftermath of the First World War.
The answer is wrapped up, in part, in the fact and legend of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia.
Until the end of the Great War, most of the Arabic speaking Middle East was under the authority of the Muslim Turkish Ottoman Empire. During that time the various ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire, if they were Muslim, thought of themselves as Muslim first and if Arabic speaking, Arab secondarily, if at all. Their first preoccupation was with securing for Muslims the holy sites of Mecca and Medina on the western Arabian peninsula.
Jewish communities under the Ottomans, to the north, were a separate nation in a different administrative sector, and, as Jews, second-class citizens.
The Ottoman Turks lost their empire when they fought their self-declared jihad or Holy War against the allies. The British (and this is where Col. Lawrence was involved) worked with Arab leaders to undermine Ottoman rule with the promise for some form of Arab independence.
And so, after four centuries of subservience to the Turks, the writings and activities of a small number of Western-missionary educated Christian and Muslim speakers of Arabic, longing for independence in the image of their new French and British conquerors, created Arab nationalism, a political movement that mirrored, in a distorted way, the ethnic and linguistic nationalisms which had recently transformed the landscape of Europe, weakening empires and creating a myriad of new states based on ethnicity, common territory, language, and religion.
On this basis, the British and French, working through the League of Nations, tried to reproduce this European concept of the “nation state” by artificially creating soon-to-beindependent (mandated) Arab states carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire. These included Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. They remained under French and British influence, but by the end of the Second World War they had all gained their independence.
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Among these newly-created and often fictitious states wracked by tribal rivalries there arose the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (literally “across the Jordan”), which became formally independent in 1946. The Hashemites had been the Bedouin tribal leaders befriended by the British for strategic reasons in the Hejaz during the war. Until then, what became Transjordan was legally part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, implemented on trust from the League of Nations by the British government. That mandate included the primary goal of creating a Jewish state (“National Home for the Jewish People” in Palestine.8
Part of the territory mandated as “British” Palestine by the League of Nations, then, was to be given to the Jewish people. Its territory initially included all of the Bible lands west of the Jordan river, including Judea and Samaria and much land east of the Jordan to the borders of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The goal of the Mandate was in part to create a Jewish “national home” under allied protection (League of Nations mandate).
The fact that during the war the Jewish Legion (under legendary Irishman John Henry Patterson) fought effectively on the side of the allies on both sides of the Jordan, and in Gallipoli against the Ottoman Turks in decisive battles, was another motivator.
So, let me answer the apparently simple question: where do today’s Jordanians live and who are they? In order to answer this apparently simple question we must once again look at some history.
Today, the people who reside in Jordan live on that part of the Palestine mandate east of the Jordan River. This is the Biblical land of Bashan and of Gilead. Anyone who went to Sunday school in the old days probably remembers this.
Three thousand years ago, what is now northern Jordan was part of the territory of the Israelites: specifically, the tribes of Dan, Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben. Much of today’s Jordan later became part of the second Jewish Commonwealth under the Maccabees, which is to say the Jewish Hellenistic Hasmonaean Kings, before the Romans conquered the whole area and made it part of their empire. We also read in the New Testament about the travels of Jesus and his Jewish apostles on both sides of the Jordan.
If that is indeed the case, who lives in Jordan today? And where did they come from?
The first answer to the question is what Jordan is not. Until the second decade of the 20th century there has never been a Jordanian people, ethnic group, tribe or nation by that name, or a group of diasporic exiles who thought of themselves as “Jordanian.”
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the “Jordanian People” are a 20th century British invention, dreamed up in the 1920s, for the peoples living in what Britain illegally (of which more below) hived off from the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1923. Until 1946 its British administrators called it just that: Eastern Palestine.
Few people have read the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine document. It is still worth reading, for according to international law, the Mandate remains valid. Ask Canadian international lawyer and legal historian Jacques Gautier, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva demonstrates that the entire city of Jerusalem, east and west, legally belongs to Israel. The provisions of the Mandate still stand, because all of the legal pronouncements of the League were subsequently recognized as binding when the United Nations was created after the Second World War.9
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In 1923 the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was arbitrarily, immorally, and illegally violated by the British, who had been authorized by the League as its implementers (and such it is a historial misnomer to call it the “British Mandate” as do many historians).
They did so by creating what they called the temporary “Emirate of Jordan” in Eastern Palestine. Jews were no longer allowed to live there.
The name of “Hashemite” Kingdom of Jordan makes reference to the fact that its ruling tribe, the Hashemites. befriended by British officers like Lawrence during the war, were imported from the Hejaz.
The Hashemites rule Jordan today as the Saudis do most of the Arabian peninsula, the Saudis being the tribe who drove the Hashemites out in the first place in the early 1920s. The Hashemites claimed the name by right of tribal conquest, secured in collaboration with the British, which allowed them to occupy that territory without the consent of the few people who lived there before their arrival or “occupation” as today’s leftists would say.
In order to give this new national fiction of Jordan some instant legitimacy in the eyes of the world, the British creatively mistranslated Arabic titles like “Emir” and called these men “Kings,” giving them a kind of faux royal aura. They did the same thing in erecting the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq out of another series of pieces of ex-Ottoman territory. That “Kingdom” did not last long.
In fact, the Hashemites were and continue to be a usurping Bedouin tribal elite in Eastern Palestine. They are and have been notoriously corrupt. Their present king is worth many billions of dollars while every few years there are bread riots among the poorer citizens of Jordan — the vast majority of whom are now Arabs calling themselves Palestinians.
This helps explain all those so-called “tribal rebellions,” that occurred east of the Jordan River during the 1920s and 1930s under British rule. Clearly, the Bedouin tribes who had migrated there earlier than the Hashemites, from Arabia and other parts of the middle east, had a hard time understanding why they should give up their nomadic independence and be ruled by these British-backed interlopers.
The Hashemites put down these “rebellions” with the active aid and military support of thinly disguised British mercenaries, an army that was ironically named, “The Arab Legion,” trained and led by British officers such as Sir John Bagot Glubb.10
During this same period the Arabs west of the Jordan (remember, all of it was British Palestine) were being encouraged by the Nazi German government and later given arms to attack the Jews and the British which they did on numerous occasions. Their intense and official collaboration with the Nazis is welldocumented in the recent book called Nazi Palestine by German academics Klaus- Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers. The political successors of these Nazi allies in what is now called the Palestinian Authority have never acknowledged or faced consequences for their Nazi collaborationist part, let alone apologized.11
Although the various Bedouin tribes had before the First World War been the fluctuating masters of most of the desert lands east of the Jordan river, under loose Ottoman authority, there were always small towns and villages where farmers and townsmen eked out a living. Many of the Arab Muslims of these towns and villages were former Bedouin who had become farmers.
Among them were also the demographically reduced survivors of the Byzantine Empire, which had fallen to the invading Arab Muslims in the 7th century during the first Muslim invasions from Arabia. These included various Arabic and Aramaic-speaking Christians, who over time were joined by Armenians fleeing the 1915 genocide in Turkey and who in turn were later joined by Muslims from the Caucasus, and Druze immigrants from neighbouring Syria.
A century later, today the majority of Jordan’s inhabitants are largely migrant Muslim Arabs who came from different parts of the Middle East, mostly during the 20th and late 19th century and now think of themselves as a comparatively new ethnic group, the “Palestinians.”12
Before the Mandate, these largely Muslim (and Christian) immigrants had no national identity and like that of Jordan, there is no record of a self-defined, self-declared Palestinian national entity in any historical document, before the early- to mid-20th century.
A “national” Palestinian Arab identity developed quite recently, as a contrary movement and mirror image to that of the Jewish people, who were returning to their ancient homeland by right, and whose physical, religious, and cultural connection to the land of Israel had never been severed or questioned. There were always scattered villages and towns with Jewish communities from the time of the Roman conquest to the coming of the British. The Jewish return was formally recognized by the League of Nations Mandate. The strange, recent, and paradoxical ethnogenesis of what is now called the Palestinian people is food for thought.
But there is the rub. Once the British began to implement the Mandate during the 1920s, and Jewish returnees began to create an agricultural and mini-industrial revolution there, both Western and Eastern Palestine attracted waves of Muslim Arab immigrants from Egypt and Syria and beyond, including Morocco and the formerly Muslim Balkans.
These new Muslim immigrants found it convenient to make common cause with the non-Bedouin residents of the area and much later, specifically after 1967, began to call themselves and their children Palestinians. In the 1930s they comprised over fifty distinct ethnic groups with distinctive languages other than Arabic.
Even President Roosevelt pointed out in 1939 that, “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.” Most Palestinians, but not all, are therefore relatively new arrivals in the Land of Israel.
The great historical irony of this period is that most of the ancestors of today’s Muslim Arabs now living in Mandated Eastern Palestine, that is to say Jordan, all of a sudden stopped being thought of as Arabs of Palestine by the British, and then by the members of the United Nations, immediately after Israeli independence was declared and recognized in 1948, and even more so, since the Oslo peace process began in 1992.
These Arab Muslim lineages and clans suddenly became “Jordanians,” while only those Arabs west of the Jordan river were called, by default, “Palestinians.”
And so supporters of Arab Nationalism and pan-Islamism have ever since been having a field day claiming that Palestinians west of the river are a people without a home or nation. This mantra is then used to justify any and all violence against the State of Israel which, in reality, received substantially less than half of the land intended by the League of Nations Mandate.
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This re-labelling of the Arabs of East Palestine (and those “refugees” from West Palestine who have joined them over the decades) remains one of the great national disappearing acts of modern history, for Jordan is clearly a Palestinian Arab State in what was formerly British Palestine, with a majority of non-Bedouin villagers and townspeople who do not define themselves as Bedouin or “Jordanian” or Hashemite but as Palestinian, contrary to their “King” who rules by might, not right.
In 1948, the same year that the British-led Arab (Bedouin) Legion of Jordan invaded the newly created State of Israel (so much for British neutrality), “King” Abdullah I of Jordan declared that “Palestine and Jordan are one.” He was the first of many.
And so, in 1948, Arab residents in East and West Palestine on both sides of the Jordan eagerly went to war on the newly-declared state of Israel in that small sliver of West Palestine begrudged by the UN to the Jewish people.
In 1948 the Arabs of the British Mandate and Jordan attacked Israel but when defeated, many of them removed themselves from one part of West Palestine to those parts of Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan, then under “Jordanian” authority. The Hashemite Jordanians had illegally “occupied” Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), but the international community did not care.
The same thing happened when Arabs from the West Bank of the Jordan chose to cross the River again after the 1967 war, when the state of Jordan and its army once again took up arms against Israel, in the hope of conquering all of Western Palestine.
If that is the case, are these people really “refugees” or are they not still residents in the territory of the Palestine Mandate living in their “National Homeland,” namely that part of the land of Israel dominated and populated by the people and state of Jordan?
This selective and periodic political and ethnographic disappearance and reappearance of the Palestinian nature of the Arabs of Eastern Palestine, especially in the state of Jordan, has largely been a tactic used by the Arab League, and its allies on the left, to put Israel and its supporters on the defensive. The reality is that many Arabs have made public statements in favor of the Jordan is Palestine argument. They just happen to periodically do so in a context, which usually implies the destruction of the Jewish State.
At the same time, since the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, Israeli academics and politicians have been careful not to question the legitimacy of the HashemiteKingdom of Jordan as so many of its rank and file citizens support the pan-Islamic jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas belongs. In other words the price of Israeli silence as to the Palestinian nature of Jordan is the price Israel pays for the cold peace that they manage with their illegitimate eastern neighbour.
It is an unsustainable, self-censoring silence.
The Israelis are at a singular disadvantage, for the Jordanians excel at speaking from both sides of their mouths by accepting a cold peace with Israel while claiming that Israel is actually Palestine too (“from river to the sea” as the Hamas and Hizbullah like to declare) alongside their leftist allies on the streets ofNew, York, London, Paris, and Toronto.
The most revealing example of the Jordan is Palestine argument was made in 1977.Speaking to a Dutch newspaper, PLO representative Zouhair Muhsen said, “For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa andJaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demandHaifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right toall of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unitePalestine and Jordan.”
Jordan’s rulers would have the best of all possible worlds, were it not for the fact that a few “JordanianPalestinian” leaders of opposition to the King have finally spoken out. They argue that Israel is the rightful owner of Palestine west of the Jordan and that the majority of Jordanian-Palestinians should get rid of Hashemite minority rule and accept the historical factthat they are the de facto historical and majority owners of the eastern side of the Biblical Land of Israel. In short, that Jordan should be the Palestinian state.
Mudar Zahran is their most articulate spokesperson and no doubt represents many who are too frightened to speak out. Zahran is an Arab Muslim Palestinian Jordanian who has had to flee Jordan because he has told the truth to his fellow Arabs: that Jordan is a Palestinian State and a state of Palestinians. In a recent article he has bluntly stated:
"There is, in fact, almost nothing un-Palestinian about Jordan except for the royal family. Despite decades of official imposition of a Bedouin image on the country, and even Bedouin accents on state television, the Palestinian identity is still the most dominant…to the point where the Jordanian capital, Amman, is the largest and most populated, Palestinian city anywhere. Palestinians view it as a symbol of their economic success and ability to excel. Moreover, empowering a Palestinian statehood for Jordan has a well-founded and legally accepted grounding: The minute the minimum level of democracy is applied to Jordan, the Palestinian majority would, by right, take over the political momentum."13
Zahran has gone on record recognizing the right of Israel to all its territory West of the Jordan and that Jordan is the Palestinian state. At numerous conferences and interviews he has hinted that many Arabs who live west of the Jordan river would be welcome to come “home.”
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There is no Israeli “occupation” of anything other than their national homeland according to 20th century international law. Time and again the Israeli government has ceded authority to armed movements such as Hamas and Fatah in territory west of the Jordan whose inhabitants daily announce their desire for the annihilation of the stateand people of Israel, thus sacrificing part of their legal, historic Biblical homeland to hostile Islamic expansionists, not to “a people without a land.”
Mudar Zahran finds this exasperating and argues that the fictitious Jordanian kingdom masks the Palestinian nature of their own Muslim Arab national homeland.
The Arabs of Palestine, that is the Palestinians, are a majority in Eastern Palestine, that is to say the state of Jordan. If one accepts this historical and legal fact, then first thinking and then policies must change in both Israel and the Anglosphere. Without realizing it, the world has been living with a two-state solution for decades.
Jordan is what good anthropologists call an “ethnographic fiction.”14 The majority of Jordanians are self-defined Palestinians living in Mandated Palestine. The rest are Bedouin. To suggest that a second and third Palestinian state be created as well in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is historically absurd and unjust in the extreme. There can be no peace without the recognition of this simple ethnographic reality.
Notes
See the article by Mclure, Chris “Reading Mein Kampf in Cairo” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 13, 2007
Cf. Raymond Ibrahim, “The Many Faces of Jihad” Aug. 26, 2019.
Jeffrey Goldberg, “What Would Hamas Do if it Could Do What It Wanted?” The Atlantic, Aug. 2014.
David Gurevitch and Anat Kidron, Exploring the Holy Land: 150 Years of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Equinox, 2019.
Solomon Benzimra, The Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, CILR, 2018.
Burton MacDonald, East of the Jordan: Territories and Sites of the Hebrew Scriptures, American Schools of Oriental Research, 2000.
Solomon Zeitlin, The Rise and Fall of the Judean State (3 vols.), Jewish Publication Society of America, New York, 1967.
Joseph Katz, “History of Jordan, Jordan as Palestine” at: http://eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/jordan.html.
Sela Hadar, “Dr. Jacques Gautier; The Jewish Claim to Jerusalem: The Case Under International Law,” CAMERA, Nov. 23, 2013, at camerauk.org.
In 1948, when the British led and officered Arab Legion, commanded by British officer Sir John Bagot Glubb, were attacking the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem, a British photojournalist smuggled himself into Jerusalem posing as a British officer. Not only did he witness the Legion’s ethnic cleansing of this most Jewish part of Jerusalem but met a number of former Nazis who were fighting for the “Arab” side. See Richard Pollock, “ ‘A Will to Survive’ recalls Arab Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem’s Jews,” at www.jns.org.
Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cuppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, Enigma, 2010.
There is a slow growth of international scholarship that shows that perhaps a majority of the people in Israel and Jordan who are Muslim Arabs and claim to have come to Palestine with the first waves of conquering Muslims during the eighth century, are actually descendants of recent Muslim immigrants (many non speakers of Arabic). Oneof the indicators of this trend is shown in the intermittent language surveys carried out by the British when they ruled Palestine from 1920 to 1948. Joan Peters writes: “In the 1931 census at least twenty three different languages were reported in use by ‘Moslems,’ and most of those, plus an additional twenty eight were in use by ‘Christians’ — many of whom were known, or represented as ‘Arabs’ — a total of at least fifty-one languages.” Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab- Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (Harper and Row, 1984), p. 226 Many of the Arabs of coastal Israel proper came there from Egypt during the 1800s, cf. Gideon Kressel and Reuven Aharoni, “Egyptian Emigres in the Levant…” Jerusalem Institute For Public Affairs, 2012.
That the Hashemi are a well-armed imported group of Bedouin who with other Bedouin comprise 10% of the population, the majority self identifying as Palestinian Arab Muslims and some Christians and Druze. Mudas Zahran argues that the Hashemi treat the majority as did white South Africans their black majority population before the fall of Apartheid. Indeed, he calls the Hashemites rulers of an apartheid state. Cf. Mudar Zahran, “Jordan is Palestinian” in Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12.
G. Clarfield and Selim Mansur, “Ethnographic Fiction of Jordan,” National Post, Jun. 8, 2015.
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