No sooner had we recovered from our bout of laughter over Turkey criticizing Israel for its actions in Gaza (“Talking Turkey,” op-ed, Feb. 6) than an even more Orwellian event took place when it was reported that Jordan planned to file a criminal lawsuit against Israeli officials for alleged war crimes.
Let us put this into perspective. Jordan is a pseudo-country sitting on land that properly belongs to the Jews. There is no Jordanian people; Jordan is a country composed of Palestinian Arabs with no political rights, controlled by a Bedouin ruling elite that has hegemony over the government and army.
Jordan is as much an apartheid regime as exists in any nation on earth. Official discrimination against non-Bedouin Arabs is state policy. Jews may not own land in Jordan, and tracts of land once legally purchased by Jews have been stolen from them by the Jordanian government.
When Jordan controlled the Old City of Jerusalem it destroyed every single Jewish shrine there and used the stones to build latrines. It tore up gravestones from the Mount of Olives and used them also as building materials.
Jordan came into existence when the young Winston Churchill quite literally drew its boundaries on the back of an envelope to accommodate two British petroleum pipelines. You’ve heard of Wilsonian national self-determination dictating the emergence of countries? Pipeline geography did the trick in the case of Jordan.
Jordan is one of the few countries on earth still ruled by a king, and not a make-pretend ceremonial one, but one whose every whim must be obeyed. Moreover, the previous king of Jordan decided to show his devotion to the human rights of Palestinians by massacring tens of thousands of them in the infamous Black September of 1970. No one exactly knows how many Palestinian civilians were massacred by the Jordanian ruling class and army, though Yasir Arafat said it was 25,000.
The Palestinian terror group Black September, which carried out the Munich massacre and other atrocities, named itself in memory of this massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army. At the time, hundreds of Palestinian terrorists entered Israel and begged to be put into Israeli prisons rather than be returned to Jordan where they faced certain death.
Jordan not only shoots Palestinians when they ally with Syria and try to topple the Bedouin regime there, as they did in 1970. Palestinian students in Jordan participating in demonstrations against Israel have been mowed down by the Jordanian soldiers. In fact, the only country in the Middle East where students can conduct spontaneous anti-Israel demonstrations against Israel is Israel.
Amnesty International and many others speak out against human rights abuses in Jordan. The treatment of women there is about as bad as it gets anywhere. There is no freedom of the press. Torture is routinely used. Gay Jordanians, who face violent persecution, often apply for asylum in Israel.
Jordan of course has a long history of military aggression. It began with the Jordanian invasion of Western Palestine in 1948, when Jordan attempted to annex all of the territory the UN had tried to partition into Israel and an Arab Palestinian state. It was Jordan, not Israel, that prevented the creation of that Arab Palestinian state.
Jordan illegally invaded and held East Jerusalem for nineteen years. It participated in the military aggressions against Israel in 1967 and 1973. Jordan lost the West Bank to Israel the same way Germany lost Alsace and Lorraine – by being defeated in its own war of aggression.
Jordan’s Queen Rania recently issued a call for donations to UNRWA, the agency that funnels money into the Gaza Strip, much of it requisitioned by the Hamas and some of it used for weapons.
“We are in very dire need of much more assistance and without which I think UNRWA won’t be able to operate,” she said. Rania, who quite literally has a queen’s fortune, evidently donated nothing at all herself, though she earlier claimed to have donated blood to help the Gazans while Israel was attacking the terrorists.
Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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