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Old 08-12-2013, 12:23 PM   #121
blankall
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Originally Posted by jofillips View Post
Plus Jordan fought a pretty big civil war against the PLO (Yasser Arafat) and Palestinians back in the 70s (?)...
Probably not too much love lost between the two.
The relationship between the Jordanians and Palestinians is very complicated. Palestinians form the majority in Jordan.

The official stance of all the Arab countries has been to never give Palestinians full citizenship. The idea is to keep them and their descendants as refugees so that they can be used against Israel in a demographic war later on. This includes keeping people who have descendants of, for example, Jordanian and Egyptian heritigae, who happened to be in Palestine at the time Israel was created from ever gaining citizenship or land rights. For example, Yasser Arafat's family, who has Egyptian heritage was stripped of all Egyptian citizenship and land, because they qualified as Palestinian. In order to qualify as Palestinian, you had to be in what is now Israel and the occupied territories for 2 years prior to Israel becoming into being or be descended from someone who was.

That being said, the Jordanians have also made all sorts of random declarations to appease their Palestinian population and even going as far as to say that Jordanians and Palestinians are the same people.

Basically, Jordan wants to rule over all of Jordan and Israel. They, however, also fear being overthrown by the Palestinians militant groups. This is changing somewhat, as the Palestinian refugee problem, they helped create, leaves their control, and Israel's permance becomes cemented. More and more they are going to distance themselves from the West Bank. They'll also be working to sabotage Palestinian statehood. At one time, they were invading the West Bank. Now it's going to be the Palestinians with nationalist aspirations towards Jordanian territory.
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