Dr.Saud Al-Sharafat
The impression left by our previous discussion of Jordan’s history is perhaps focused on an important point, which is the lack of clarity, infiltration, and consistency between the movement of history and people in time and place. But we must accept that we lose a little in accuracy in order to gain in clarity (45), especially since the source of accuracy is due in its entirety to the lack of modern sources and studies on the subject of terrorism in Jordan.
The experiences and events of the past that human memory passes through are a phenomenon that accompanies the process of remembering. As the British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says: “People learn the concept of the past by remembering it.
But more important than remembering is writing down these experiences, analyzing them, and constantly criticizing them in a scientific way that is as far away as possible from bias, so that they do not perish, be forgotten, die, or be manipulated, because there is no history without past experiences and events, and there are no events and experiences without the process of writing and remembering, and the diverse and different experiences constitute a stinging process to activate the process of remembering and writing history.
In light of this situation, the question that arises is: What should we remember from the events and experiences that Jordan went through?
The first thing to remember is the events, changes and complex interactions between seemingly distant events and close fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders, which have contributed to the formation of contemporary Jordan and its entry into the “geography of anger (50)” which is the spatial outcome of all interactions. The fuel for this angry geography is the process of technological globalization, mass media, the Internet and modern social media, political speeches, reports and inflammatory documents. Its spark is always the state of social suspicion towards the other: the enemy (51), but it is manifested in violent extremism and terrorist operations.
Jordan was founded as an inscription in the rock, just as its Nabataeans carved the rocks in Petra. Some people may like what you write here, and others may not like what you are talking about. We are trying to uncover the events, information, analyses and conclusions that we will not claim are inevitable and final, but rather are open to discussion, research and evaluation, and are always open to questions and the search for what is correct, right and credible, because we believe that the task of research – and the historian in particular – is not only to collect information and events, but to evaluate them .
Chomsky says: “If something continues to be repeated as clear, then it must be clearly false (53). The injustice and the ongoing systematic “historical silencing” that Jordan’s history has been subjected to, whether ancient or contemporary, are very great, whether by its own people or by strangers and enemies, and I assume that the systematic silencing process was one of the main reasons for the phenomenon of terrorism in Jordan.
This injustice and silencing act has been manifested in two forms: the first is related to the social, economic, political and cultural history of Jordan in general, which is a vast field and requires a long search, and I do not claim to be a specialist or expert in it, in addition to the fact that it needs special research, and therefore I will summarize what I can in this topic.
The second, which falls within my academic and research specialization and interest, and by which I mean the application of quantitative analysis methods, mechanisms and tools in international political economy and the process of globalization to study the phenomenon of terrorism and its relationship to history and the process of globalization: how its causes, motives and goals have developed, its methods and those who are responsible for them, its contemporary trends, its impact on the structure and behavior of the state and its future in Jordan, which is the focus of our interest here and the main subject of the book.
The injustice I mean here has taken – and is taking – many forms, some of which are clear and obvious to every seeker of truth and examples, too numerous to count. For example, but not limited to: the book by American President Jimmy Carter (Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,2006 ), whose ignorance of history was shown to be incomparable to his ignorance of geography through several fallacies, the first of which was when he portrayed King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein’s participation in the Great Arab Revolt against the Turks as participation in World War I, in a desire to obtain a reward for himself, first as King of Iraq and then King of Jordan.
Carter claims that… King Abdullah fought against the Ottoman Turks in World War I and the British wanted to reward him for this work, at first… they decided to give him Iraq, but they finally decided to give this honor to his brother Faisal. They needed a new emirate… to give it to him, so an emirate was created from the Palestinian territories under the mandate and located on the West Bank of the Jordan River… and King Abdullah became its ruler.
Carter’s biblical fallacies are clear to anyone who follows history and knows the East from the West in geography. King Abdullah participated with his father and brothers in the Great Arab Revolt against the Turks with the aim of obtaining the independence of all Arab lands in the Fertile Crescent from Turkish rule in cooperation with the British according to the well-known Hussein-McMahon correspondence as I mentioned earlier.
As for the “creation” of the Emirate of Transjordan, it was first: one of the results of the British betrayal of their covenants. And their agreements with Sharif Hussein 1915-1916, which were manifested in the Sykes-Picot Agreement 1916, the Balfour Declaration 1917, and the San Remo Agreement 1920, which approved the British mandate over Palestine and Jordan.
Secondly: Because King Abdullah I (imposed himself on the British) according to the confirmation of Christopher Sykes, son of Sir Mark Sykes, the British Secretary of State for the Cabinet during the First World War, and partner of the Frenchman Georges Picot in the well-known Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the one who had the greatest credit for issuing the Balfour Declaration after the British and French colonialists had eliminated the Faisal Arab Kingdom in Syria, of which Jordan and Palestine were the southern part (55), which was evident in: “The Transjordan Memorandum”, which is a memorandum submitted by the British government in August 1922 to the League of Nations, stipulating the implementation of the mandate over Palestine and the exclusion of Transjordan from all provisions dealing with Jewish settlement, and the approval of this memorandum was by the League of Nations on August 12, 1922 (56).
Therefore, it can be said that “Jordan” was not a reward from the English, but rather a forced seizure of part of a right by the possible force available to King Abdullah I from a strong and deceitful party, and it is an act that deserves praise and historical appreciation in the records of world political history.
Carter’s second biblical fallacy is his statement: “… King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian extremist – on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem…” (57), and here we notice how Carter used the biblical term “Temple Mount” instead of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Carter’s third fallacy is his description of the terrorist operations carried out by Palestinian terrorist groups and organizations during 1970 and Jordan’s response to them as a comprehensive civil war between: the Jordanian army and the Palestinians in general, and not against the terrorist groups and organizations; as he claims…. With the advent of September 1970, a civil war broke out Comprehensive in Jordan between the armed forces of “Hussein” and the “Palestinians”.
Here we must point out that the concept of “civil war” is rarely mentioned in international affairs and international law, and political scientists have not agreed on a specific definition for it. The truth is that the “war” or confrontation was not against all Palestinians – as Carter claims – but rather against specific entities, namely the Palestinian terrorist groups, organizations and factions at the time, and it is known who they are, who their leaders are, and who finances, sponsors and moves them.
This confrontation does not at all apply to the concept of “civil war” defined in international law and civil war literature, but rather it is “rebellion operations” and “guerrilla warfare” (59) or “terrorist guerrillas by a non-state actor that was not seeking self-determination in accordance with the principles of the right of peoples to self-determination included in the Charter of the United Nations.
This is what the Jordanian officials and politicians who were active in that critical period of the Jordanian state’s life settled on, in that these terrorist acts would have – possibly – actually turned into a civil war between the components of Jordanian and Palestinian society had the state not intervened at the appropriate time.
King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein confirmed that “it is wrong to consider this confrontation a civil war between Jordanians and Palestinians, justifying this by saying that many Jordanians of Palestinian origin fought bravely in the ranks of the army, and that some Jordanians from the East Bank joined the Palestinians and fought against the army”.
While the former head of the Jordanian Royal Court, Ahmed Al-Tarawneh, confirmed that if the situation had continued, it was likely that a civil war would break out in the country, ending with the collapse of the country and its falling into the hands of the enemies .
Adnan Abu Odeh also stressed that the term “civil war” to describe the events that took place between Jordan and the Palestinian organizations is wrong, as what happened was not a civil war, and some of the Western foreigners press were the ones who used it. The truth is that what happened was in defense of the legitimacy of the rule in the state that had become weak and threatened, because if the situation had been left for five days after September, there would have been fear that the rule would fall.
There are many examples of civil war, the most prominent example being the “American Civil War.” I believe that the closest description in the serious academic literature on civil war to the tragic events that took place in Jordan is the guerrilla warfare (63) or the guerrilla forces (64), which I will explain in the coming chapters.
It is unfortunate that such fallacies issued against Jordan pass unnoticed and are not paid attention to or commented on – in most cases – by anyone, and thus the process of falsifying awareness and silencing continues to the date.
This prompts me to emphasize that there are very important stations in the history of Jordan and the analysis of the phenomenon of internal terrorism, or partial terrorism, such as the events of September 1970, which no one has dared – for many reasons – to study and analyze until now! (65) This is what prompted the Palestinian researcher
Moeen al-Tahir said: “The September incidents are a phase that is not talked about by both parties, the Jordanian regime and the PLO. No one wants to talk about them, even if there is a positive aspect to that related to preventing the tearing apart of the social fabric by raising past incidents. However, understanding the political circumstances that led to the clash between the Palestinian resistance and the Jordanian army, and allowed it, is important, because of its great impact on the structure of the Jordanian regime, as it is on the future of the Palestinian revolution”.
The American Civil War, which began on April 12, 1861, despite all its sensitivities and the loss of lives that exceeded 600,000 victims, and the assassination of the famous American President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was not silenced or excluded from research and criticism by American society in all its spectrums, its politicians, historians and academics. Rather, it remains to this day the most researched topic.
In the American cultural product: around it and increasing every day (69), it raises discussion and controversy (65), and there are thousands of books that have been written.
The second example: The claim of the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, professor of history at the University of Exeter in Britain and one of the new historians in Israel, in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians,2006 ” that “East Jordan was a barren emirate east of the Jordan River inhabited by Bedouin tribes and some Circassian villages, and therefore the founder King Abdullah sought to “occupy” and annex the West Bank in coordination with Israel” (70).
This description is extremely racist and chauvinistic, as it depicts the Bedouins and Circassians as a different race, inferior to humans. This is a confirmation of a racist theory that goes deep into the Western cognitive structure and Zionist racism. Remember that it was the justification for the genocide of the Native American civilization in North and South America and the colonization of large parts of the world, the last of which was Palestine.
Statistics from the Jordanian Tribal Office during September 1922 indicate that the population of the Emirate of Transjordan amounted to about 225 thousand people, of whom about 103 thousand people were from the Bedouin tribes. In 1946, the population rose to more than 433 thousand people, while the Bedouin nomads constituted more than 99 thousand (71).
This refutes Ilan Pappe’s claims, because it means that the percentage of what he calls Bedouins was less than half of the emirate’s population, at 45.7 percent in 1922, at the beginning of the emirate’s establishment, but it declined rapidly due to rapid development and urbanization over two decades to about a quarter of the population in 1946, before the declaration of Jordan’s independence.
Here we should abandon this false and weak idea that Jordan is a country of Bedouins. The settled population has always been more numerous than the Bedouins, and these Bedouins themselves were
“They were semi-nomadic when the Emirate of Transjordan was established. On the other hand, it is true that the Bedouins were the politically preferred group of the regime, and they were recruited into the army, and their qualities of honor, simplicity of life, and courage were considered to embody national qualities, within what can be considered a process of cultural nationalization.” Then the Bedouins abandoned their nomadic way of life since the thirties, through their integration into the Arab army) (72).
These are the same claims of Avi Shlaim’s theory on which he built the theory of collusion or conspiracy between King Abdullah the Founder and Israel to divide Palestine in his collection of books (Collusion Across the Jordan,1988), “The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and Palestine,1999” and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World,2021” (13).
Close to this is the claim of the American journalist “From Beirut to Jerusalem,1989 ” who limited the population of Jordan in 1948 to Bedouins only! Claiming that the population of Jordan at that time was 450,000 Bedouins? And that Jordan occupied the West Bank (74). But he ignores or is ignorant of the fact that there were some cities and towns in Jordan that were opening schools for girls and believed in the spirit of social solidarity and collecting donations since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Here we notice how this wrong, inaccurate or false idea has been circulating and circulating on people’s tongues and in the citations of researchers and historians, without verification or scrutiny. It is an epistemological characteristic that the process of transferring human knowledge suffers from in general, but here it is a general phenomenon in the history of Jordan for a main reason: serving Israel, colonialism and competition between Arab countries, specifically Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians.
Then what harm would it do to Jordan if its inhabitants were Bedouins or Circassians? The Bedouins, along with the Circassians, lived an economic and social pattern imposed by the circumstances of a long period of neglect due to The Ottoman Empire controlled the Levant. However, they defied the harsh conditions and created a cohesive structure that contributed to the development of the kingdom in record time.
For example, the Damascus newspaper Al-Muqtabas published in issue No. 588, dated 2/31/1911, a conversation (see the picture of the conversation with the Turkish governor (21) that was conducted by the Cairo newspaper Al-Muqattam after the resignation of the governor of Syria, Ismail Fadil Pasha, as a result of what was called the Karak rebellion against the Ottoman government, or what the people of Karak call “the Iliyah” or the revolution against the Turks that erupted on November 21, 1910. The governor speaks with admiration of Karak and Tafilah and how he found the people of Karak to be the most civilized of the Arabs) and how “the people of Tafilah donated ten thousand piasters (qirsh) to build a school for girls and how the people paid this amount willingly and without objection. If the government had dealt with them in a decent manner, what happened would not have happened” (75).
But without forgetting the heavy taxes and compulsory military service (76).
The governor of Syria, Ismail Fadel Pasha, refused to approve the appointment of Qadr Al-Majali, the Sheikh of Sheikhs of Karak, as a member of the state’s administrative council for Karak District, after he won the majority of votes. One of the reasons for this revolution, during which the Turks destroyed between 549 and 582 houses in Karak alone, was this revolution that dazzled Arab historians in that era, which prompted the Syrian historian Munir al-Rayyis to describe it as one of the glorious revolutions at the dawn of the Arab Renaissance.
