Jordan Muslim Brotherhood supporters_311.
(photo credit: Reuters/Muhammad Hamed )
Jordan is fearful of receiving Palestinian refugees from Syria, as it has
neither the resources nor the infrastructure to accommodate them,
Gen.
Mansour Abu Rashid, chairman of the Amman Center for Peace and
Development, said in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
Abu Rashid, a former head of
Jordanian intelligence, was participating in a symposium hosted by the Truman
Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Israeli Council on Foreign
Relations to honor the memory of Dave Kimche, who had been a central figure in
the Mossad and a Foreign Ministry director-general.
Kimche was a member
of the board of trustees at the Truman Institute, as well as the founding
president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a dedicated peace
activist.
Abu Rashid, who enjoyed a 20-year friendship with Kimche and
collaborated on various peace projects with him, said that 81,000 people had
already crossed from Syria to Jordan, where they were being treated as visitors,
not as refugees. Jordan already has to cope with 400,000 Palestinians who came
from Kuwait and 700,000 Iraqis, Sudanese, and people from other parts of the
region, he said, and it simply cannot take in Palestinians from Syria.
In
response to the Truman Institute’s Dr. Assaf David, who has been engaged in
dialogue on several levels with the Jordanians and who has said that there is an
increasing Israeli movement to the political Right that sees Jordan as an
alternative homeland for the Palestinians, Abu Rashid suggested that Israelis
think carefully about whether they want such concentrated Palestinian power on
their eastern border.