A handful of Israelis marked Jordanian Independence Day on Tuesday by trying to
present the Jordanian Embassy in Ramat Gan with a petition to make the country
the official homeland of the Palestinian people.
The initiator of the
petition, MK Arye Eldad (National Union), said it asks “that King Abdullah
declare Jordan as the national homeland of the Palestinian people. His father
[King Hussein] said ‘Jordan is Palestine, Palestine is Jordan.’ Unfortunately
Abdullah doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps on this.
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killing
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is already a Palestinian state in Jordan.
Eighty percent of the Jordanian
people are Palestinians, and it is built on 65% of the Jewish homeland allocated
in the Balfour Declaration and given to us at the San Remo Conference [in 1920].
Once the Palestinians lose their orphan status as a people without a state,
their international demands will become much weaker,” Eldad said.
He also
invoked the recent popular revolutions in the Middle East, saying, “If what
happened in Tahrir Square happens in Amman we could find in a single day that on
our eastern border there is no Hashemite Kingdom, but a Palestinian state
controlled by 80% of the public.”
Eldad took an elevator up to the
Jordanian Embassy in an office tower on Ramat Gan’s Rehov Abba Hillel, but came
back down minutes later after he was refused entrance to the
embassy.
Eldad’s spokeswoman said that he was able to enter the floor of
the embassy but that police who had been called by the Jordanian staff prevented
him from entering.
Ron Breiman from the Hatikva Party (which Eldad chairs
and which is one of the four parties that make up the National Union) said
making Jordan Palestine was not nearly as far-fetched as the traditional
solutions for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“First off, I
think the solution of a Palestinian state in the West Bank is not relevant or
realistic. It is a lie and the opposite of peace.
“The Palestinian state
west of the Jordan River is impossible.
Peace cannot be based on transfer
of Jews, on ethnic cleansing of Jews from the heartland of their
homeland.
I am against transfer, against ethnic cleansing either of Jews
or Arabs,” Breiman said.
The Palestinians who remain in the West Bank
would be citizens of the Palestinian state and “can live wherever they like in
the West Bank and vote for the Palestinian parliament in Amman,” he
said.
“This is the real two-state vision.”