Palestinian Refugees in Jordan and the Revocation of Citizenship
Interview with Anis F. Kassim by Hazem Jamjoum
HJ: What legal status was afforded
Palestinians who came under Jordanian control after the 1948
Nakba?
AK: On 19 May 1948, the Jordanian army entered the
area of central Palestine that the Zionist forces were unable to
occupy, and began the process of legally incorporating central
Palestine into the Jordanian Kingdom. As part of this process, on
20 December 1949, the Jordanian Council of Ministries amended the
1928 Citizenship Law such that all Palestinians who took refuge in
Jordan or who remained in the western areas controlled by Jordan at
the time of the law’s entry into force, became full Jordanian
citizens for all legal purposes. The law did not discriminate
between Palestinian refugees displaced from the areas that Israel
occupied in 1948 and those of the area that the Jordanian
authorities renamed the “West Bank” in 1950.
On one hand, this citizenship was forced upon the Palestinians
who did not really have much of a say in the matter. On the other,
this was a welcome move because it saved those Palestinians the
hardship of living without citizenship.
HJ: How was the process for the revocation of
citizenship complex?
AK: First of all, I should note that the law
itself has not been officially amended, so what I am about to
describe is still what is officially in effect today. First of all,
the Jordanian Constitution, adopted in 1952, states that
citizenship is a matter to be regulated by a law, and the Jordanian
Citizenship Law was indeed adopted in 1954 replacing that of 1928
and its amendment.. According to this law, it is possible to revoke
the citizenship of a Jordanian citizen who is in the civil service
of a foreign authority or government. The citizen must be
notified by the Jordanian government to leave that service and, if
the citizen does not comply, the Council of Ministries is the body
with the authority that is able to decide to revoke his
citizenship. Even if the Council does decide to revoke the
citizenship, this decision must then be ratified by the King, and
even then, the citizen whose citizenship was revoked has the right
to challenge the Council of Ministries’ decision in the Jordanian
High Court, and it is this court’s decision that is binding and
final. These procedures are being completely ignored when the
citizenship of a Jordanian of Palestinian origin is revoked.
HJ: Did the status of Palestinians in
Jordan change after the 1967 War with the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank?
AK: No. their status remained as Jordanian
citizens.
HJ: When did the differentiation
between Palestinian citizens of Jordan begin?
AK: Today we can speak of five kinds of
Palestinian citizens of Jordan. The first differentiation came in
the early 1980s when the Jordanian government was concerned that
Israeli policies and practices aimed to squeeze out the Palestinian
inhabitants of the occupied West Bank; to empty out the Palestinian
territories to replace them with Jewish settlers. The Jordanian
government then created the first real differentiation between its
Palestinian citizens by issuing differentiated cards.
Those who lived habitually in the West Bank were issued green
cards, while those who habitually lived in Jordan but had material
and/or family connections in the West Bank were issued yellow
cards. The sole purpose of these cards at the time was so that the
Jordanian authorities at the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge—the only
crossing point between Jordan and the occupied West Bank—could
monitor the movement of these card holders, enabling the Jordanian
authorities to know how many Palestinian West Bankers had crossed
into Jordan, and to ensure that they returned, essentially a kind
of statistical device. Indeed, this was a wise policy in terms of
countering the Zionist plans to continue the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine.
The major turning point came with the Jordanian disengagement (fak
al-irtibat) from the West Bank on 31 July 1988.
HJ: What was the
disengagement?
AK: Since 1948 when central Palestine came under
Jordanian control, the Jordanian government has claimed the West
Bank as part of the kingdom. By 1988, the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) had come to be recognized on an Arab and, to
some extent, international level as the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people, but the Israelis and
Americans were still refusing to recognize the PLO, let alone to
officially communicate with it. Jordan’s King Hussein shrewdly took
the decision to disengage from the West Bank as a message to the
United States and Israel that if they were going to negotiate with
anyone over the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank, it should be
with the PLO. In the famous speech he delivered on 31 July 1988[1]
in which he declared the disengagement—and we have to remember that
this was during the most intense period of the first Intifada— King
Hussein stated that the purpose of the disengagement was to support
the Palestinians’ struggle for self determination by relinquishing
his claim to that territory.
HJ: How was the disengagement a
“turning point” for Palestinians’ status as Jordanian
citizens?
AK: When the disengagement was declared, the color
of the cards (yellow and green), that had been used as a
statistical device, became the criteria for determining the
citizenship status of a citizen. The government issued instructions
to the effect that those who habitually lived in the West Bank,
that is green card holders, on 31 July 1988 were “Palestinian
citizens,” while those who were living in Jordan or abroad were
Jordanian. Put another way, over one-and-a-half million
Palestinians went to bed on 31 July 1988 as Jordanian citizens, and
woke up on 1 August 1988 as stateless persons.
HJ: You previously mentioned that we can speak of five
kinds of Palestinian citizens of Jordan. What are the different
kinds of status among Palestinians citizen of Jordan
currently?
AK: The first category we can call hyphenated
Palestinian-Jordanians. These are Palestinians who were in Jordan
on the date of the disengagement with no material connection to the
West Bank or Gaza Strip, or who were Jordanian citizenship holders
abroad. These are regarded as Jordanians for all legal
purposes.
The Palestinians in the second category are the green card holders
whose citizenship was revoked by the government orders that I
described earlier.
The Palestinians in the third category are the yellow card holders,
who kept their citizenship after the disengagement, but many of
whom have more recently faced the revocation of their Jordanian
citizenship rights.
The fourth category is that of blue card holders. These are 1967
Palestinians refugees from the occupied Gaza Strip who are in
Jordan and who were never given citizenship rights. They are in a
very miserable position because, since they are not Jordanian, they
cannot enjoy any of the benefits of citizenship in this country:
they cannot access public schools or health services, they cannot
get driving licenses, they cannot open bank accounts, or purchase
land. They are mostly concentrated in the refugee camps in the
Jerash area, specifically the one called “Gaza Refugee Camp” which
is generally known as the worst of the refugee camps in Jordan in
terms of living conditions. To build a tiny house in the camp, they
need to get several permits from several government departments.
While they receive some modest support from UNRWA, any support that
comes from the rest of the society has to be approved by Jordanian
security authorities.
The fifth, and newest, of the categories is that of Jerusalem
residents. These have always been a special case: the Israelis
consider them permanent residents of Israel without any citizenship
rights, while for Jordan they are citizens whose status was not
affected by the disengagement. The problem now is that the
Israelis, as part of their ongoing ethnic cleansing project, are
revoking the residency rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem who
cannot prove that their “center of life” is in that city, to use
the terms of the Israeli High Court. The Jordanian government has
yet to officially take a position on the Jordanian citizenship
rights of these Jerusalemite Palestinian citizens of Jordan whose
residency in Jerusalem has been revoked by Israel. This is now
another emerging problem.
HJ: You mentioned that yellow card holders have been
facing the revocation of their Jordanian citizenship in recent
years. Can you expand on this?
AK: The main institution that handles this issue
is the Follow-up and Inspection Department (al-mutaba’a wa
al-taftish) of the Jordanian Ministry of Interior. To understand
what’s happening you need to understand that the way Jordanian
citizenship works since 1992 is that every citizen must have a
“national number” (raqam watani). Anyone who does not have this
number is not a citizen.
In recent years, the Follow-up and Inspection Department has been
expanding on the scope of its authority in interpreting the 1988
government regulations dealing with the revocation of Palestinians’
Jordanian citizenship. We need to keep in mind also that these
regulations were never made public, and that in fact no policy, let
alone law, dealing with the revocation of Palestinians’ citizenship
in Jordan has ever officially been made public. Originally, as I
described, 31 July 1988 was treated as a cut-off date, if you were
a green card holder in the West Bank, your citizenship was revoked,
and otherwise you remained a citizen. The Department has since
expanded to the revocation of citizenship from others under other
pretexts.
For instance, many Palestinian citizens of Jordan were able to
acquire Israeli-issued West Bank residency permits through such
procedures as family-reunification since 1967. Of course, part of
Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies manifested as revocation of West
Bank residency permits over the years under various pretexts. For
example, at one point West Bank residency permit holders who were
away from the West Bank for more than three years had their
residency revoked by the Israelis. The Follow-up and Inspection
Department of the Jordanian Interior Ministry has revoked national
numbers (i.e. citizenship) from many Palestinians who had their
West Bank residency permits revoked by the Israelis under the
pretext that these people should have kept these residency permits,
and that the Palestinian should go and get the Israelis to reissue
them their West Bank residency permits.
Another example is that of PLO or Palestinian Authority (PA)
employees. Even though a Jordanian citizen can work for any other
government, many Palestinian citizens of Jordan who have taken jobs
in PA institutions have been stripped of their national numbers. A
more recent example is that of the Jordanian parliamentary
elections [November 2010]. Many of the Palestinians who went to
register as voters were sent to the Follow-up and Inspection
Department where they had their national numbers revoked.
Ultimately, however, it is difficult to discern a particular logic
to the post-1988 revocations. In some cases, one person or group
within the family has their citizenship revoked, while others in
the same family remain citizens. With regards to employment in the
PLO or PA, there are PA parliamentarians and ministers with
Jordanian national numbers, while some Palestinian citizens of
Jordan, for example, have had their citizenship revoked for working
for a PA-owned Company or civil institution. We can only say that
so far it seems very arbitrary. I should also add that this wave of
citizenship revocation means that yellow card holders live with the
perpetual fear of any interaction with the government bureaucracy,
since this could result in being sent to the Follow-up and
Inspection Department and having their citizenship revoked.
HJ: Is there a way to know how many
Palestinians have had their Jordanian citizenship revoked since
1988?
AK: No, these numbers are kept secret by the
Jordanian Ministry of Interior and are not made public. There are
various estimates, but these numbers vary. The most well-known of
these is that of the Human Rights Watch report that stated that
over 2700 Palestinians citizens of Jordan had their citizenship
revoked between 2004 and 2008, but this number is based on a
journalistic article in a Jordanian newspaper, and so, in addition
to not giving information on the years before or after the period,
are not to be taken as authoritative.
HJ: What is the effect of the revocation of citizenship
on the people involved?
AK: They become like the blue-card holders from
the Gaza Strip that I talked about before without the ability to
access any government services, open bank accounts, etc. It should
be mentioned though that there is a potentially very dangerous
situation for Jordan; if this trend continues it will become a
“ghetto state.” When you forfeit a Jordanian’s citizenship and keep
him in Jordan because you don’t have the power to send him to
Palestine—because the Israelis of course refuse—you will end up
with over a million stateless Palestinians within your borders, and
who have nowhere to go.
HJ: Earlier you described the Jordanian law of
citizenship and the various levels of government and judiciary
through which the revocation of citizenship must pass to become
final. Can Palestinians who have had their Jordanian citizenship
revoked make use of what you described as an advanced citizenship
law to challenge the Follow-up and Inspection Department’s
actions?
AK: As I described above, there is no question
that the revocations of citizenship that the Jordanian authorities
have carried out since 1988 contradict the written law and indeed
the constitution. Under the law, the revocation of citizenship must
follow the procedures I spoke about earlier, and are not the
subject to such things as the color of your card or regulations. As
it stands, however, a junior officer of the Follow-up and
Inspection Department can decide the fate of a citizen’s
citizenship rights. It is now a more simple matter to revoke a
yellow card-carrying citizen from his citizenship than it is to
revoke their driving license! With the revocation of a driving
license, the citizen has the right to challenge the revocation in a
court. The Inspection and Follow-up Department is indeed the only
government department that is not subject to judicial review. ||
Advertise kinosalo.org/categories/minet .
The government justifies this by stating that the revocation of
citizenship by this Department is an “act of state.” There is one
judge, Justice Farouq Kilani, who was president of the Jordanian
High Court of Justice who did challenge the government’s position,
and stated that citizenship is a matter regulated by law and not
regulations, and that therefore the actions of the Department are
null and void. As a result of his ruling—this was in 1998—the
Minister of Justice demanded his resignation, and Kilani resigned.
He subsequently gave two public lectures on the topic, and wrote a
book called Independence of the Judiciary, an excellent treatise in
which he describes in detail both his landmark ruling and his
encounter with the Justice Minister. His ruling was very correct,
constitutionally sound and legally unchallenged. The Jordanian
judiciary has a long tradition of reviewing administrative
decisions, including decisions involving citizenship. As it stands
now, the situation in Jordan is very suffocating on this issue of
citizenship revocation because there is no right to appeal since
the government treats these decisions as “acts of state,” and it is
practically impossible to take these issues to an international
court.
It is also important to mention that there is no refugee law in
Jordan. As such, once the citizenship is revoked, the Palestinian
refugee is left with no political, civil or economic rights.
HJ: Besides the position that
citizenship revocation is an “act of state,” how does the Jordanian
government justify stripping its Palestinian citizens of their
citizenship rights and rendering them stateless?
AK: There have been several justifications or
excuses given. Jordanian officials maintain, for example, that the
revocations are designed to force Palestinians to stay in
Palestine, to stop the Zionist leadership from implementing its
ethnic cleansing project. This argument is usually framed within
the paradigm of the “alternative homeland” project, the Israeli
right-wing’s position that Palestinians have a homeland, and this
homeland is Jordan. We do not debate the importance of these goals,
and of full-fledged rejection of the “alternative homeland” project
on all fronts. Mixing this in with the issue of Palestinian
citizenship rights in Jordan is like mixing apples and pears. The
“alternative homeland” is a national issue, and thus should not be
treated solely at the Jordanian level, but through
Jordanian-Palestinian-Arab coordination as an Arab summit item.
Such a political issue should not and cannot be mixed with a human
rights issue such as the rights of Palestinian citizens of Jordan.
Moreover, the people who are fighting the “alternative homeland”
project are the Palestinians themselves who have fought it with
their own bodies in these decades of spilled Palestinian blood.
Actually, if Jordanian officials are sincere about their political
position, they should take more credible action against the
Israelis to force them to leave the Palestinians in peace and to
allow the refugees to return, as is their internationally
recognized right.
Furthermore, as a sovereign state, the Jordanian government could
have taken steps during the negotiation of the Wadi Araba
Israeli-Jordanian peace settlement to insist on such things as
allowing Jordanian citizens to maintain their West Bank residency
permits, and to restore those that had been stripped. As it stands
now, the Jordanian government does not have the power to push for
such a residency permit to be issued to an individual, and so by
stripping them of their Jordanian citizenship, these individuals
are left stranded with nowhere to go. But also as it stands, the
Jordanian government can stop security coordination with Israel,
and can stop the marketing of Israeli products in Jordan. Lately,
the Jordanian Ministry of Industry has allowed the entry of 2500
types of Israeli products into the Jordanian market.
Another justification that Jordanian officials forward is that they
are not revoking citizenship, rather they are “correcting the
situation” of certain individuals who were wrongly classified, that
all they are doing is simply dropping the national number.
“Correcting the situation” is the new catch-phrase you see. They
say this to avoid contradiction of the Follow-up and Inspection
Department’s actions with the law and constitution, but the fact
remains that simply dropping the national number is in effect the
total revocation of citizenship.
HJ: Do you see any way that this situation can be
reversed?
AK: The January 2010 report of Human Rights Watch[2] about the
citizenship revocation raised some awareness both locally, on an
Arab level as well as internationally, but this was short-lived and
has not alleviated the situation. This issue requires an
international campaign of human rights organizations because there
is no venue left to air your grievances. Ultimately, the situation
would best be alleviated by addressing the root-cause of the
situation of these Palestinians, which is the implementation of
Palestinians’ right to return to the lands from which they were
displaced. Until then however, more attention needs to be given to
this thus-far largely-ignored issue, and the Jordanian laws and
constitution need to be respected and implemented by restoring the
citizenship of those whose rights were revoked, and ensuring that
the law is followed in any future case of citizenship
revocation.
---------------------------------
*Anis F. Kassim is an international law
expert and practicing lawyer in Jordan. He was a member of the
Palestinian legal defense team before the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) in the 2004 landmark case on Israel’s separation
wall, and that led to the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory.
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*Hazem Jamjoum is the former
communications officer of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian
Residency and Refugee Rights and editor of al-Majdal.
Endnotes:
[1] See the text of the speech at:
http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/88_july31.html
[2] Human Rights Watch, “Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin
Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality,” Human, January 2010:
http://www.hrw.org/node/87906