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JERASH, Jordan — Izzaat Al-Hindi trudged down a passageway of the Jerash Refugee Camp, navigating potholes, garbage piles and drab, dilapidated buildings. He still remembers the day his family fled here from Gaza, almost 57 years ago.
“I didn’t want to come. I jumped out of the car three times. My parents had to chase me down,” the 73-year-old recalled. “It’s like I knew even then what was waiting for us here. I wish we died in Gaza instead.”
As President Trump proposes forcibly relocating as many as 2 million Palestinians from Gaza Strip into ramshackle camps like this one, many of the some 35,000 refugees in Jerash have a message for their brethren.
“I told my relatives still in Gaza: ‘Don’t come,’ ” the white-bearded Al-Hindi said. “Even with the Israeli bombings and everything else, it’s better there.”
Earlier this month, Trump said Gaza was no longer livable after 16 months of Israeli bombardment, and that Jordan and Egypt would need to take in Gaza residents while the U.S. takes charge of the enclave. Trump has said Gaza could become the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Jordan, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world rejected any such displacement, even as Trump as hinted he might cut off aid to Washington’s top Arab allies if they did not bend to his will.
King Abdullah of Jordan has proposed that Arab nations present an alternative rebuilding plan, though one has not yet been finalized.
King Abdullah II dodges questions about President Trump’s plan to relocate Gazans to Jordan.
Meanwhile, Trump’s proposal has sparked fury from all quarters of Jordan’s society, with many considering it nothing less than an existential crisis facing the kingdom.
Jordan already hosts the world’s largest population of Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations, many of them arriving in 1948 after Israel’s creation, but also in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt.
Decades later, Palestinians have become an integral part of Jordan society, numbering some 2.39 million in this tiny desert kingdom of 11 million people and forming a hybrid identity that, though Jordanian, retains deep links to families in the West Bank and Gaza.
It’s created a fraught relationship with Jordan’s long-standing families and tribes hailing from the east bank of the Jordan River.
The Hashemite monarchy has also viewed Palestinian activism as a threat. King Hussein, father to Abdullah, fought a pitched battle against the Palestinian Liberation Organization that led to the group’s ouster from the country in 1970. Jordan’s security services have long feared radicalization in the 10 Palestinian refugee camps spread around the kingdom.
Refugees from Gaza have always stood apart. In 1968, Some 11,500 were brought to Jerash, a few miles from the city’s magnificent Roman ruins. In the years since, the 1,500 tents that housed them have hardened into more permanent structures.
The eastern province of Deir al-Zour, which remains divided between Syria’s new government and a Kurdish-backed militia, is a hostage to competing ambitions.
Unlike other Palestinians in the country, most people here never received Jordanian citizenship, vastly complicating their ability to access basic services such as healthcare and education, and forbidding them from owning the rickety homes they stay in. Those who manage to get the necessary qualifications or education are nevertheless limited to the types of jobs to which they can apply, and even those require a work permit — a cost few can bear.
“It costs hundreds of dollars. So how can I afford that without a salary?” asked Feras, a 25-year-old who gave only his first name. “I can’t even get a cellphone line, let alone a job.”
Playing with his infant daughter in front of the two-room home he shared with his three children, wife and parents, Feras said he hadn’t been officially employed in years and was barely making ends meet with odd jobs in nearby farms.
“Here, we all get married young and just start having babies — there’s nothing else to do,” he said.
Ayman Bakkar, who serves as the chief of UNRWA’s office in northern Jordan, said more than half of residents in the Jerash Refugee Camp are unemployed.
“It’s the poorest and the most overcrowded camp in the country,” he said.
Over the decades, Jordan has sheltered many other foreigners fleeing nearby violence, be it Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans or Yemenis. As a result, Jordan has little appetite for another wave of Palestinian displacement, said Oraib Al-Rantawi, an Amman-based analyst who leads the Al-Quds Center for Political Studies.
“The position for everyone here — whether Jordanians of Palestinian origin or east bank Jordanians — is that Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine for Palestinians,” he said. “Changing that will cause internal strife from all sides.”
When Abdullah returned home from a meeting in Washington last week with Trump, thousands of Jordanians lined the streets, raising placards articulating what has since become known as Jordan’s “three no’s”: No to Palestinian displacement; no to Jordan being the alternative homeland for Palestinians; and no to abandoning the Palestinian cause.
At the same time, the government must tread carefully: It relies on the largesse of Washington, which pays roughly $1.45 billion into state coffers and $425 million more in military assistance.
Washington gets much in return, said Jawad al-Anani, a Jordanian commentator and former economics minister. Aside from a defense cooperation agreement that allows U.S. forces to operate in the country, Jordan has been a steadfast partner against terrorism groups in Syria and in countering Iranian influence in the region. Last year, it scrambled fighter jets when Iran launched ballistic missiles against Israel.
“That aid didn’t come for free and Jordan does a lot,” Al-Anani said. He added that “cooperating with Trump on this would make Jordan an accessory to the crime of forced displacement. And all this to help a right-wing Israeli government? Why?”
Back at the Jerash Refugee Camp, Nimr Rmeilat, an octogenarian sitting with friends in a yard smoking a water pipe, said he and others would wait and see what plan Arab nations would come up with. But he predicted it wouldn’t matter to his relatives in Gaza.
“If you see Trump,” he said, “tell him Gazans are the world’s most stubborn people. They’re not going anywhere.”
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