Talk:Demographics of Jordan

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How can one estimate the life expectancy for females to be 80 years, when the population over the age of 65 is leas then 4%

[edit] Judenrein law

This was removed from the article: The policy of Great Britain forbidding Jews to reside or buy land East of Jordan river (invoking their legal right to "postpone or Withold application of the Mandate in the territories east of the Jordan river" with regard to Jewish settlement) was ratified by Jordan’s law number 6 section 3 on April 3, 1954, and reactivated in law number 7 section 2, on April 1, 1963. It states that any Palestinian may become a citizen of Jordan unless he/she is a Jew. This legislation remains valid today.

Source: [1]: 2. Turning a blind eye to article 15, Britain also decided that no Jews would reside or could buy land in the newly created emirate. This policy was ratified — after the emirate became a kingdom — by the Jordanian Nationality Law No. 6, section 3 (Official Gazette, N° 1171, of 16 February 1954), amended to section 2 (Official Gazette, N° 1675 of 1 April 1963), which states that a Jew may not become a citizen of Jordan. King Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, but this 'Judenrein' legislation remains valid in Jordan today.

What was the basis for removal, not even moving to talk page? Please restore. ←Humus sapiens←Talk 17:59, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I should have removed it to Talk, sorry for being lazy. Now to address the contents. The mentioned clause of the 1954 Nationality Law was designed to grant Jordanian citizenship to Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, and also to Palestinians living in the West Bank (then claimed as part of Jordan). The original text reads:

Any person with previous Palestinian nationality except the Jews before the date of May 14, 1948 residing in the Kingdom during the period from December 20, 1949 and February 16, 1954 is a Jordanian citizen.

From this we can see that Jews were explicitly excluded from invoking their Palestinian nationality pre-1948 (this nationality was a formal concept of the British Mandate) to claim automatic citizenship of Jordan. Why this exclusion was present is unclear since as far I know there were no Jews at all residing in Jordan during the stated 1949-1954 period, but maybe there were a handful. The clause says nothing at all about other Jews and certainly doesn't say that Jews in general are barred from citizenship; it just says that a certain (very small or empty) group of Jews are not given citizenship automatically.

In other words, your source (which is based on an article of David Littman available here) seems to be incorrect. Littman's article contains only a few claims that are literally false, but the presentation and especially the choice of what information to omit makes it quite propagandistic. Incidentally a law which explicitly stated that "Jews cannot become citizens" would be a direct violation of the Jordanian constitution - that doesn't prove there is no such law, but such claims need proof. Of course there is probably an effective bar in practice regardless of the law, just as there is in Israel for non-Jews who have no family connections with Israelis. --Zero 10:35, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

In support I will bring a quotation from Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan by Joseph A. Massad (Columbia University Press, 2001) p40:
These laws were amended in 1954. The Law of Jordanian Nationality, which replaced all former laws related to the question of nationality, stresses that Jordanians are those who became Jordanians in accordance with the Nationality Law of 1928 and the addendum Law of 1949. In addition to adding new stipulations for naturalization, this law adds one more criterion designed to include and exclude different categories of people. On the one hand, article 3 of this law wants to include those Palestinians (holding Palestinian nationality before May 15, 1948) who arrived in the country after the enactment of the 1949 law (whether from Israel or the neighboring Arab countries to which they fled or had been expelled), while simultaneously excluding application of this law to Jews who before the war resided in those parts of Palestine that came under Jordanian jurisdiction. It must be noted that the 1949 addendum did not exclude Jews. As Transjordan did not have any Jewish population, the exclusion of Jews in 1954 was an attempt to thwart Zionist efforts for colonial settlement in Jordan and Zionist claims for Jewish-owned lands in the country, which were being asserted in the fifties.

Another claim I deleted is the one that said that most Jordanians are Palestinians. This is very contentious. According to the Jordanian classification, only Arabs who came from West of the Jordan (and their descendants) are called Palestinians; these are about half the population but no exact figures exist. Very large percentages like those Littman give are computed using the formula of "Jordan is in Palestine, therefore Arabs living in Jordan pre-1948 are Palestinians" regardless of whether either Jordan or those Arabs themselves regard them to be Palestinians. So the claim of a large percentage belongs to the polemical debate and cannot be stated without qualification as if it is a plain fact. --Zero 10:35, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Semitic Levantines?

This characterization doesn't exist and is perhaps mostly untrue. --Inahet 01:47, 19 March 2006 (UTC)