To follow on from my previous post re Palestinians in the West Bank - while all eyes are on Gaza, Jordan is pulling the rug out from under the feet of Palestinians there.
More than half of the 6.3 million population of Jordan is of Palestinian origin-that is, from areas west of the River Jordan, including the West Bank, today's Israel, and Gaza.
With the exception of persons from Gaza, the vast majority of those persons of Palestinian origin have Jordanian citizenship.
However, since 1988, and especially over the past few years, the Jordanian government has been arbitrarily and without notice withdrawing Jordanian nationality from its citizens of Palestinian origin, making them stateless
For many of them this means they are again stateless Palestinians as they were before 1950.
So far, Jordan has withdrawn its nationality from thousands of its citizens of Palestinian origin-over 2,700 between 2004 and 2008 alone. It has done so, in the individual cases Human Rights Watch identified, in an arbitrary manner and in violation of Jordan's nationality law of 1954. Under that law Palestinian residents of the West Bank in 1949 or thereafter received full Jordanian nationality following Jordan's incorporation of the West Bank in April 1950.
Where is the outcry from the UK pro-palestinian supporters, I wonder ?
The reason may be Jordan's desire to be able to rid itself of hundreds of thousands of Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin whom Jordan could then forcibly return to the West Bank or Israel as part of a settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem caused by the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars.
Anyone who has visited Jordan will have seen the "tent city" stretching down the East Bank of the River Jordan as far as the eye can see.
This info can be checked at Human Rights Watch.