Precarious, Not Permanent: The Status Held by Palestinian Jerusalemites (Pt. 1)

Status:the legal position of a person, group, or country ~ Oxford Learner’s Dictionary

Under international law, when the British terminated their Mandate on May 14, 1948, and withdrew from the country, Palestinians who had been citizens under the Mandate should have automatically acquired the nationality of the state that arose in its place.6 Indeed, under the proposed 1947 UN Partition Plan, the three envisaged entities—one Arab state with an overwhelming majority of Arabs; one Jewish state with a bare majority of Jews; and a UN-administered City of Jerusalem with a near-equal number of Arabs and Jews—would each have been required to grant citizenship to all their permanent residents, regardless of ethnic origin, in accordance with international law.7 

However, that is not what happened. Rather, their British-issued Palestinian passports became invalid, and Israel subsequently passed legislation that retroactively denationalized all Palestinians who had either left the country (by force or out of fear) or remained and came under Israel’s control in 1948.8 Their citizenship was literally abrogated, and they were made stateless. This was a violation of international law (see Palestinians’ Historic and Legal Rights to Nationality).9

Since Israel’s establishment on May 15, 1948, for most Palestinian Jerusalemites, their legal status has been determined by Israel and Jordan, unless they happen to have citizenship in another country. In 1948, Israel conquered West Jerusalem. Almost all of the tens of thousands of Palestinians in that part of the city and the surrounding villages—who until that point had been citizens of Palestine—either fled under duress of war or were driven out; many to the eastern side of the city, the rest of the West Bank, and beyond to neighboring countries including Jordan, Lebanon, and others (see The West Side Story).10 Israel subsequently declared them as “absentees,” in accordance with Israel's Absentees’ Property Law of 5710–1950.11 The state seized their properties and their financial assets and transferred them to a newly established Custodian of Absentee Property, which was then authorized to decide what to do with it and ultimately transferred these Palestinian assets to Jewish use, both private and public.12 Thus Palestinians who had formerly lived in West Jerusalem (many of whom ended up in Jordanian-held Jerusalem after the war) found themselves stateless, homeless, and penniless.

However, Israel failed to conquer the eastern side of the city, and therefore Jerusalem was split in half for the next 19 years. During this period, the legal status of Palestinians on the eastern side of the city was derived from Jordan, which had annexed it. As detailed below, in the late 1980s, shifting regional winds caused Jordan to eventually “disown” the West Bank and retract nationality from Palestinians who originated from there, leaving them stateless once again.

Meanwhile, after Israel conquered the eastern part of the city in 1967 and Jordan retreated, Palestinian Jerusalemites in those areas came under the control of Israel, which conferred upon them only a conditional status as permanent residents and tried in myriad ways to limit the number who would be entitled even to that status.

After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established, but its authority to confer status on Palestinians was both geographically and legally limited by the terms of the agreements. Thus, a full appreciation of the highly precarious legal status of Palestinian Jerusalemites requires a historical recounting of the evolution of their status vis-à-vis Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel.

In the period of the 1948 War and the catastrophe that it brought upon Palestinians, at least 70,000 to 100,000 Palestinians fled to Jordan (East Bank), which itself had only gained independence two years earlier and had a population of 433,000.13 

Palestinians therefore came to comprise a significant part of Jordan’s population. In fact, today, more than half of Jordan’s population is originally from Palestine.14 In the newly divided city, Palestinians who found themselves under Jordanian rule on the city’s east side were granted Jordanian citizenship only on December 13, 1949, when King Abdullah of Jordan passed an amendment of the 1928 Law of Nationality and granted Jordanian citizenship for residents of the West Bank, including Arab (East) Jerusalem.15 

The connection between Jordan and the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem was growing. In December 1948, a conference of 1,000 leaders from all over Palestine met in Jericho and voted unanimously to request unity with Jordan.16 Such was the affinity that the structure of the Jordanian parliament was even changed to guarantee that half of the seats in a newly expanded lower house would be reserved for Palestinians from the West Bank and Jerusalem. The union of central Palestine and Jordan (or the “East Bank” of the Jordan River with the “West Bank,” referred to as the “Unification of the Two Banks”) was ratified unanimously on April 24, 1950, when Jordan annexed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and provided a pathway for full Jordanian nationality for Palestinians.17

In 1954, Jordan amended its Nationality Law to extend Jordanian citizenship to Palestinian refugees living in the country. Specifically, Article 3 conferred nationality upon, among others, “Any person who, not being Jewish, possessed Palestinian nationality before 15 May 1948 and was a regular resident in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan between 20 December 1949 and 16 February 1954.”18

By 1967, on the eve of the war, 47 percent of Jordan’s population lived in the West Bank, and Palestinians had both benefited from citizenship and contributed in fundamental ways to the country’s development.19

In 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip,20 and Jordan’s annexation came to an end. However, while Palestinian Jerusalemites’ status under Israel changed to that of permanent residents (see below), they were largely allowed to maintain their Jordanian citizenship, which was important as most had no other type of citizenship.

At the same time, Jordan faced an influx of 400,000 Palestinians “internally displaced” from the West Bank (including about 175,000 who were refugees from the 1948 War).21 In fact, at a certain point in the late 1960s, Palestinian-origin Jordanians outnumbered the “original” East Bank Jordanian population, leading to tensions.

After the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, and Palestinian nationalist ideology began to take shape, its growing sphere of influence in Jordan and its cross-border retaliatory raids against Israel caused increasing concern. Ultimately, this erupted in a civil war known as Black September (Aylul al-Aswad) between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the armed wing of the PLO. By July 1971, Jordan had expelled the PLO fighters from the country and signed an agreement with PLO leader Yasser Arafat to regularize their presence in Jordan. After this, the government undertook a wide-scale purge of the bureaucracy and the military, with the aim of ridding them of elements, mostly Palestinian, that supported the Palestinian forces. These events were a turning point toward the development of a distinct Jordanian identity.22

On June 1, 1983, Jordan began requiring Palestinians of West Bank (including Jerusalem) origin to obtain a “crossing card” that was issued at the Allenby Bridge before they entered Jordan. There were two classes of cards, each with very different status and implications (Table 1):23

East Bank Jordanians who were not of Palestinian origin were not included in this card system and were considered bona fide citizens. Thus, as of June 1, 1983, three classes were created:

• Jordanian citizens (Jordanian origin)
• West Bankers of Palestinian origin who were full Jordanian citizens
• West Bankers of Palestinian origin who were only entitled to temporary status in Jordan

Note that a good number of Palestinian Jerusalemites, especially those who frequently traveled back and forth to Jordan, fell into the second class—perhaps as many as one-third.24 But many more fell in the third class. They could apply for a temporary passport at a West Bank Jordanian passport office. The passport is identical in appearance to the actual Jordanian passport, except that it has no national identity number, which is the critical requisite for bona fide citizenship.25 Essentially it is a mere travel document and does not grant the holder any rights or status.

In July 1988, six months into the First Intifada, Jordan severed all its legal, administrative, and financial ties (faq irtibat) with the West Bank, renouncing responsibility for it and ceding its claims to the West Bank to the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.26 Therefore, those who were eligible for yellow cards remained Jordanian citizens, but those eligible for green cards became Palestinians with no status in Jordan. For the most part, the former category included Palestinians of West Bank origin (including Jerusalemites) who resided in the East Bank, while the latter included those living in the West Bank or a third country.27 Indeed, Article 2 of Jordan’s official disengagement instructions reads: “Every person residing in the West Bank before the date of 31/7/1988 will be considered as a Palestinian and not as a Jordanian.”28 An estimated one to one-and-a-half million Palestinians overall were stripped of national rights and citizenship in this way.29

Overnight, unless they held citizenship elsewhere, Palestinian Jerusalemites along with all other Palestinians of West Bank origin became stateless, in contravention of international law and in a stroke of fate that echoed eerily with the earlier watershed of 1948. According to international law lawyer Anis al-Kassem, interviewed by BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights:

During and after the Gulf War, when Iraq invaded, occupied, and annexed neighboring Kuwait, and Yasser Arafat aligned with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in its claim to Kuwait, the nearly 400,000 Palestinians living in Kuwait were profoundly affected.34 They began leaving the country in waves—before, during, and after the occupation.35 Those in the first two waves formed the majority, and after the war they were prevented from returning. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, the Kuwaiti leadership embarked on a sustained months-long effort to encourage or force the remaining Palestinians to leave the country:

By the early 2000s, the rate of those losing their Jordanian citizenship or green cards was increasing. In a report published in 2010, Human Rights Watch reported that between 2004 and 2008, over 2,700 Palestinian-origin Jordanians had had their nationality withdrawn. According to the report, hundreds of thousands were affected.

Furthermore, those affected were not given notice in a timely fashion. Withdrawal of nationality for green cardholders was typically done in a backhanded and arbitrary manner, generally in the midst of some other bureaucratic encounter. The report states: