“I do not want to stay in Jordan. There is no future for me here.”
Hamza was adamant that Jordan was only temporary for him on our walk to retrieve bread in downtown Amman. Hamza isn’t originally from Jordan but got his degree here and is now a software engineer.
I met Hamza outside a restaurant run by volunteers. He was playing chess with a sign that challenged anyone to a match. He would buy you a drink if you lasted more than 10 minutes; if you won, he would cover a meal. If he won, it was simply a good game. As an adamant Chess.com lover myself, I was intrigued. Soon enough, he was teaching me each piece’s name in Arabic as we laughed at the discrepancy between our languages. It was a lovely evening, and I felt as though I could stay here forever. On the walk after, he explained why he felt completely differently.
Hamza talked about how he could not feel settled in Jordan because of how difficult it was to find a secure job. He felt as though, “everyone was a software engineer, but there is only so much software to engineer”. Hamza is not the only one that does not feel that Jordan is the end goal. From our coworkers at ILearn to a man working on his small farm near the Palestinian border, seemingly everyone we met has multiple national identities. At PeaceWadi, we met a man named Abu Faraz who was Palestinian but had to move to Jordan when he was a teenager. Every day, Abu sits on his porch and stares in the distance where he can see Jericho, his birthplace. Abu has built an NGO to catalyze exchange between cultures through ecotourism in Jordan. But it is obvious that his heart still belongs to Palestine. Abu isn’t the only one, more than half of Jordanians are of Palestinian origin. To speak about Jordanian identity inherently means to speak about Palestinian justice.
In a weird way, it reminds me of America. The hyper-focus on identity in America is like no other. Everyone is not ~just~ American and our media highlights how we are all different from each other. Although the Jordanian culture is not as rooted in non-nationality identities, talking about national identity in Jordan requires political expression. Although a lot about Jordan is foreign to me, the politicization of identities is very domestic. I empathize with how an individual’s relationship with their identity can dictate how they express themselves and what they decide to pursue. Daoud Kuttab devoting his entire life to journalism as a way to fight for Palestinian justice while simultaneously living in Jordan for many years is an example of this. How the government positions itself versus the stories I have heard from residents is particularly interesting to me.
Transit state is a common term found in refugee policy literature used to describe states that have policies that incentivize refugees to only temporarily stay in that state. Jordanian refugee policies in many ways encourage temporary settlement. It is difficult for a refugee that does not already have citizenship to establish job security, health care is dependent on certain identity cards, etc. But, Jordan is not really a transit state. Jordan has a unique history with Palestinians, has the second-largest Syrian refugee population, and is facing unemployment issues for their own citizens. 33.1% of the Jordanian population are considered international migrants. The feeling of not being just Jordanian is prominent and the fight for Palestinian justice is felt strongly all around Jordan. However, Jordan is not temporary. I truly wonder what it will mean to be Jordanian in fifty years and how/if the government and its policies will reflect it accurately.
This post doesn’t feel complete and I am not even sure if I answered the prompt entirely. But weirdly, that feels fitting for a topic about the nuance of Jordanian identity and the meaning of Palestinian justice.
