Across Jordan
Anthony Ham visits the new front line.
From Queen Alia International Airport, the road into Amman, the Jordanian capital, passes by a large billboard. It shows a young girl of perhaps 12 years. The caption, in Arabic and English, reads: 'I am top of my class in geography but I still can't find Palestine on the map.'
The significance of such words is difficult to escape in this country where over 60 per cent of the population is Palestinian - refugees from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Six Day War in 1967 and the 1991 Gulf War. The billboard and Amman itself lie just 50 kilometres from the King Hussein (or Allenby) Bridge, which marks Jordan's border with the Palestinian Territories, and less than 100 kilometres from Ramallah, Hebron, Jerusalem - the battlegrounds of a conflict that has claimed more than 1000 lives and shattered any semblance of a peace process.
At times, however, Amman can seem a million miles from the fighting.
The city, like Rome, was originally built on seven hills, or jebels. With a population approaching two million, Amman now sprawls across 19 hills. Residents of the capital speak openly about two Ammans. Eastern Amman, home to the city's urban poor, is considered more religiously conservative. Its ancient Roman monuments strain under the modern chaos of traffic congestion and jumbled town planning. Western Amman, especially in the leafy suburbs of Shmeisani and Abdoun, stretches out above the downtown area. It is a genteel world apart, with its Western-style cafés, wine bars, galleries of contemporary art and tranquil residential districts. Here, young men and women in the latest Western clothes walk arm in arm on the streets and conduct not-so-secret liaisons in the hang-outs that were once the preserve of Western expatriates. In trendy internet cafés you can find youth magazines jointly put together by Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian writers.
After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War that followed in 1991, as many as 500,000 Palestinians fled the conflict and the Kuwaiti retribution that followed Yasser Arafat's refusal to condemn Iraq. Most of them settled in Amman. The strain on Jordan's resources was inconceivable. But the educated refugees - Palestinians have one of the highest proportions of PhDs of any nation in the world - are now credited with having transformed the city's social fabric. They, along with a new generation of young Jordanians, have led a process by which Amman has become a modern, outward-looking, international city with an unmistakably Arab flavour.
I had last visited Amman in 1998, after two months in the Syrian capital, Damascus, one of the truly great Arab and Islamic cities. Every Damascene stone tells a story of Umayyads, caliphs, Saladin. Although hostility towards Israelis is extremely rare among ordinary Syrians, an awareness of grievance and lost territories seemed to dominate the national debate. Official government newspapers refused even to mention Israel by name, referring to it as the 'Zionist Entity'.
By contrast, Amman lacked the same obvious sense of history. In 1998, I felt alienated by its embrace of the modern and stayed only a few days before hurrying onwards towards another of the great Arab capitals, Cairo. Amman was not what I had imagined; its orientation seemed an affront to the significant events taking place just across the border. High in the upper tiers of Amman's 6000-seat Roman amphitheatre, the centrepiece of ancient Philadelphia, I had sat in discussion with disaffected young Palestinians. One young man, Ahmed, was particularly articulate and angry, but all of them expressed anger that Jordan's 1994 peace treaty with Israel had won nothing for the Palestinian people.
Four years on, I met with Fayez, Ra'ed and Suheil, among many. Two of these young men are Palestinians, sons of refugees. Both have made their home in Jordan and are successful businessmen but still they share the frustrations expressed by Ahmed in 1998 - every Palestinian has an awareness of a homeland lost.
These are men who have profited from Jordan's relative stability flowing from the peace treaty. Yet the overriding emotion is one of bewilderment, sometimes bordering on despair, that the Palestinian people, as victims of occupation, are considered the aggressors, the threat to peace. They ask with disbelief and genuine curiosity how a country that uses assassinations with impunity and without due process of law can be portrayed internationally as the aggrieved party.
Such anger as exists alongside the dismay is complex. These men and other Jordanians and Palestinians with whom I have spoken react to the hardline Israeli Government of Ariel Sharon with scarcely concealed contempt. Yet they welcome Israeli tourists as guests in Jordan with genuine warmth. They are critical of the double standards of the US Government, its supporters and the media, but they overwhelm with kindness the Americans in their midst. And they direct a powerful anger towards Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers whose acts of terrible violence have channelled so easily into the prejudices of a Western world too ready to believe that they - Fayez, Ra'ed and Suheil - are to be feared because they are Muslim.
Not far from Amman, Mt Nebo rises up from the East Bank plateau. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Moses - considered a prophet in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (where he is called Musa) - stood atop this mountain and looked out over the Promised Land. It was a land he would never visit but one in which his people would make their home. Some 4000 years later, the domes, minarets and spires of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Promised Land, can be seen through the haze.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is on record as saying that the Palestinian homeland should be Jordan, not Jerusalem. He is widely believed in diplomatic circles still to prefer a population transfer of this kind and for the Palestinian Territories to become a permanent part of a Greater Israel. The assassinated Israeli Tourism Minister, Rahavan Ze'evi, openly advocated this as the solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict. On their reading of the future, the Palestinian Promised Land lies to the east, not west of Mt Nebo.
Jordan's greatest success thus far has been in transforming itself from a nation largely comprised of disenfranchised refugees into a moderate and modern nation at peace with itself and its neighbours, actively engaged with the world, whether it be Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
The current leadership of both the Palestinians and Israelis were born out of the bloody battles for supremacy of decades past. Sharon and Arafat, bitter enemies to the last. These two old warhorses, each reviled as a terrorist among their opposed peoples, seem unable to understand that violence will not bring victory nor allow their people to enter the hoped-for land of peace.
The future does not belong to these men. A future Israel might, if it looked closely at Jordan, see not the Palestinian Promised Land that Sharon hopes for, but a model for peace with its neighbours led by the new generation of Palestinians. Jordan's Palestinians are living proof that, freed from the alienation fostered by daily occupation and humiliation, the Palestinian people are as capable of peaceful coexistence as any people on earth.
In the meantime, Amman may feel far from the battlefields of Palestine and Israel. But perhaps it is a new front line of a different kind, one critical in convincing Israel that it need not fear.
Anthony Ham is a Eureka Street correspondent.
Graphic by Siobhan Jackson
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