AMMAN, 20 January 2008 — Jordan, home to about 1.9 million Palestinian refugees, was this week the scene for deep disappointment over US President George W Bush’s remarks supportive of Jewish Israel and his unequivocal denial of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes which they deserted upon Israel’s foundation in 1948.
Bush’s suggestion that the refugees be compensated for their properties instead of allowing them to return to their homes in Israel also drew sharp reactions from the refugees themselves and from members of the Amman-based Palestine National Council (PNC), an equivalent to a Palestinian Parliament-in-exile.
“Bush’s proposal is tantamount to a new Balfour Declaration,” PNC Deputy Speaker Tayseer Qubaa told Arab News on Friday. He referred to a 1917 document that was included in a letter sent by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to leader of the British Jewish Community, Walter Rothschild, expressing the backing of Britain, as a UN trustee power, for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
“The US president’s exclusion of the return of Palestinian refugees and his call for amending the armistice line to ensure annexation of Jewish settlements to Israel virtually derailed the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations before they started,” he said.
The ongoing talks, which were launched by Bush at the November conference in Annapolis, Maryland, are supposed to cover all core issues, including the refugees question in the run-up for the conclusion of a peace pact between the Palestinians and Israel before the end of 2008.
“I believe that any peace agreement between them will require mutually agreed adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949 to reflect current realities and to ensure that the Palestinian state is viable and contiguous,” Bush declared in Jerusalem at the outset of his Middle East tour.
“I believe we need to look to the establishment of a Palestinian state and new international mechanisms, including compensation, to resolve the refugee issue,” he added. Bush’s statement and the escalating Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip drew angry reactions on Wednesday from both pro-government and opposition lawmakers at the lower house of Parliament.
Deputies, who charged that the US president had given the “green light” to Israel to kill more Palestinians in the territory, demanded that the government summon the US and Israeli ambassadors in Amman to hand them official protests over Bush’s remarks.
Islamists went further to urge the government to recall the Jordanian ambassador from Israel as a first step toward the rupture of diplomatic ties between the two countries, which concluded a peace pact in 1994.
