As borders and peoples began to settle following the formal creation of Israel, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) in collaboration with the Jordanian government established in 1952 the Jabal el-Hussien Palestinian refugee camp North West of Amman. Now, over fifty years later, the Jabal el-Hussien refugee camp has significantly grown and become a fluid, indistinguishable part of Amman.
The area is evidently poor and underdeveloped, but no wires, walls, or visible signs separate these people from the rest. The streets are swarming with shoppers, vendors, and cars, and in the heat of the day their denseness is acutely felt. Every Middle Eastern item imaginable is for sale in the stores, from dusty household goods, to colored scarves, to an abundance of fly friendly fruits and vegetables. Alleys leading away from the main market allude to rows and rows of housing hastily constructed in the same sand stone color that covers all Amman. I would never have known without prior knowledge that the narrow, trash strewn streets that I walked along do not tell the same history as the rest of Amman.
Jabal el-Hussien is now the fourth largest of the ten refugee camps created in Jordan. The original 421,000 square-metres allotted for the camp housed 8,000 refugees in makeshift, temporary tents. As the years passed and the population grew, the UNRWA in the late 50s and 60s began providing more durable dwellings and services for these displaced Palestinian people. Starting in the 1980s, the Jordanian government allotted residents permits to replace their metal shelters with brick buildings suitable for a permanent residence. As of March 2009, the UNRWA for Palestine Refugees in the Near East accommodates over 29,000 Registered Refugees in the Jabal el-Hussien area by administering relief and social service programs, as well as four elementary/preparatory schools for over 2,000 students.
While three refugee camps were created in Jordan following the 1948 War, four more were needed after the 1967 Six Day War, during which Jordan lost control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem area. Today these ten camps provide assistance to 337,571 registered refugees; UNRWA began its operations in 1950 to accommodate 750,000 Palestinian refugees and today 4.6 million Palestinians qualify for service. The land upon which the camps were built has been leased from the Jordanian government, leaving the people powerless if at any point the government chooses to relocate them away from their permanently constructed homes.
In Jordan, sometimes it seems that almost everyone is in someway of Palestinian descent, a figure commonly placed at about 70 percent. It is not surprising, then, that the historic refugee areas and people have become so integrated into the country. While the Jordanian government has granted full citizenship to all Palestinian refugees (despite reports this summer of revocations), for some there still exists a divide between them and the “original†Jordanians. Yet Jordanians will proudly tell you that Jordan has been the best country in the region to the Palestinian people. I once asked a woman who identified herself as Palestinian whether she would move to a Palestinian state were one to be created. She hesitated, and responded that she wasn’t sure, as her life, her friends, all she had known were here in Jordan…
