It has been widely believed that Jordan was generous to refugees from Palestine by pursuing assimilative policies that help refugees integrate into society while accepting as many refugees as possible. It seems regrettable that Palestinian refugees are no more welcomed nor treated fairly by the Jordanian government. This study argues that this commonly held belief is limited to cases of early settlers in the mid-twentieth century, and that the Jordanian government has had different policies for different refugee groups. This study further explores the political aspects of Jordan’s selective policies and concludes that Jordan’s refugee policies can best be explained through the existence of external security threats.
This article has three aims. First, it aims to explain how media framing forms a central soft power tool utilized by states for the political control of social groups antagonistic to the states’ dominant ideology. For that purpose it addresses Israeli state efforts to penetrate the native Arab community that remained within its borders after the 1948 war, seeking to create submissive ‘quiet Arab’ citizens. Second, it examines the role of Jewish-Arab (Mizrahi) professional opinion-makers in creating and maintaining this framing. Third, it demonstrates that efforts made by states to influence ‘captive audiences’ by media outlets in the global age can be successful only if they meet the needs of the target community.
How do we explore the relationship between the urban poor and large-scale revolutions? What kind of politics do they espouse in such extraordinary times? In this article I narrate the story of the poor people’s struggles for sustenance and citizenship during and after the Arab uprisings, focusing on Egypt and Tunisia. I suggest that while the abject poor and rural migrants avoid direct involvement in large-scale uprisings, the nature of which they do not comprehend, the “middle-class poor,” a product of the neoliberal restructuring, tend to engage in and lead others to these broader revolts. But most take advantage of the collapse of state control to extend their everyday struggles to secure life chances in their immediate environs—neighborhoods and work sites. This is also a time when they engage in extraordinary mobilization and organized protests to demand collective consumption and recognition as legitimate citizens of the city. Yet in the aftermath of the revolutions, when the new elites show their inability or unwillingness to respond to the rising demands, the subaltern retreat to their strategy of “quiet encroachment,” but with new capability and clout.