Jon Was Here: Jordan

I was only supposed to be in Jordan for an hour, or the time it takes to take a bus from the airport outside Amman (the capital) to the border with the Palestinian West Bank (NOT Israel). The West Bank is not part of Israel; it is controlled and occupied by Israel. From the border I would take a bus to Jerusalem then another bus to Bethlehem. I was to leave Beirut at sunrise and be in Bethlehem by sunset. It ended up taking me over 36 hours to go 93 miles thanks to the geopolitical implications of the Middle East. After my 6 weeks of study in Lebanon, I had volunteered as an aid worker at a Palestinian refugee camp outside Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. My aid work would last two weeks and then I would fly straight back to Notre Dame. Since Israel and Lebanon are at war there was no direct way to get to Beirut to Bethlehem. My only option was to fly to Amman and crossover into the West Bank by land. Beirut to Amman to Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

I left my apartment in Beirut at 5am and had a bittersweet goodbye to Lebanon as the sun was rising over the mountains to the west. I landed in Amman on time 45 minutes after takeoff. Turns out there are no buses to the border but only to Amman. This wouldn't be too much of a delay since Amman is on the way to the border anyway. I got to Amman and negotiated a fare with a taxi driver to take me straight to the border. I looked in my travel book after we left and it turns out I overpaid him by 10 dinars but whatever; I just wanted to get to Bethlehem. We get to the border 45 minutes later and to my luck it was closed. I never found out why, but borders around Israel and Palestine are prone to random closures at the hint of the smallest security threat. Great. The Israelis were being uptight Jews as usual. The border wouldn't reopen til the next morning. I tried to argue with the taxi driver (Arabic of course) to give me a discount since he was driving back to Amman anyway, border open or closed. He only relented when I told him I was a poor minority college student. So we got back to Amman and I had to find a hotel. I found a great place downtown thanks to my travel book. So I inadvertently ended up with time to explore Amman, capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

After visiting the great Arab capitals of antiquity, Damascus in Syria and Cairo in Egypt, Amman in Jordan doesn't really impress. It has its fair share of old Roman/Byzantium sights and ruins but they really don't compare. Amman itself is fairly Westernized and modern... but unlike Beirut there's no character to the place. Amman to me, at least after all my travels in the Mideast, seemed generic and bland. Nice but nothing special. Central and South Jordan, on the other hand, is where it's at and is actually probably the 2nd most visited tourist spot in the Middle East. I was confined to the capital since I needed to get to Palestine so I'd have to save trips to those regions for another time. News reporters put it best when they nicknamed the country, "The Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom." But on a more positive note, besides the aforementioned connotation of that nickame, Jordan is widely known as the most stable country in the entire Middle East. The royal family (who claims descendency from the Prophet Muhammad) enjoys widespread support, both from Jordanians and from the West, for its wise handling of various crises throughout Jordanian history that threatened the peace and stability of the nation (1948 War, 1967 War, Black September 1970-1, 1973 War, Gulf War 1990-1, Peace with Israel 1994, Al-Qaeda bombings 2005, etc.)

Anyway I left Amman early the next morning and got to the border. I wasn't surprised to see it full of Arab families trying to get into Palestine. The border is controlled by the Israelis even though the West Bank wasn't annexed by Israel in 1967. Palestinians have no control over their borders; just one of the results of living under occupation. It took me 7 hours to cross the border. The Israelis didn't like my visa stamps from Iran/Syria/Lebanon or my Hezbollah stuff in my bag. They took me into a separate room and questioned me twice. The UN imposed a demilitarized zone between the two nations because although the Jordanians signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994 (probably under large US pressure, who is a strong ally with Jordan), it doesn't exactly mean they no longer harbor bitterness towards Israel's existence or its human rights violations of Palestinians. Peace in this context simply just means the absence of war, or as Ambrose Bierce put it, "in international affairs, [peace is] a period of cheating between two periods of fighting."