Read the original statement in Arabic.
After a Jordanian State Security Court criminally convicted five young men, accusing them of attempting to carry out a Palestinian resistance action against Zionist forces in occupied Jerusalem and sentencing them to five years in prison, Mohammed Khatib, Europe coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, harshly condemned the trial and the system responsible for it. He said that this conviction is a “stab in the side of the Palestinian and Jordanian people who have fallen in the struggle to defend Palestine.”
The five were accused of a felony “threat of violence” and brought before military judges, with charges pursued against them by the State Security Prosecutor. State security courts and “terrorism” charges have been used on multiple occasions to criminalize Jordanians and Palestinians for alleged involvement with the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. Such “anti-terror” policies have nothing to do with protecting the interests or security of Jordanians or Palestinians, but only serve the interests of U.S. imperialism – a powerful backer of the Jordanian regime – and its strategic partner, the Israeli occupation.
In his statement, Khatib emphasized that this step clarifies the “functional role of this reactionary regime in protecting the occupation, its ‘borders’ and its interests from the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. There is no hope for this reactionary system except to dismantle it.” He noted the role of the Jordanian regime and its security apparatus in thwarting any joint Jordanian-Palestinian action to confront the occupation, inside and outside Jordan, which shares the longest border with occupied Palestine.
“The Jordanian people are bound together with the Palestinian people through history, land and blood. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine deserves a principled Jordanian national position that stands with the Arab people to confront Zionism, the Israeli state and U.S. imperialism,” Khatib affirmed.
He also denounced the projects of security collaboration between the Israeli occupation, the Jordanian regime and the Palestinian Authority, noting that these take place with the blessing of the king and of PA officialdom, under the auspices of the owners of banks and the big bourgeoisie on both sides of the Jordan river. “This dangerous project that threatens the future of both Palestine and Jordan must be defeated,” Khatib affirmed.
Khatib urged Jordanian organizers and youth activists to take a stand and reject all attempts to criminalize the resistance in various forms, urging that the Jordanian regime “should not be allowed to continue targeting the resistance without real mass popular pressure to bring an end to the Wadi’ Araba agreement and all associated deaals based on trading the rights of the Palestinian and the Jordanian people to colonization, Zionism and imperialism.”
