Contemporary Review of the Middle East
Postage
stamps, as historian Kimberly Katz asserts, offer visual evidence of a
country’s history and depict events that are deemed worthy of visual
commemoration and “reflect ideologies, aspirations and values, attesting to
political, social and cultural ideas and aesthetic tastes”. Although not
regarded as a scholarly discipline to the historian, postage stamps, as Donald
Reid observes, “are excellent primary sources for the symbolic messages which
governments seek to convey to their citizens and the world”. Indeed, King
Hussein introduced the hobby of stamp collecting to Jordanians when he assumed
the throne in 1953, and Jordanian stamps have historical significance because
they are considered a record of the kingdom’s political, cultural, economic,
and social development. Thus, Jordanian stamp depictions of maps of the West
Bank are an interesting case study to better understand the kingdom’s attitudes
and policies toward the West Bank, which it ruled from 1948 until 1967. Jordan
continued to assert sovereignty claims on the West Bank after Israel’s
occupation of the land in 1967, after the 1974 Arab League decision to
recognize the PLO as “the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian
people” and until King Hussein’s disengagement decision in 1988 to sever all
legal and administrative ties to the West Bank.1
Jordanian
postage stamps normally depict the West Bank as Jordanian territory. Sometimes
the West Bank is demarcated as an occupied or disputed territory with Israel,
which conquered the land during the 1967 war. Distinguishing the West Bank from
Jordan can also imply bitter or tense relations with the Palestinians after
tragedies such as Black September (1970–1971) and the assassination of
Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tall (1971). Concurrently, Jordanian
commemorative stamps of Palestine show the West Bank as part of Palestine by
featuring the West Bank along with the rest of land from the Jordan River to
the Mediterranean Sea as it existed during the British Mandate (1922–1948).
Although other Arab countries also issued commemoratives of Palestine,
Jordanian stamps contain a deeper significance because Jordan was the only Arab
country to assert sovereignty claims over a part of Palestine (West Bank).
Curiously, Jordanian stamps stopped showing the West Bank as part of Jordan in
August 1985, three years before King Hussein’s disengagement decision and
several years before Jordanian media and textbooks stopped showing the land as
part of Jordan.2
This
analysis attempts to chronicle Jordanian postage stamp portrayals of maps of
the West Bank from their first inception in 1952 until their last inclusion in
1985. In doing so, this study aims to explain the kingdom’s dynamic and
multi-dimensional attitude toward the West Bank, which varied depending on
historical events as an integral part of the Hashemite Kingdom, to an
Israeli-occupied land, to a territorial dispute with the PLO, while also
occasionally acknowledging through commemoratives that the West Bank had been
part of central Palestine and therefore was a Palestinian land. This analysis
also explores why Jordanian postage stamps stopped depicting the West Bank on
maps in 1985, three years before Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank.
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