Interesting piece by a Jordanian-born man.
Bright September
ABE HAAK
July 8, 2014
In the Spring of 1970, I was attending Al-Kindi middle school in Zarqa, Jordan, a large town northeast of Amman. One Sunday, the first day of the school week, the principal interrupted our math lesson by asking the teacher to usher the whole class out to an unannounced festival. Excitement filled all of us as we shoved tattered textbooks into our sacks and scrambled out of the classroom. We, and the rest of the student body, were then all marched to a dusty field a few blocks away where a large crowd of other students and adults had assembled. Flags of Palestine and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) with banners proclaiming Revolution Until Victory were draped all around. Martial music played on tinny loudspeakers. We milled about in the bright sun for what seemed several hours while, in the far corner of the field, awards were being granted to teenagers in army green fatigues. Then we went home.
The very following week, the same thing happened, except that this time we were taken to the Rex movie theatre nearby and watched several men give speeches in the un-air-conditioned space for over two hours under DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Chinese flags.
This was not part of the regular curriculum, of course. In each case a few armed men from those organizations had walked into the principals office and asked him to volunteer his school for participation in these events. He complied, because he had no choice. The Jordanian state apparatus had by then essentially disappeared from the municipality as a result of months of concerted and systematic provocations, threats, and attacks from the PLOs numerous factions. Armed men, sometimes local but often not, ruled entire districts and neighborhoods. They collected donations of money, food, and appliances, such as radios and binoculars. They enforced whimsical curfews and organized spontaneous demonstrations. They settled accounts with old rivals. And they fired in the air whenever they got excited, which was often.
Read more:
Bright September | Abe Haak | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel
Bright September
ABE HAAK
July 8, 2014
In the Spring of 1970, I was attending Al-Kindi middle school in Zarqa, Jordan, a large town northeast of Amman. One Sunday, the first day of the school week, the principal interrupted our math lesson by asking the teacher to usher the whole class out to an unannounced festival. Excitement filled all of us as we shoved tattered textbooks into our sacks and scrambled out of the classroom. We, and the rest of the student body, were then all marched to a dusty field a few blocks away where a large crowd of other students and adults had assembled. Flags of Palestine and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) with banners proclaiming Revolution Until Victory were draped all around. Martial music played on tinny loudspeakers. We milled about in the bright sun for what seemed several hours while, in the far corner of the field, awards were being granted to teenagers in army green fatigues. Then we went home.
The very following week, the same thing happened, except that this time we were taken to the Rex movie theatre nearby and watched several men give speeches in the un-air-conditioned space for over two hours under DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Chinese flags.
This was not part of the regular curriculum, of course. In each case a few armed men from those organizations had walked into the principals office and asked him to volunteer his school for participation in these events. He complied, because he had no choice. The Jordanian state apparatus had by then essentially disappeared from the municipality as a result of months of concerted and systematic provocations, threats, and attacks from the PLOs numerous factions. Armed men, sometimes local but often not, ruled entire districts and neighborhoods. They collected donations of money, food, and appliances, such as radios and binoculars. They enforced whimsical curfews and organized spontaneous demonstrations. They settled accounts with old rivals. And they fired in the air whenever they got excited, which was often.
Read more:
Bright September | Abe Haak | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel
