Jordan isn't their "home country". These are people that have lived there for generations.
Jordan was their home country right after the 1948 war. Or did you forget? Oh yeah, no mention of how Jordan "occupied" the West Bank and annexed it into their country; or at least we do not dare mention it now.
They lived in the area they live in now. Not in what is called "Jordan". If another country annexes your country -does that change your "home"? No.
Who's they? The Arabs who live in Jordan are different than the Arabs who live in Jordan? How so?
It has nothing to do with differences but what constitutes home.
If you are born on a military base, is that your home or where ever you and your family happening to be at any one time?
If you are born in a hotel or apartment, is that home? Even if you were only there a few days, weeks or months?
If someone is working in saudi but their parents are american, is saudi home? Is america? What state, what town?
If someone is a migrant farmer, or seasonal farm worker, is the farm(s) their family work home? Which one?
If you live in a refugee camp and have never been to what ever farm your family might have lived on 50+ yrs ago, is the camp or the farm home?
If your parents or grandparents were born and lived in egypt till seeking work in the mandate, is the mandate your home or egypt, or the country where what ever camp you were born and lived in was located?
If you or your family did not have a legal deed to land, would any of the places you lived or worked your's to damand a right of return? Why should you be allowed into the country let along to the home/hut,apartment your family was located while working there?
Arab/palestinians of the mandate or post mandate identified by tribe, as arab, some even as syrian, egyptian or jordanian, but palestinian was a foreign name of a region in the levant where the mandate governed, be it french or english mandate. only at the end of the mandate were people/refugees who had lived and worked for a minimum of two years allowed to use the name palestinian for lack of any single identity. It was expediant for the UN ho needed a reason for so many refugees and how to handle the situation. It was not because they had a home or had lived generation in the same place in the land they had left.
When egypt and jordan controled G and the WB, why did they not create a state for the palestinians or close the camps and place them in homes there? Why did the palestinians attempt a coup in jordan when the king offered to give them jordanian citizenship, the only place many had ever known. Why would he offer Arafat the position of PM?
Palestinians are a fabrication, a meld of many groups and faith who's origins span europe and the middle east. They did not have a shared culture, history or religion. They had not had a state or government for themselves as palestinians. They barely share arabic as common language, with several dialects. For some, they did not even share arabic as a first language, but rather used it in a limited way for shopping and as a street language. French, english, syriac, greek, russian, farci, turkic, armenian, kurdish were all spoken by various groups.
For a people or a state there is a need to have been some commonality that united them all. Palestinians did not have that when the mandate ended. Those that left at the urging of the arab state that were about to attack, their status as refugees became their commonality. That is all they had or have. The refugee did not even all come from what is now Israel. They came from the WB and G as well before they left. They did not all leave at the same time, they left in phases and moved from town or camp over time and as the political situation changed.
Some that left has sold their land, others had never owned land, still other might have turned over their property (rented, allowed to use or registered with/without paying taxes) to church, mosque or to someone else that did not leave. There is not one story or group that was historically known as palestinian.
Just because palestinians might have lived and worked in the mandate, it does not make any place therein home.
