Us and Them... The Makers of Ignorance in a Simple Phrase

This confrontation begins with education, through a radical review of how the history of Jordan and the individuals who contributed to its building are taught. It is the right of our children to know the contributions of Jordanians from various components of society in founding the state and building its armed forces, hospitals, schools, and public institutions—not as separate stories of groups differing in their beliefs and affiliations, but as chapters of a single national story. These institutions were established through the efforts of generations of Jordanians who worked side by side, sharing responsibility and sacrifices, and their contributions were not conditional on religion or origin, but on their belonging to the state and their belief in its future. Children must grow up seeing Jordanian diversity present in the history of their homeland, because what becomes familiar through education is difficult to portray later as strange or intrusive.

The same responsibility extends to our national media, both official and private, through a comprehensive strategy that confronts hate speech, discriminatory narratives, and daily language that normalizes exclusion. Perhaps the time has also come to reconsider using expressions such as coexistence and civil peace; coexistence suggests the presence of separate groups trying to accept one another, while civil peace suggests that our goal is merely to avoid conflict. There is no coexistence among citizens of the same homeland; rather, there is a shared existence. Equal citizenship is not an arrangement between groups, but a unifying identity that must be reflected in the way citizens are represented, addressed, and treated, and in the stories the media tells about society, so that every Jordanian sees themselves as a natural part of the national picture, neither an exception to it nor a guest upon it.

In the literature of behavioral sciences, the messenger is no less important than the message itself. His Majesty King Abdullah II, the Supreme Commander of the Jordanian Armed Forces, expressed the nation’s resolve in simple words from our Jordanian dialect: “We will show them.” This phrase encapsulates the confrontation between “us” and “them,” between those who believe in a homeland that unites its people and those who seek to dismantle this belief. While direct confrontation requires countering anyone who threatens our security, the greatest and most enduring victory lies in preserving, nurturing, and strengthening the single ideology that unites us all: the ideology of the homeland.