After 1948, in a development that abides to its own geographical, socio-economic, and political context, Amman has gradually become what Jerusalem could not: an Arab metropolis. It did so, in part, by absorbing a significant number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom lived in the official camps established by the United Nations and others who did not. The latter included a significant number of the educated middle class who resided in neighborhoods outside the Old City walls, and who played a major role in the administrative, commercial, and cultural sectors of Amman in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to its own destiny, then, Amman can also be taken to represent the aborted destiny of Jerusalem and thereby offers an opportunity to observe part of the potential that Jerusalem embodied before the Nakba. Indeed, the Jordanian capital somehow seems to have become the temporary conservatory of a Jerusalemite Palestinian Arab modernity nipped in the bud in 1948.
