The paradox at the Israel- Jordan border

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison

LA JOLLA, California – The paradox of the border between Israel and Jordan is that, on the one hand, the cold peace between the two countries has resulted in some laudable cooperative projects.  On the other hand, the political situation in the Middle East is such that too much attention given to these cooperative projects might result in a severe backlash.

So reported Tamar Arieli, the visiting Israeli professor at San Diego State University, during a Shabbat luncheon speech, December 9, at Congregation Beth El.  She was brought to San Diego under the auspices of the Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative, whose director, Susan Lapidus, introduced Arieli at the luncheon sponsored by Beth El’s Israel Committee.  Beth El congregant Clive Walden presided over the gathering.

Arieli said it would be ideal if cooperative programs between Jordan and Israel could be showcased so the rest of the Arab world could see clearly the benefits of peace with the Jewish state.  Militating against this possibility, however, is that security concerns are the prism through which both countries view relations with each other, as is fairly typical at what Arieli called “Post-Conflict Borders.”

On the Israeli side, there is concern that allowing the wrong people from Jordan to enter Israel could result in terrorism, or unauthorized immigration into Israel.  As a result, a cumbersome process has been put into place for any Jordanian seeking to visit Israel, no matter what the program is to which they may have been invited.

They must travel to Amman to be interviewed by the Israeli consulate, then wait an indeterminate number of days, before a visa is mailed to them.  Arieli, who teaches Conflict Management at Tel Hai Academic College in northeastern Israel, said she has attended some academic conferences  in Israel at which the paper of a Jordanian participant had to be read by someone else because the Israeli visa did not arrive in time.

Some of these conferences are sponsored by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, but are frustrated by the cautiousness of Israel’s Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry – a case of government agencies working at cross purposes.

As a result, most cross-border conferences occur on the Jordanian side, she said.

In Jordan, not only bureaucratic red tape militates against close cooperation; there is also the problem of the political tightrope that the country’s Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah II, must walk in a country where Palestinians constitute 70 percent of the population.  Many of these Palestinian-Jordanians are opposed to “normalization” of relations with Israel, so reports of cooperation between the two countries – even when the cooperation is mutually beneficial – can cause dissidence and resentment.

Therefore, the quieter the successes are, the better, so far as the Jordanian government is concerned, according to Arieli.

On the national level, Jordan and Israel cooperate in the sharing of water and energy resources, and trade security information for the protection of both countries.  Since the Jordan’s King Hussein and Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a peace treaty in 1994, there also have been various local cross-border initiatives, ranging from soccer matches between the youth of the two countries, to efforts to wipe out Med Flies infesting both sides of the Dead Sea. There are programs for agricultural cooperation in the southern Arava Valley, and some social interactions between residents of Beit Shean in Israel and the Sheikh Hussein region of Jordan, Arieli reported.

Early after the treaty signing there were optimistic efforts to establish industrial parks on the Jordanian side of the border, where products could be manufactures with lower labor wages, then shipped across the border to be sold as Israeli products – similar to the maquiladora arrangements along the Mexican-U.S. border.

However, said Arieli, these efforts have been unsuccessful.  Where there was once an Israeli textile factory manufacturing undergarments in Irbid, Jordan, that factory has now been shut down, Arieli said.  As low as Jordanian wages may be, they still are higher with wages in other countries such as Laos, she explained.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com